The SAGE Handbook Of Process Organization Studies [1 ed.] 1473959217, 9781473959217, 1786842610, 9781786842619, 1446297012, 9781446297018

Table of contents :
1. Introduction / Ann Langley and Haridimos Tsoukas

Part I. Process philosophy:

2. Whitehead's process relational philosophy / C. Robert Mesle and Mark R. Dibben;
3. Henri Bergson: toward a philosophy of becoming / Wahida Khandker;
4. Gilles Deleuze and process philosophy / Keith Robinson;
5. James, Dewey, and Mead: on what must come before all our inquiries / John Shotter

Part II. Process theory:

6. Contradictions, dialectics, and paradoxes / Moshe Farjoun;
7. The practice approach: for a praxeology of organisational and management studies / Davide Nicolini and Pedro Monteiro;
8. Complexity theory and process organization studies / Philip Anderson and Alan D. Meyer;
9. Symbolic interactionism / Dionysios D. Dionysiou;
10. Actor-network theory / Barbara Czarniawska;
11. Ethnomethodology / Andrea Whittle and William Housley;
12. Discourse theory / Loizos Heracleous;
13. Evolutionary theory / Geoffrey M. Hodgson.

Part III. Process methodology:

14. Ethnography and organizational processes / Merlijn van Hulst, Sierk Ybema, and Dvora Yanow;
15. Taking a strong process approach to analyzing qualitative process data / Paula Jarzabkowski, Jane Lê, and Paul Spee;
16. Sequential analysis of processes / Marshall Scott Poole, Natalie Lambert, Toshio Murase, Raquel Asencio, and Joseph McDonald;
17. Narratives and processuality / Anniina Rantakari and Eero Vaara;
18. Composing a musical score for academic-practitioner collaborative research / Stuart Albert and Jean M. Bartunek;
19. History in process organization studies: what, why and how / Matthias Kipping and Juha-Antti Lamberg.

Part IV. Process applications:

20. A process perspective on organizational routines / Jennifer Howard-Grenville and Claus Rerup;
21. Sensemaking, simplexity, and mindfulness / Timothy Vogus and Ian Colville;
22. A temporal understanding of the connections between organizational culture and identity / Tor Hernes and Majken Schultz;
23. Institutions as process / Panita Surachaikulwattana and Nelson Phillips;
24. Strategy as practice, process and institution: turning towards activity / Richard Whittington;
25. Time, temporality and process studies / Juliane Reinecke and Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari;
26. Sustainability as process / Gail Whiteman and Steve Kennedy;
27. Entrepreneurship as process / Todd H. Chiles, Sara R.S.T.A. Elias, and Qian Li;
28. From the process of innovation to innovation as process / Raghu Garud, Joel Gehman, Arun Kumaraswamy, and Philipp Tuertscher;
29. Power and process: the production of 'knowing' subjects and 'known' objects / Cynthia Hardy and Robyn Thomas;
30. Organizational learning and knowledge processes: a critical review / Krista Pettit, Mary Crossan, and Dusya Vera;
31. Leadership process / Gail T. Fairhurst;
32. Organizational communication as process / Frandcois Cooren, Gerald Bartels, and Thomas Martine;
33. Materiality as an organizing process: toward a process metaphysics for material artifacts / Paul M. Leonardi;
34. Organization design as process / Roger L.M. Dunbar and Beth A. Bechky;
35. Improvisation processes in organizations / Miguel Pina e Cunha, Anne S. Miner, and Elena Antonacopoulou;
36. Cycles of divergence and convergence: underlying processes of organization change and innovation / Kevin Dooley and Andrew Van de Ven.

Part V. Process perspectives:

37. Process, practices and organizational competitiveness: understanding dynamic capabilities through a process-philosophical worldview / Robert Chia;
38. Process as the becoming of temporal trajectory / Tor Hernes;
39. Deconstructing the theoretical language of process research: metaphor and metonymy in interaction / Joep Cornelissen, Dennis Schoeneborn, and Consuelo Vásquez;
40. Embedding process: situating process in work relations / Hugh Willmott;
41. Making process visible: alternatives to boxes and arrows / Martha S. Feldman;
42. Truth and process studies / Robin Holt.

Citation preview

The SAGE Handbook of

Process Organization Studies

Edited by

Ann Langley and

Haridimos Tsoukas ($)SAGE

refere nee

Los Angeles I London I New Delhi I Singapore I Wasrnogton DC 1 Melbourne

($)SAGE Los Angeles I London I New Deihl Singapore I Washington DC I Melbourne

SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver's Yard 55 City Road London EC1 Y 1 SP SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pv1 Ltd B 1/1 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road New Delhi 110 044 SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pie Ltd 3 Church Street #10-04 Samsung Hub Singapore 049483

Editor : Delia Martinez Alfonso Editorial Assistant: Matthew Oldfield Prod uction editor: Sushant Nailwal Copyeditor: Cenveo Publisher Services Proofreader: Cenveo Publisher Services Indexer: Cenveo Publisher Services Marketing manager: Alison Borg Cover design: Wendy Scott Typeset by Cenveo Publisher Services Printed in the UK

Introduction & editorial arrangement © Ann Langley and Haridimos Tsoukas,2017 Chapter 2 © C. Robert Mesle and Mark R. Dibben, 2017 Chapter 3 © Wahida Khandker, 2017 Chapter 4 © Keith Robinson, 2017 Chapter 5 ©John Shatter, 2017 Chapter 6 © Moshe Farjoun, 2017 Chapter 7 © Davide Nicolini and Pedro Monteiro, 2017 Chapter 8 © Philip Anderson and Alan D. Meyer, 2017 Chapter 9 © Dionysios D. Dionysiou, 2017 Chapter 10 ©Barbara Czarniawska, 2017 Chapter 11 © Andrea Whittle and William Housley, 2017 Chapter 12 © Loizos Heracleous, 2017 Chapter 13 ©Geoffrey M. Hodgson, 2017 Chapter 14 © Merlijn van Hulst, Sierk Ybema and Dvora Yanow, 2017 Chapter 15 © Paula Jarzabkowski, Jane Le and Paul Spee, 2017 Chapter 16 ©Marshall Scott Poole, Natalie Lambert, Toshia Mu rase, Raquel Asencio and Joseph McDonald, 2017 Chapter 17 © Anniina Rantakari and Eero Vaara , 2017 Chapter 18 © Stuart Albert and Jean M. Bartunek, 2017 Chapter 19 © Matthias Kipping and Juha-Antti Lamberg, 2017 Chapter 20 ©Jennifer HowardGrenville and Claus Rerup, 2017 Chapter 21 © Timothy Vogus and Ian Colville, 2017 Chapter 22 ©Tor Hemes and Majken Schultz, 2017

Chapter 23 © Panila Surachaikulwattana and Nelson Phillips, 2017 Chapter 24 ©Richard Whittington, 2017 Chapter 25 ©Juliane Reinecke and Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari, 2017 Chapter 26 © Gail Whiteman and Steve Kennedy, 2017 Chapter 27 ©Todd H. Chiles, Sara R. S. T. A. Elias and Qian Li, 2017 Chapter 28 © Raghu Garud, Joel Gehman, Arun Kumaraswamy and Philipp Tuertscher, 2017 Chapter 29 © Cynthia Hardy and Robyn Thomas, 2017 Chapter 30 © Krista Pettit, Mary Crossan and Dusya Vera, 2017 Chapter 31 © Gail T. Fairhurst, 2017 Chapter 32 © Fran9ois Cooren, Gerald Bartels and Thomas Martine, 2017 Chapter 33 ©Paul M. Leonardi, 2017 Chapter 34 ©Roger L.M. Dunbar and Beth A. Bechky, 2017 Chapter 35 © Miguel Pina e Cunha, Anne S. Miner and Elena Antonacopoulou, 2017 Chapter 36 © Kevin Dooley and Andrew Van de Ven, 2017 Chapter 37 ©Robert Chia, 2017 Chapter 38 ©Tor Hemes, 2017 Chapter 39 © Joep Cornelissen, Dennis Schoeneborn and Consuelo Vasquez, 2017 Chapter 40 ©Hugh Willmott, 2017 Chapter 41 © Martha S. Feldman, 2017 Chapter 42 © Robin Holt, 2017

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or trans mitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers . At SAGE we take sustainability seriously. Most of our products are printed in the UK using FSC papers and boards. When we print overseas we ensure sustainable papers are used as measu red by the PREPS grading system . We undertake an annual audit to monitor our sustainability.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016955337 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-4 462-9701-8

Contents List of Figures List of Tables Notes on the Editors and Contributors 1

ix x

xi

Introduction Ann Langley and Haridimos Tsoukas

PART I

PROCESS PHILOSOPHY

27

2

Whitehead's Process Relational Philosophy C. Robert Mesle and Mark R. Dibben

29

3

Henri Bergson: Toward a Philosophy of Becoming Wahida Khandker

43

4

Gilles Deleuze and Process Philosophy Keith Robinson

56

5

James, Dewey, and Mead: On What Must Come Before All Our Inquiries John Shotter

71

PART II

PROCESS THEORY

6

Contradictions, Dialectics, and Paradoxes Moshe Farjoun

7

The Practice Approach: For a Praxeology of Organisational and Management Studies Davide Nicolini and Pedro Monteiro

85

87

110

8

Complexity Theory and Process Organization Studies Philip Anderson and Alan D. Meyer

127

9

Symbolic lnteractionism Dionysios D. Dionysiou

144

10

Actor-Network Theory Barbara Czarniawska

160

vi

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PROCESS ORGANIZATION STUDIES

11

Ethnomethodology Andrea Whittle and William Housley

174

12

Discourse Theory Loizos Heracleous

190

13

Evolutionary Theory Geoffrey M. Hodgson

204

PART III

PROCESS METHODOLOGY

221

14

Ethnography and Organizational Processes Merlijn van Hulst, Sierk Ybema, and Dvora Yanow

223

15

Taking a Strong Process Approach to Analyzing Qualitative Process Data Paula Jarzabkowski, Jane Le, and Paul Spee

237

16

Sequential Analysis of Processes Marshall Scott Poole, Natalie Lambert, Toshio Murase, Raquel Asencio, and Joseph McDonald

254

17

Narratives and Processuality Anniina Rantakari and Eero Vaara

271

18

Composing a Musical Score for Academic-Practitioner ColJaborative Research Stuart Albert and Jean M. Bartunek

286

19

History in Process Organization Studies: What, Why and How Matthias Kipping and Juha-Antti Lamberg

303

PART IV

PROCESS APPLICATIONS

321

20

A Process Perspective on Organizational Routines Jennifer Howard-Grenville and Claus Rerup

323

21

Sensemaking, Simplexity, and Mindfulness Timothy Vogus and Jan Colville

340

22

A Temporal Understanding of the Connections between Organizational Culture and Identity Tor Hem es and Majken Schultz

356

23

Institutions as Process Panita Surachaikulwattana and Nelson Phillips

372

24

Strategy as Practice, Process and Institution: Turning Towards Activity Richard Whittington

387

CONTENTS

25

Time, Temporality and Process Studies

vii

402

Juliane Reinecke and Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari

26

Sustainability as Process

417

Gail Whiteman and Steve Kennedy 27

Entrepreneurship as Process Todd H. Chiles, Sara R. S. T. A. Elias, and Qian Li

432

28

From the Process of Innovation to Innovation as Process

451

Raghu Garud, Joel Gehman, Arun Kumaraswamy, and Philipp Tuertscher

29

Power and Process: The Production of 'Knowing' Subjects and 'Known' Objects

466

Cynthia Hardy and Robyn Thomas

30

Organizational Leaming and Knowledge Processes: A Critical Review

481

Krista Pettit, Mary Crossan, and Dusya Vera 31

Leadership Process Gail T. Fairhurst

497

32

Organizational Communication as Process

513

Fran~ois

33

34

Cooren, Gerald Bartels, and Thomas Martine

Materiality as an Organizing Process: Toward a Process Metaphysics for Material Artifacts Paul M. Leonardi

529

Organization Design as Process

544

Roger L.M. Dunbar and Beth A. Bechky 35

Improvisation Processes in Organizations

559

Miguel Pina e Cunha, Anne S. Miner, and Elena Antonacopoulou 36

Cycles of Divergence and Convergence: Underlying Processes of Organization Change and Innovation

574

Kevin Dooley and Andrew Van de Ven

PART V 37

PROCESS PERSPECTIVES

Process, Practices and Organizational Competitiveness: Understanding Dynamic Capabilities through a Process-Philosophical Worldview

591

593

Robert Chia

38

Process as the Becoming of Temporal Trajectory

Tor Hemes

601

viii

39

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PROCESS ORGANIZATION STUDIES

Deconstructing the Theoretical Language of Process Research: Metaphor and Metonymy in Interaction Joep Cornelissen, Dennis Schoeneborn, and Consuelo Vasquez

607

40

Embedding Process: Situating Process in Work Relations Hugh Willmott

616

41

Making Process Visible: Alternatives to Boxes and Arrows Martha S. Feldman

625

42

Truth and Process Studies Robin Holt

636

Index

645

List of Figures 3.1 12.1 16. l 16.2 18.l 18.2 18.3 18.4 19.1 20.1 22.1 22.2 25.1 27.1 28.1 28.2 28.3 30.1 36.l 36.2 36.3 36.4 36.5 39.1 41.l 41.2 41.3 41.4 41.5

Cone Diagram, Matter and Memory Record of meomerkalli reindeer earmarks in the Sarni culture Sequences and sequence data Example event descriptions The music of academic-practitioner collaboration The primary melody line of Bach's Art of Fugue The Art of Fugue and Legacy Jig in unharmonious polyphony A musical score for academic-practitioner collaborative research Four basic historical approaches Count of routines papers from a process perspective published by journal Organizational identity dynamics model Temporal connections between organizational culture and identity Temporal assumptions and epistemological and phenomenological dimensions Selected entrepreneurship research organized by Pepper's worldviews Usher's process of cumulative synthesis Asynchrony and diachrony in the emergence of the VCR Ups and downs during an innovation journey Dimensions of OL process types Cyclic processes of divergence and convergence CIP action events TAP action events Qnetics action events Random, chaotic, and periodic dimensions in the innovation journey Types of metaphor-metonymy dynamics Boxes and arrows Modified boxes and arrows Actor-network Action net Narrative network

50 193 259 261 292 293 294 296 305 328 365 366 413 436 453 455 460 485 575 578 579 579 581 609 627 628 629 631 632

List of Tables 6.1 6.2 6.3 7.1 12.1 14.1 16. l 16.2 16.3 18.l 18.2 18.3

20.l 20.2 22. l 25.l 26. l 27.1 27.2 28.1 28.2 29.1 29.2 30.1 33.l 34.l

Organizational contradictions - illustrative studies The dialectic tradition - summary of key ideas as interpreted within Organization Studies The dialectics and paradox perspectives - key differences and potential complementarities Definitions of practice Discourse approaches, analytical focus, and processual orientation Some elements of the three aspects of ethnographying which contribute to studying organizational processes Four generative mechanisms for processes Complete list of subsequences for the sequence ABCABABCA Example of a first-order Markov transition matrix, predicting probability of transition from event at time 1 to event at time 2 The stages of Insider/Outsider (I/0) research Four step method for moving from static descriptions of academic- practitioner collaboration to more dynamic ones The stages of academic-practitioner collaboration shown in the figure 18.4 composition, along with the reference for each stage according to melody Line and the musical instrument playing it Summary of review of papers citing Feldman and Pentland (2003) Top five journals publishing routines papers from a process perspective Three views on temporality in relation to organizational culture and identity Temporal disjunctures Summarizes this discussion and identifies related organization studies on sustainability Selected theoretical entrepreneurship research Selected empirical entrepreneurship research Assumptions underlying synoptic and performative view of innovation process Complexity perspectives on innovation A classification of the process literature Different approaches to power Article summary Toward a view of materiality as process: two variants of sociomateriality Summary of cases, desired design outcome and design details, and insights for organization design processes

90 96 99 112 195 229 258 263 264 287 289

295 327 327 357 4 10 4 19 438 440 456 459 468 471 483 539 554

Notes on the Editors and Contributors

THE EDITORS Ann Langley is Professor of Management at HEC Montreal, Canada and holder of the research chair in strategic management in pluralistic settings. Her research focuses on strategic change, inter-professional collaboration and the practice of strategy in complex organizations. She is particularly interested in process-oriented research and methodology and has published a number of papers on that topic. In 2013, she was co-guest editor with Clive Smallman, Haridimos Tsoukas and Andrew Van de Ven of a Special Research Forum of Academy of Management Journal on Process Studies of Change in Organizations and Management. She is also coeditor of the journal Strategic Organization, and coeditor with Haridimos Tsoukas of a book series Perspectives on Process Organization Studies published with Oxford University Press. She is Adjunct Professor at Universite de Montreal, and University of Gothenburg. Haridimos Tsoukas is the Columbia Ship Management Professor of Strategic Management in the University of Cyprus, Cyprus and a Distinguished Research Environment Professor of Organization Studies at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, UK. He obtained his PhD at the Manchester Business School (MBS), University of Manchester, and has worked at MBS, the University of Essex, the University of Strathclyde, and at the ALBA Graduate Business School (Greece). He has published widely in several leading academic journals. He was the Editor-in-Chief of Organization Studies (2003-2008) and has served on the Editorial Board of several journals. He received the honorary degree Doctor of Science from the University of Warwick (2014). He was awarded an Honorary Membership from the European Group of Organization Studies (2016) and received the Trailblazer Award from the OMT Division of the American Academy of Management (2016). With Ann Langley, he is the cofounder and co-convener of the annual International Symposium on Process Organization and co-editor of the Perspectives on Process Organization Studies, published annually by Oxford University Press. His research interests include: knowledge-based perspectives on organizations; the management of organizational change and social reforms; organizational becoming; practical reason and the epistemology of practice; and meta-theoretical issues in organization theory. He has co-edited several books, including The Oxford Handbook of Organization Theory: Meta-theoretical Perspectives (with Christian Knudsen, Oxford University Press, 2003) and Philosophy and Organization Theory (with Robert Chia, Emerald, 2011). He is the author of: Complex Knowledge: Studies in Organizational Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2005), If Aristotle were a CEO (in Greek, Kastaniotis, 2012, 4th edition), and Philosophical Organization Theory (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

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THE CONTRIBUTORS Stuart Albert is an Associate Professor Emeritus in the Department of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship, University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management, and a frequent visiting scholar at Harvard and MIT. He is a member of the Academy of Management and the International Society for the Study of Time, the premier organization in the world for the interdisciplinary study of time. He has published in top academic and applied journals in management and recently authored When: The Art of Petfect Timing (Jossey-Bass, 2013), which is being translated into German, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. Stuart spent two decades studying the impact of timing decisions on major projects in business and government and developed a method that allows leaders to better anticipate oncoming risks, identify windows of opportunity, and improve the likelihood of delivering superior results. His expertise enables leaders to determine how quickly or slowly to proceed to maximize the likelihood of success. Philip Anderson is the INSEAD Alumni Fund Chaired Professor of Entrepreneurship at INSEAD, in Singapore, where he directs the Rudolf and Valeria Maag International Centre for Entrepreneurship. He earned his PhD from Columbia University in 1988, and was previously on the faculties of Cornell 's Johnson Graduate School of Management and Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. He is a former Associate Editor of Administrative Science Quarterly and former Senior Editor of Organization Science. He is co-author of Managing Strategic Innovation and Change: A Collection of Readings (with Michael Tushman), published by Oxford University Press in 2004 (second edition), and Inside the Kaisha: Demystifying Japanese Business Behavior (with Noboru Yoshimura) published by Harvard Business School Press in 1997. His research focuses on entrepreneurship, innovation, and organizational evolution, and his articles have appeared in many scholarly and practitioner-oriented journals.

Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari is a Professor of Strategy and Innovation at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge and Visiting Faculty at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. His research interests include institutional processes, logics and diffusion of practices; framing, social movements, social, environmental and ethical issues in management, technological and management innovations; ecosystem strategies, and reputation management. He has published in journals including Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Journal of Management Studies, Research Policy, Industrial and Corporate Change, Strategic Organization, and Organization Studies. Elena Antonacopoulou is Professor of Organizational Behavior at the University of Liverpool Management School, where she leads GNOSIS - a research initiative advancing impactful collaborative research in management and organization studies. Her principal research expertise lies in the areas of Organizational Change, Learning, and Knowledge Management with a focus on the leadership implications. Her research continues to advance new methodologies for studying social complexity and is strengthened by her approach: working with leading international researchers, practitioners, and policy makers collaboratively. Her current study on Realizing Y-Our Impact is one example of the approach that governs her commitment to pursue scholarship that makes a difference through actionable knowledge. Elena's work is published widely in leading international journals and edited books. She has been elected in several leadership roles and has served her scholarly community as a member at board, council, executive, and editorial roles of the top professional bodies (AoM, EGOS, EURAM, SMS, etc.).

NOTES ON THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

xiii

Raquel Asencio is an Assistant Professor, Krannert School of Management, Purdue University. She has a PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from the Georgia Institute of Technology, with a master's degree in 1/0 Psychology from the University of Central Florida. She served as the student representative to the INGRoup board, and is the recipient of a Goizueta Fellowship. Her research interests include teams, multiteam systems, collective identity, and social networks. Gerald Bartels is a Doctoral Candidate and Researcher in organizational communication at the Universite de Montreal. His research interests and teaching include processes of collaborative creativity, systemic management and design, leadership development, and qualitative research methods. Gerald is currently a researcher in residence at The Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada. Jean M. Bartunek is the Robert A. and Evelyn J. Ferris Chair and Professor of Management and Organization Studies at Boston College, where she has taught since 1977. Her PhD is in social and organizational psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a past president and fellow of the Academy of Management. In 2009 she won the Academy of Management's Career Distinguished Service Award. Jean has published more than 140 journal articles and book chapters, as well as five books. Her primary research interests center around organizational change and academic-practitioner relationships. Jean is currently an associate editor of the Academy of Management Review as well as an associate editor of the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science. She was previously an associate editor of the Academy of Management Learning and Education. Beth Bechky is the Jacob B. Melnick Term Professor in the Department of Management and Organizations at the New York University Stem School of Business and holds a courtesy appointment in NYU's Department of Sociology. Beth's primary research interest is the microsociology of work, and she focuses her attention on interactions and dynamics at organizational and occupational boundaries. She studies how occupational groups in organizations collaborate to solve problems, coordinate their activities, respond to surprises, and innovate. Beth's current research is an ethnography of a crime laboratory. Beth is the co-editor of Qualitative Organizational Research and co-organizer of the Davis Conference on Qualitative Research. She received a BS (with Honors) from the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, and an MA in Sociology and a PhD in Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management from Stanford University. Robert Chia is Research Professor of Management at the Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow. He received his PhD in Organizational Analysis from Lancaster University. He has published substantially in the top international management journals and is the author/editor of five books. His latest books include Strategy without Design (Cambridge University Press, with R. Holt) and Philosophy and Organization Theory (eds.) (Emerald Publishing, with H. Tsoukas). His research interests include: process thinking in organization theory; strategy practices; east-west philosophies and managerial wisdom. Prior to entering academia Robert worked for seventeen years in shipbuilding, aircraft engineering, human resource management and manufacturing management. Todd H. Chiles is an Associate Professor of Management at the University of Missouri's Robert J. Trulaske Sr., College of Business. His research interests are in entrepreneurship, organization and process theory, and their intersection. His work in these areas explores processes such as novelty creation and commercialization, industry emergence and evolution,

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THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PROCESS ORGANIZATION STUDIES

and market order and upheaval. His research has been funded by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and has appeared in Academy of Management Review, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, and Organization Science, among others. He serves on the Research Committee of the Academy of Management's Entrepreneurship Division and the editorial advisory board of Perspectives on Process Organization Studies, and has served as a guest editor at Organization Studies.

Ian Colville is Professor of Organization and Management Studies at the University of Bath, UK. His research interests lie theoretically in the areas of organizing and sensemaking combined with an abiding concern with their relevance to practice. Most recently he has been studying organizing and sensemaking in complex and fast moving contexts, e.g. Counter Terrorism and Environmental Flooding, which perforce require a process perspective. His work is published in journals such as Accounting, Organization and Society, Public Administration, Human Relations, Management Learning, Organization Studies and Organization. He is on the editorial board of Organization Studies and Human Relations. Fram;ois Cooren, PhD, is a Professor at the Universite de Montreal, Canada. His research focuses on organizational communication, language, and social interaction, as well as communication theory. He is the author of three books The Organizing Property of Communication (2000), Action and Agency in Dialogue: Passion, Incarnation, and Ventriloquism (2010), and Organizational Discourse: Communication and Constitution (2015) and also edited five volumes published by Oxford University Press, Routledge, John Benjamins, and Lawrence Erlbaum. He is also the author of more than 50 articles, published in international peer-reviewed journals, as well as more than 30 book chapters. In 2010-2011, he was the president of the International Communication Association (ICA) and was elected fellow of this association in 2013. He is also the current president of the International Association for Dialogue Analysis (IADA, 2012-2017). Joep Cornelissen is Professor of Corporate Communication and Management at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. The main focus of his research involves studies of the role of corporate and managerial communication in the context of innovation, entrepreneurship and change, and of social evaluations of the legitimacy and reputation of start-up and established firms. In addition, he also has an interest in questions of scientific reasoning and theory development in management and organization theory. His work has been published in the Academy of Management Review, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Science and Organization Studies, and he has written a general text on corporate communication (Corporate Communication: A Guide to Theory and Practice, Sage Publications) which is now in its fifth edition. He is an Associate Editor for the Academy of Management Review, a Council member of the Society for the Advancement of Management Studies, a former General Editor of the Journal of Management Studies (2006-2012) and serves on the editorial boards of the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management, Journal of Management Studies and Organization Studies. Mary Crossan is a Professor of Strategic Leadership at the Ivey Business School - Western University. She conducts research on organizational learning and strategic renewal, leadership, and improvisation. Her 1999 paper on Organizational Learning received the 2009 Academy of Management Review Decade Award for the most highly cited paper. Her current research and teaching focus on developing leadership character. In 2014, her paper on Developing Leadership Character in Business Programs received outstanding article of the year.

NOTES ON THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

xv

Barbara Czarniawska is Torsten & Ragnar Soderberg Senior Professor of Management Studies at Gothenburg Research Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She takes a feminist and processual perspective on organizing, recently exploring connections between popular culture and practice of management, and the organization of the news production. She is interested in in techniques of fieldwork and in the application of narratology to organization studies. Recent books in English: Social Science Research From Field to Desk (2014) and A Research Agenda for Management and Organization Studies (edited, 2016). Miguel Pina e Cunha is Professor of Organization Theory at Nova School of Business and Economics, Lisbon, Portugal. His research has been published in journals such as the Academy of Management Review, Human Relations, Journal of Management Studies, and Organization Studies, and he participated in the editorial boards of several journals including the European Management Journal, Management Learning, Organization Studies, and Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. He co-authored, with Arrnenio Rego and Stewart Clegg, The Virtues of Leadership: Contemporary Challenge for Global Managers (Oxford University Press, 2012). Mark R. Dibben is an Associate Professor at the University of Tasmania's School of Business & Economics, and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Process Studies in the School of Theology at Claremont Graduate University, California. His research focuses on Applied Process Thought, the serious-minded, thoroughgoing application of Whiteheadian metaphysics to topics in the sciences and social sciences; he has published two edited books on the subject with the specialist philosophy publisher Ontos Verlag, numerous articles and book chapters, and a monograph with MacMillan that applies process thought to the study of trust and entrepreneurship. He is co-editor with Paul Griseri, Frits Schipper, and R. Edward Freeman of Philosophy of Management (Springer), and serves on the editorial boards of a number of other journals including Process Studies. From 2007-2011, he was Executive Director of the International Process Network of some 30 process philosophy research centers around the globe. Current research, including a new book entitled A Process Philosophy of Management (Process Century Press), applies process relational panexperiential philosophy to topics in management and organization, in an attempt to move the discussion beyond the 'processevents-theory' thesis. Dionysios D. Dionysiou is an Associate Professor of Organization and Management at ALBA Graduate Business School at the American College of Greece and the Cyprus International Institute of Management (CIIM). Dionysios obtained his doctorate in management (social psychology of organizing) from the Strathclyde Business School, Strathclyde University, UK. His research focuses on the processes of organizing, organizational routines, and sensemaking. Kevin J. Dooley is a Distinguished Professor of Supply Chain Management in the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, and a Senior Sustainability Scientist in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability. As Chief Scientist of The Sustainability Consortium, Dooley leads a global research team that works with over 100 of the world's largest retailers and manufacturers to develop tools that measure and track progress on critical product sustainability issues. He has published more than 100 research articles and co-authored an award-winning book Organizational Change and Innovation Processes. Dr. Dooley has provided training or consultation for over 200 companies in the areas of sustainability, supply chain management, quality, and technology and innovation. He obtained his PhD in mechanical engineering at the University of Illinois.

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Roger L.M. Dunbar is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Management and Organizations at the New York University Stem School of Business. He is interested in how contextual understandings and organization strategies evolve over time. He received the BComm and MConun (Honors) degrees from the University of Otago, New Zealand, and a PhD from Cornell University. Sara R.S.T.A. Elias is an Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Victoria's Peter B. Gustavson School of Business, Canada. Her research interests include creative entrepreneurial processes, entrepreneurial imagination, arts entrepreneurship, aesthetics in organizations and entrepreneurship, and qualitative methodologies. Sara has published her work on several of these topics in Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management and Organizational Research Methods. Gail T. Fairhurst is a Professor of Organizational Communication at the University of Cincinnati. Her research and writing interests are in organizational communication, organizational discourse, and leadership processes, including problem-centered leadership and framing, and discursive leadership. She has published over 70 articles and chapters in communication and management journals and books. She is the author of three books, including Discursive Leadership: In Conversation with Leadership Psychology (Sage, 2007), The Power of Framing: Challenging the Language of Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2011), and The Art of Framing: Managing the Language of Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 1996). She is a Fellow of the International Communication Association; a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association; a Fulbright Scholar; and a former Associate Editor for the journal Human Relations. Moshe Farjoun is a Professor of Strategy and Organization at the Schulich School of Business, York University and is currently a visiting Research Fellow at the Judge School of Business, Cambridge University. Moshe received his PhD from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. His research is mainly conceptual and historical and focuses on strategy, organization and adaptation in novel, complex and dynamic contexts as manifest in processes such as organizational learning, discovery, strategy making, managerial cognition, and institutional and strategic change. His current projects explore themes such as the interplay of routine and nonroutine, as well as stability and change, in and around organizations, coevolution and shaping, endogenous change and discontinuities and surprises, and draws on Prag matism, Evolutionary Theory and Dialectics. He coedited (with Wendy Smith, Ann Langley and Hari Tsoukas) the book Dialectics, Paradox and Dualities, to be published by Oxford University Press (2017). Martha S. Feldman (Stanford University PhD, 1983; Honorary Doctorate, St. Gallen University, 2014) is the Johnson Chair for Civic Governance and Public Management and Professor of Social Ecology (Department of Planning, Policy and Design), Business, Political Science and Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Her research is based in practice theory and explores the role of action in organizational processes. She is best known for research that helped to create the field of routine dynamics, the study of the internal dynamics of organizational routines. She is a Senior Editor for Organization Science and serves on editorial boards of journals in the fields of management, public policy and qualitative research methods. She has received the Administrative Science Quarterly Award for Scholarly Contribution (2009), the Academy of Management Practice Scholarship Award (201 I ) and the Academy of Management Organization and M anagement Theory Division Distinguished Scholar Award (2015). In 2015, she was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Management.

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Raghu Garud is Alvin H. Clemens Professor of Management and Organization and the Research Director of the Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Pennsylvania State University. Raghu's research explores novelty emergence, a theme around which he has co-edited a book under the aegis of the annual Process Organization Studies (PROS). In his recent research, Raghu has examined a paradox that entrepreneurial storytelling generates - how the very expectations set through projective stories to gain venture legitimacy can also serve as the source of future disappointments and loss of legitimacy. He also has explored how interlaced knowledge across scientists at ATLAS, CERN, made it possible for a distributed collective to identify the Higgs boson (or the God particle). Joel Gehman is an Assistant Professor of Strategic Management and Organization at the University of Alberta School of Business. He studies the organization of concerns: the strategies and practices organizations pursue in response to emerging cultural concerns related to sustainability and values, and the impact of such cultural concerns on technology innovation and institutional arrangements. Ongoing research examines these issues in the context of unconventional shale drilling, hydraulic fracturing patents, B Corporations, divestitures, and social license, among others. His research has appeared in the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Studies and Research Policy. Cynthia Hardy is Laureate Professor of Management at the University of Melbourne. She previously worked at McGill University, and holds an undergraduate degree and doctorate from the University of Warwick. She is also a Professor at Cardiff Business School and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Her research interests revolve around discourse, institutional change, and organizational change. She has published over 60 articles in refereed journals, numerous book chapters and conference papers, and 10 books, including two handbooks - The SAGE Handbook of Organization Studies, which won the George R. Terry Book Award at the Academy of Management, and The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Discourse, which won the Outstanding Book at the National Communication Association. Loizos Heracleous is Professor of Strategy and Organization at Warwick Business School and Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College and the Said Business School at Oxford University. He earned his PhD from the University of Cambridge, and received a DSc from the University of Warwick. He conducts research on organizational discourse, organization change and development and strategic management. His research has been published in 6 books and over 60 research papers in leading periodicals that include the Academy ofManagement Journal, Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal, and MISQ. His work has been honored by three Best Paper Awards from the US Academy of Management; and by three research awards from Emerald. He serves on the editorial boards of six journals including the Academy of Management Journal and the Academy of Management Review. Tor Hemes is a Professor at the Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School, and Adjunct Professor at University College of South-East Norway. His main focus is on time and temporality in organizational life. His work is inspired by process philosophy and particularly the work of Alfred North Whitehead. Among his latest publications are A Process Theory of Organization (2014, Oxford University Press), which won the George R. Terry book award at the American Academy of Management in Vancouver in 2015 and The Oxford Handbook of Process Philosophy and Organization Studies (2014), edited together with Jenny Helin, Daniel Hjorth, and Robin Holt.

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Geoffrey M. Hodgson is a Research Professor in Business Studies at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. He is the author of 16 academic books and over l30 articles in academic journals. His most recent book is Conceptualizing Capitalism: Institutions, Evolution, Future (Chicago University Press, 2015), which won the Joseph Schumpeter Prize in 2014. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Institutional Economics and secretary of the World Interdisciplinary Network for Institutional Research (WINIR). Robin Holt is professor in the Department of Management, Philosophy and Politics at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. He has just written a book on Judgment and Strategy and is writing two further books, one on craft, strategy and technology, and the other on entrepreneurship and desire. He was editor of the journal Organization Studies 2013-2017. William Housley, is a Sociologist, based at the Cardiff University School of Social Sciences, who works across a number of research areas that include language and interaction, social media, the social aspects of disruptive technologies and the emerging contours of digital society, economy and culture. Jennifer Howard-Grenville is the Diageo Reader of Management Studies at the University of Cambridge's Judge Business School. Jennifer studies processes of organizational and institutional change and has explored the role of routines, issue selling, and culture in enabling and inhibiting change. She is particularly interested in how people change their organizations in response to environmental and social demands. Her work has been published in Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Organization Studies, Academy of Management Annals, several other journals and three books. Jennifer served as an Associate Editor at Academy of Management Journal from 2013-2016 and has served on the editorial boards of Academy of Management Journal and Organization Science. She received her PhD at MIT, her MA at Oxford University, and her BSc at Queen's University. Paula Jarzabkowski is a Professor of Strategic Management at Cass Business School, City University London. Her research focuses on strategy as practice in complex and pluralistic contexts suc h as regulated infrastructure firms, third sector organizations, and financial services, particularly insurance and reinsurance. She has conducted extensive, internationally comparative audio and video ethnographic studies in a range of business contexts. Her work has appeared in leading journals including Academy of Management Journal , Organization Science, and Strategic Management Journal. Her first book, Strategy as Practice: An Activity-Based Approach, was published by SAGE in 2005, and her most recent book, Making a Market for Acts of God, was published by Oxford University Press in 2015 . Steve Kennedy is an Assistant Professor at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. His work focuses on how corporate sustainability strategies are translated into successful innovation and the formation of future-ready sustainable business models. His doctoral thesis on the challenges of operationalizing sustainability in water management at the local level was highly commended at the Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Awards 2010. Kennedy is the Academic Director of the MSc Global Business & Sustainability and teaches courses on corporate sustainability and climate change strategy. Wahida Khandker is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research focuses on concepts of organic life and process across philosophy, biology and

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medicine, with a special interest in the works of Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead. She is author of Philosophy, Animality and the Life Sciences (2014).

Matthias Kipping is Professor of Policy and Richard E. Waugh Chair in Business History at the Schulich School of Business, York University in Toronto, Canada. He held previous positions at the University of Reading in the UK and Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. Much of his research concerns the evolution and role of management consulting, a topic on which he has published many journal articles and book chapters, co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Management Consulting (2012) and co-authored Defining Management: Business Schools, Consultants, Media (Routledge, 2016). He has also been active in examining and promoting the role of historical research in management and organization theory, where he co-organized a standing working group at the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS), published various chapters and articles, including in The Academy of Management Annals (with B. Dsdiken), and is currently writing a book-length overview (also with B. Dsdiken). Aron Kumaraswamy is an Associate Professor in the College of Business at Florida International University, Miami. He studies the management of innovation and growth, and has published in leading management journals. He co-edited the book Managing in the Modular Age: Architectures, Networks and Organizations, and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of International Management. Juha-Antti Lamberg is a Professor of Strategy and Economic History at the University of Jyvaskyla (Finland). His research has focused on history of strategy and industry evolution. He has published research in the Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal, the Journal of Management Studies, Industrial and Corporate Change, Academy of Management Learning & Education, as well as other leading journals of the field. In recognition of quality of his research, Prof. Lamberg has won the Sloan Foundation's Industry Studies Best Paper Prize in 2008, the Carolyn Dexter Award in 2009 at the Academy of Management Conference, and the Outstanding Article of the Year at the Academy of Management Learning & Education in 2015. Natalie Lambert (PhD University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is Assistant Professor, Brian Lamb School of Communication, Purdue University. Her research interests include on line communication, organizational communication, and theory construction for understanding organizational networks on- and offline. She is published in Communication Research. Jane Le is a Senior Lecturer in Work and Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney. She studies organizational practices and processes in complex, dynamic, and pluralistic organizations. Jane is particularly interested in social processes such as conflict, coordination, and information sharing. She has a passion for qualitative research and qualitative research methods. Jane received her PhD from the Aston Business School. She has published in Organization Science, Organization Studies, Strategic Organization, British Journal of Management, and the International Journal ofHuman Resource Management. Jane is currently serving on the editorial board of Organizational Research Methods. Paul M. Leonardi is the Duca Family Professor of Technology Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research and teaching focus on helping companies to create and share knowledge more effectively. He is interested in how implementing new technologies

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and harnessing the power of informal social networks can help companies take advantage of their knowledge assets to create innovative products and services. Qian Li is a Doctoral Student in Management at the University of Missouri's Robert J. Trulaske Sr., College of Business. Building on her master's thesis at the University of Melbourne, she is currently exploring different assumptions researchers make when studying organizational culture. Inspired by Hayek's work on spontaneous and sensory order, she is also interested in complexity theory, institutional entrepreneurship, organic forms of organizing, and the role that experience, perception, and self-selection play in making decisions. Thomas Martine, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer in Organizational Communication at the Universite de Montreal. His research interests focus on technology adoption and use in organizations as well as on processes of collective creativity. Joseph McDonald, MS PhD, Georgia Institute of Technology is Head of Business Development & User Experience Researcher at Human Interfaces, Inc. His research focuses on understanding how organizational, team-level, and individual-level factors interact with technology to bring about system-level changes. Joe has published work in various peer-reviewed journals and national and international conference proceedings on topics ranging from behavioral interventions for reducing work-related errors to novel approaches to investigating team dynamics. He recently received the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society's Student Member with Honors Award for Outstanding Contributions to the HF/E discipline. C. Robert Mesle is a Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Graceland University, Iowa. He is the author of Process Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead, Process Theology: A Basic Introduction and other books as well as over 100 articles and reviews including Chinese journals. He works with the Institute for the Postmodern Development of China, which promotes Whitehead's philosophy in China with concrete applications to problems in education, management, agriculture, and building an ecological civilization. In that role, he has been a keynote speaker at many international conferences in China and has taught the Summer Process Academy at several Chinese universities. Process Relational Philosophy has been translated and published in China. Process Theology has been translated into Korean, Portuguese, and Japanese. Mesle was also a keynote speaker at the 6th International PROS Symposium, in Rhodes, Greece. Alan D. Meyer is the Charles H. Lundquist Professor Emeritus of Management at the University of Oregon. He received his PhD in organizational behavior and industrial relations from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a field researcher who uses organizational theory and sociology as theoretical frames to study corporate venturing, university entrepreneurship, technology commercialization, institutional change, and industry evolution. Alan has served as Consulting Editor for the Academy of Management Journal, as Associate Editor-in-Chief for Organization Science, and on the editorial boards of Administrative Science Quarterly, the Academy ofManagement Journal, and Strategic Management Journal. Anne S. Miner is Professor of Management and Human Resources Emeritus at the Wisconsin School of Business. Miner studies organizational learning and improvisation, including papers on improvisation in product development and organizational learning from failure. Miner was named 2004 Scholar of the Year by the Technology and Innovation Management Division of the

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Academy of Management. She has served as associate editor of Management Science and of Organization Science, and on the editorial boards of Administrative Science Quarterly, American Sociological Review, the Academy of Management Journal, the Academy of Management Review, and Strategic Organization. Miner's BA is from Harvard, and her PhD is from Stanford. She has also worked as VP of a start-up and as assistant to the President at Stanford. Pedro Monteiro is a PhD researcher at Warwick Business School. His doctoral project explores multidisciplinary work in complex product development based on ethnographic methods and practice theory. His current work focuses on the work involved in the organization of cross-expertise collaboration, knowledge circulation, and innovation. He is also interested in ethnographic methodology and in reviving classic topics in organization science. Toshio Murase (PhD, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2014) is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Roosevelt University. He has been fascinated by collaborative power, which enables people to complete marvelous projects which no one can accomplish alone. His specific interests are in the following areas: teams, leadership, social networks, and measurement issues. Currently, he has been investigating a way to extract psychologically meaningful information from digital and log data, and whether synchronized actions among members can enhance team performance. Dr Murase's research has appeared in the following journals: Journal of Management, The Leadership Quarterly, Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, & Practice, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Educational and Psychological Measurement, and Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice. Davide Nicolini is Professor of Organization Studies at Warwick Business School where he co-directs the IKON Research Centre. He is also adjunct professor at department of Informatics of the University of Oslo. In the past he has held positions at The Tavistock Institute in London, ESADE Barcelona and the Universities of Trento and Bergamo in Italy. His work has appeared in a number of major North American and European journals. His current research focuses on the development of the practice-based approach and its application to phenomena such as knowing, collaboration, innovation and technological change in organizations. Although these days most of his empirical work is carried out in healthcare organizations, he has also studied construction sites, factories, public organizations, pharmacies, and scientific labs. Krista Pettit is a PhD candidate in General Management and Strategy at the Ivey Business School, Western University in Canada. Her research focuses on understanding how individual and shared factors such as identity impact key processes involved in strategic renewal such as organizational learning. She is primarily interested in exposing mechanisms that either help or hinder learning and strategy implementation across different levels of the organization. Nelson Phillips is Professor of Strategy and Organizational Behaviour at Imperial College London. His research interests include various aspects of organization theory, technology strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship, often studied from an institutional theory perspective. In addition to publishing numerous academic articles, he has published four books: Discourse Analysis with Cynthia Hardy published in 2002, Power and Organizations with Stewart Clegg and David Courpasson published in 2006, Technology and Organization with Graham Sewell and Dorothy Griffiths published in 2010, and the Oxford Handbook of Innovation Management with David Gann and Mark Dodgson published in 2014. He is also the

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Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Management Inquiry and co-edits the Cambridge University Press Elements Series in Organization Theory.

Marshall Scott Poole (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison) is David L. Swanson Professor of Communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Visiting Professor of Organization and Communication Studies at Vrije University, Amsterdam, Netherlands. His research interests include group and organizational communication, information systems, collaboration technologies, organizational innovation, and theory construction. Scott is the author of over 150 articles, book chapters, and proceedings publications and has authored or co-edited 11 books. He has been named a Fellow of the International Communication Association, a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association, and is recipient of the Steven A. Chaffee Career Productivity Award from the International Communication and the Joseph E. McGrath Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Study of Groups from the Interdisciplinary Network for Group Research (INGRoup). Anniina Rantakari, MSc, is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Oulu Business School, Finland. Her key areas of research are the process and practice perspectives on strategy, and the dynamics of power and resistance in organizational research in general and strategy research in particular. In her upcoming doctoral dissertation, she examines strategy making from a Foucauldian perspective. Juliane Reinecke is Professor of Organization Studies at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick. She is a Fellow at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, and Research Fellow at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, from where she received her PhD. Her research interests include process perspectives on ethics, global governance, sustainability, and temporality in organizations and in global value chains. Her work has been published in the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Science, Organization Studies, and Research Policy, among others. Juliane serves as Associate Editor of Business Ethics Quarterly and on the Editorial boards of Organization Studies and Organization. Claus Rerup is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at Ivey Business School, Western University, Canada. He obtained his doctorate in organization theory from the Aarhus School of Business, Denmark. He currently does research on organizational sensemaking, routine dynamics, and organizational learning with a particular interest in understanding how change unfolds over time and space. He specializes in qualitative research, combining historical and archival data collection methods with close ethnographic observations of organizational processes in real time. His work has been published in several management journals, including the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management, Journal of Management Studies, and Organization Science. Keith Robinson is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. His research has been concerned primarily with the European traditions of thought that emerge from Kant and post-Kantian philosophy - especially 19th and 20th century continental thinkers (Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze). He has interests in modem process philosophy (James, Bergson, Whitehead) and works on the interconnections between continental and process philosophy. He has published widely in these areas, including Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson: Rhizamatic Connections (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and, most recently, The Event and the Occasion: Deleuze, Whitehead and Creativity in The Lure of Whitehead, Eds. N. Gaskill and A. Nocek (University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

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Dennis Schoeneborn is a Professor (MSO) in the Department of Intercultural Communication and Management at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His current research is focused on constitutive and formative role of communication for partial and rudimentary organizational phenomena. His work has been published in Academy of Management Review, Human Relations, Journal of Management Studies, and Organization Studies, among others locations. He is currently serving in the editorial boards of Business and Society, Management Communication Quarterly, and Organization Studies. Majken Schultz is Professor at the Department of Organization at Copenhagen Business School. Her research focuses on the interrelations between organizational culture and organizational identity, including the implications for corporate branding. Currently, she is interested in developing a temporal perspective for how organizations reconstruct their identity in time. She has published more than 50 articles in international peer-reviewed journals on these topics and edited/co-authored multiple books. She is International Research Fellow at the Centre for Corporate Reputation at Oxford University, member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, and serves on several company boards. John Shotter was Emeritus Professor of Communication in the Department of Communication, University of New Hampshire, and a Research Associate, Centre for Philosophy of Natural & Social Science (CPNSS), London School of Economics, London. He is the author of Social Accountability and Seljhood (Blackwell, 1984), Cultural Politics of Everyday Life: Social Constructionism, Rhetoric, and Knowing of the Third Kind (Open University, 1993), Conversational Realities: the Construction of Life through Language (Sage, 1993), Conversational Realities Revisisted; Life, Language, Body, and World (Taos Publications, 2009) Getting It: 'Withness' -Thinking and the Dialogical... in Practice (Hampton Press, 2011), and Speaking, Actually: Towards a New "Fluid" Common Sense Understanding of Relational Becommings (Everything is Connected Press, October 2016, this was John's last published book). John has left us with an Archive of his writings. Paul Spee is a Senior Lecturer in Strategy at the University of Queensland Business School. He explores practices and processes that constitute strategy/strategizing and organization/organizing employing longitudinal qualitative research methods, most recently video ethnography. His work has appeared in the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Studies, Journal of Organizational Ethnography, and British Journal of Management, culminating in a research monograph (Making a Market for Acts of God, Oxford University Press). Panita Surachaikulwattana recently completed her PhD in Organization and Management at Imperial College, London, and is currently a Lecturer at the University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce (UTCC). She is also a research fellow at the Research Institute for Policy Evaluation and Design, UTCC. Her research interests include institutionalization and agency, translation, theorization, and organizational form and practices, primarily investigated with the use of qualitative methodologies. Her current research projects focus on the translation processes of managerial practices and ideas across nationaJ boundaries in diverse settings, including the health care industry, the software industry, and the education industry. Robyn Thomas is a Professor of Management at Cardiff Business School, UK. Her research primarily focuses on the critical anaJysis of management and organization, exploring the dynamics of power-resistance relations. Current research projects include the critical analysis

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of the contestation around professional and work-based identities; the construction of age in organizational contexts; and the role of middle managers in strategic change processes. She publishes mainly in management and organization journals, including Organization Science, Organization Studies; Organization; Journal of Management Studies and the British Journal of Management. She has previously been Editor-in-Chief of Organization and ESRC Ghoshal Fellow for the Advanced Institute of Management Research. Philipp Tuertscher is an Assistant Professor of Technology and Innovation at the Knowledge, Information, and Networks research group at the VU University Amsterdam. He obtained a PhD in management from the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. Philipp's research explores organizational mechanisms and social practices for collaborative innovation in a variety of settings. Besides studying large-scale scientific collaborations at CERN, Philipp has been studying innovation processes in collaborative communities such as Linux, Wikipedia, and Threadless. His work has appeared in the Academy of Management Annals, Organization Science, Information Systems Research, and Organization Studies. Eero Vaara is a Professor of Organization and Management at Aalto University School of Business, a Permanent Visiting Professor at EMLYON Business School, and a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Lancaster University, UK. His research interests focus on organizational, strategic, and institutional change, strategic practices and processes, multinational corporations and globalization, management history, management education, and methodological issues in organization and management research. He has worked especially on discursive and narrative approaches. Consuelo Vasquez (PhD, Universite de Montreal, 2009) is an associate professor in the Departement de Communication sociale et publique at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal in Canada. Her research takes a communicative constitution of organization approach to explore the role of spacing and timing in project and volunteer organizations. She has investigated these topics conducting ethnographic studies in non-profit organizations. Her research has been published in Communication Theory, Communication Measures and Methods, Discourse and Communication, Human Relations, Management Communication Quarterly, Qualitative Research in Organization and Management and Scandinavian Journal of Management, among others. Andrew Van de Ven is Professor Emeritus in Strategic Management, Work and Organi zations at the Carlson School of Management of the University of Minnesota. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin, and teaches courses on innovation management and organizational behavior. He is co-author of 13 books, including The Innovation Journey ( 1999; 2008), and Engaged Scholarship (2007) which won the 2008 Terry Award for the best book of the year by the Academy of Management (AOM). Van de Ven was elected AOM President in 2001-2002, and now serves as its founding editor of Academy of Management Discoveries. Merlijn van Hulst is an Associate Professor in the School of Politics and Public Administration at Tilburg University. He is interested in the role of sensemaking in public organizations and specializes in interpretive research methods. Current research includes analyses of storytelling in police practices, the work of excellent practitioners in neighborhood governance, and the concept of framing in policy analysis. He has published in a broad range of journals across the social sciences, including The British Journal of Criminology; Planning Theory; Media, Culture & Society; and The American Review of Public Administration.

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Dusya Vera (PhD, Western University, Ivey Business School) is an Associate Professor of Strategic Management at the C. T. Bauer College of Business, University of Houston. She studies organizational learning, strategic leadership, leadership virtues, and improvisation. Her research has been published in journals such as the Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, The Leadership Quarterly, Journal of Management Studies, Journal of Management, and Organizational Dynamics. Her current teaching focuses on positive leadership, leadership character, and global leadership. Timothy Vogus is an Associate Professor of Management at the Vanderbilt University Owen Graduate School of Management. He studies how organizations create and sustain highly reliable, nearly error-free performance. His focus has primarily been on the role that the processes of mindful organizing - a set of behaviors focused on detecting and correcting errors and unexpected events - play in generating high reliability and the roles that safety culture and reliability-enhancing work practices play in supporting it. He typically studies this in health care organizations, but has also investigated child welfare agencies, offshore oil rigs, social entrepreneurial ventures, and software firms. His research has been published in health policy (e.g., Health Services Research, Medical Care), industrial relations (ILR Review), and management (e.g., Academy of Management Review) Gail Whiteman is a Professor and Rubin Chair in Sustainability at Lancaster University (UK), and Director of the new Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business. Whiteman is also the Professor-in-Residence at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. Her research analyzes how a range of actors (companies, civil society, and local communities) make sense of ecological change, and how these actors transform and build resilience across scales given environmental pressures and social inequities. She is a principal investigator of a European research grant on Arctic change called ICE-ARC.eu, coordinated by the British Antarctic Survey, a Research Fellow of the Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research (4CMR), and an Executive Board member of the Resilience Alliance, an international research organization of scientists and practitioners who collaborate to explore the process dynamics of social-ecological systems. Her research has appeared in the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Studies, Ecology & Society, and Nature, among others. Originally from Toronto, she remembers Lake Erie in the old, dirty days. Richard Whittington is a Professor of Strategic Management at the Sai"d Business School and Millman Fellow, New College, University of Oxford. His main research interest is Strategy as Practice and he is currently researching the historical development of more 'open' strategy practices. He is an associate editor of the Strategic Management Journal and co-author of the leading strategy textbook, Exploring Strategy (Pearson). He has authored or co-authored eight other books, as well as articles in leading journals such as the Journal of Management Studies, Organization Science, Organization Studies, the Strategic Management Journal, and Strategic Organization. He is co-editor of forthcoming special issues of Long Range Planning on open strategy and the Strategic Management Journal on Strategy Process and Strategy Practice. Andrea Whittle is Professor of Management at Newcastle University Business School. Her research is driven by a passion for understanding the role of language in organizational settings and is informed by theories and methodologies from the fields of discourse analysis, narrative, discursive psychology, ethnography, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. She has conducted research

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in organizational settings on management consultants, identity, branding, organizational change and strategy and has also written on discourse and sensemaking in official institutions. Hugh Willmott (PhD, Manchester University; Honorary PhD, Lund University) is Professor of Management at Cass Business School Research, City University and Research Professor in Organization Studies, Cardiff Business School. He previously held professorial appointments at UMIST (now Manchester Business School) and the Judge Business School, Cambridge and visiting appointments at the Universities of Lund, Uppsala, Sydney, Innsbruck and University of Technology Sydney. Hugh is a Fellow of the British Academy. He has research diverse aspects of organizations including managerial work, culture, control, corporate governance, management education, ethics, regulation and alternative organizations. He is currently Associate Editor of Academy of Management Review and was previously Associate Editor of Organization. He has also served on the editorial boards of Accounting, Organizations and Society, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Accounting, Auditing and Accountability and a range of management and organization journals including Journal of Management Studies and Organization Studies. Dvora Yanow, Guest Professor in Wageningen University's Department of Social Sciences, Communication, Philosophy, and Technology Sub-Department, and Professor of Organizational Studies, Keele University, is a policy/political and organizational ethnographer and interpretive methodologist. Her research and teaching are shaped by an overall interest in the generation and communication of knowing and meaning in organizational and policy settings. Research topics include state-created categories for race-ethnic identity, immigrant integration policies and citizen-making practices, research regulation (ethics board) policies, practice studies, and science/technology museum spaces and the idea of science. Her most recent book, Interpretive Research Design: Concepts and Processes, with Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, is the first volume in their co-edited Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods; their co-edited Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn is now out in a second edition. Sierk Ybema is an Associate Professor in the Department of Organization Sciences at VU University Amsterdam. His research centers on processes of politics, identity, and sensemaking, with empirical settings ranging from amusement parks to newspaper offices and from multinational corporations to health care organizations. He has published on culture and conflict, relational and temporal identity talk, managerial discourse and 'postalgia,' intercultural communications, interorganizational relationships, and organizational change and crisis rhetoric. This work has been published in such journals as Human Relations, International Journal of Cross-Cultural Management, Journal of Business Ethics, Scandinavian Journal of Management, and Organization Studies. He is also co-editor, with Dvora Yanow, Harry Weis, and Frans Kamsteeg, of Organizational Ethnography: Studying the Complexities of Everyday Life.

The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Introduction: Process Thinking, Process Theorizing and Process Researching

Contributors: Ann Langley & Haridimos Tsoukas Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Introduction: Process Thinking, Process Theorizing and Process Researching" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n1 Print pages: 1-25 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Introduction: Process Thinking, Process Theorizing and Process Researching Ann LangleyHaridimos Tsoukas This Handbook aims to address a question both of us have often been asked: ‘If, as an organization and management studies scholar, I want to advance my understanding of process organization studies, where do I start?’ Our ambition has been to edit a volume which we can point at and confidently say: ‘This is a good start.’ The 41 chapters that are included here provide a panorama of process organizational research which, we hope, will provide a good guide to what appears to be a range of challenging issues. Moreover, the present volume is also aimed at the seasoned process researcher who wants to see the state of the art; to be informed of areas of process research she may not be familiar with; and to further sharpen her understanding of what process research can do and how it may be done. The Handbook is structured into five sections dealing respectively with process philosophy, process theory, process methodology, process applications (in which process thinking is applied to different organizational phenomena) and a final ‘perspectives’ section in which we asked contributors to be provocative, stretching process thinking beyond the current mainstream (if such could ever be said to exist within this emerging, dynamic and often challenging field of study). Indeed, although long present in philosophy and theology (Bergson, 2001; Deleuze, 2006; Dewey, 1938; James, 1952; Mead, 1934; Whitehead, 1978; Epperly, 2011; McDaniel and Bowman, 2006; see also Chapters 2–5 of this volume), a process orientation may have been relatively sidelined but not absent in mainstream organization and management studies. The label may have been sparsely used, and a philosophically sophisticated process vocabulary has not always been evident, but the practice of process research has been ongoing for some time. Karl Weick (1979, 1995), for example, hardly ever used the term ‘process approach’ in his work (Weick, 2010) but, as we shall see, he has been an emblematic contributor to what has come to be known as ‘process organization studies.’ He is not the only one. In the first wave of process research, roughly from the late-1960s to the late-1990s, several authors adopted dynamic, action-oriented perspectives. Apart from Weick, the work of Henry Mintzberg (2007), James March (1994), Andrew Pettigrew (1985, 1990), Robert Burgelman (1983, 2011) and Andrew Van de Ven (1992; with Poole, 1995, 2000) on, respectively, strategy formation, decision making, organizational change, venturing, and innovation, shows a clear awareness of the importance of process-related issues, and has inspired subsequent generations of organizational researchers. In a second wave of process organizational research, roughly from the late-1990s onwards, researchers have taken an explicitly agentic (related labels also used: performative, enactive, practice-based) view of organizations and organizing focusing, for example, on routines (Feldman, 2000; Feldman and Pentland, 2003; see also Howard-Grenville and Rerup, Chapter 20, this volume), innovation (Carlile, 2004; Dougherty, 2016; Garud et al., 2011; see also Garud et al., Chapter 28; Dooley and Van de Ven, Chapter 36, this volume), change (Langley et al., 2013; Tsoukas and Chia, 2002; Hernes, 2014), identity (Schultz and Hernes, 2013), strategizing (Whittington, 2006; Jarzabkowski, 2004; see also Whittington, Chapter 24; Jarzabkowski et al., Chapter 15, this volume), decision making (Klein, 1999; Langley et al., 1995), learning and knowing (Gherardi, 2006; see also Pettit et al., Chapter 30; Pina e Cunha et al., Chapter 35 in this volume), communication (Taylor and Van Every, 2000; see also Cooren et al., Chapter 32; Fairhurst, Chapter 31; Heracleous, Chapter 12, this volume), work (Nicolini, 2012; Barley and Kunda, 2001), institutionalization and organized action (Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006; Czarniawska, 2009; see also Surachaikulwattana and Phillips, Chapter 23), sensemaking (Maitlis, 2005; Rouleau, 2005; see also Vogus and Colville, Chapter 21), and the enactment of technological change in organizations (Barley, 1986; Orlikowski, 1996; see also Leonardi, Chapter 33). These authors and many others as well have adopted, to varying degrees, an explicit process vocabulary, and have provided further impetus to the process turn. Indeed, the growing use of the gerund (-ing) indicates a desire to move towards more dynamic ways of understanding organizational phenomena, incorporating fluidity, emergence, flow, and temporal and spatial interconnections. If a ‘big-picture’ illustration of the process turn in organization and management studies is needed, Weick's work is probably the most revealing, since he reworked the foundational notion of ‘organization,’ redirecting attention from organization to organizing. This shift has profound consequences, since it enables a radically Page 2 of 20

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new line of inquiry to be initiated: while hitherto research viewed organizations as already-constituted entities, with predefined properties waiting to be discovered by the researcher, as clearly illustrated in the famous Aston studies (Pugh, 1981), the emphasis on organizing invites scholars to examine how settings of interaction become organized. What are conventionally labeled and experienced as ‘organizations’ (notice the inverted commas) are products of human action. The researcher's task, therefore, is to explain how organization (notice the process) emerges; to investigate the processes through which collections of individuals are transformed into organized entities which become actors in themselves (Hernes, 2014). In particular, in his magnum opus The Social Psychology of Organizing, Weick defines organizing as ‘a consensually validated grammar for reducing equivocality by means of sensible interlocked behaviors. To organize is to assemble ongoing interdependent actions into sensible sequences that generate sensible outcomes’ (Weick, 1979: 3). Notice that the raw material for organizing are interlocked behaviors. Organizing is like a grammar since it provides the rules by which interlocked behaviors are assembled to form intelligible patterns. Organizing is based on consensual validation in the sense that it is grounded in agreements concerning what is real: organizing is directed initially at any input that is unfamiliar and not self-evident, for the purpose of making it more familiar and predictable, namely less equivocal (Weick, 1979: 3–4). From the above, it follows that an ‘organization’ is seen as an emergent phenomenon: it emerges from the coherent and constrained interaction of several individuals. Similarly, there is no such thing as ‘the environment.’ The latter, more appropriately, should be understood as ‘enacted environments’ (Smircich and Stubbart, 1985) – human constructions; products of managerial beliefs and actions. Individuals in organizations act and, in doing so, they create the materials that become the constraints and the opportunities they subsequently face (Weick, 1995: 31). Weick's ontological move from organizations to organizing has revealed a hitherto almost invisible (in theoretical terms) world (Shotter and Tsoukas, 2011): a world of constrained yet evolving interactions, emergence, feedback loops, and double interacts. Through his process lens it is as if he lifted the lid to reveal the multiplicity of unfolding interactions going on in organizations, rather than treating them as black boxes to be ‘externally’ measured and compared. He has also brought to our attention the circularity that characterizes much of human action (Shotter and Tsoukas, 2011): individuals and organizations partly grapple with problems of their own making. Weick's work exemplifies key themes of the process approach: agency, relationality, constrained interactivity, emergence, open-endedness. Process research is committed to advancing further this line of thinking. To do so it is important to reflect on what is distinctive about the process approach, seeking, at the same time, to grasp its evolving diversity as illustrated by the contributions in this volume. We will attempt to do this here by addressing three questions – philosophical, theoretical, and methodological, respectively: What is process? How is process to be theorized? How is process to be researched? We tackle each one below, drawing, as we do so, on the rich tapestry of ideas and contributions offered in this Handbook.

What is process? We begin with the ontological question: What is process? Here, we build on our own understandings of process philosophers as well as the insightful and highly pedagogical contributions of Mesle and Dibben (on Whitehead), Khandker (on Bergson), Robinson (on Deleuze and Guattari) and Shotter (on James, Dewey and Mead) presented in the process philosophy section of this volume (Chapters 2–5). The majority of early process organizational research adopted what has been called a ‘synoptic’ (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002) or ‘weak-process’ perspective1 (Bakken and Hernes, 2006), assuming that, for the most part, the task of process research is to provide the arrows that connect preexisting, relatively stable boxes (Feldman, Chapter 41, this volume), i.e., to understand the temporal evolution of things or substances that nevertheless retain their identity over time. From a ‘weak-process’ perspective, time is viewed primarily chronologically and Page 3 of 20

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change is seen as something that happens to organizations viewed as relatively stable entities. A ‘weak-process’ perspective has close affinities with substance metaphysics (Mesle, 2008; see also Mesle and Dibben, Chapter 2; Robinson, Chapter 4, this volume). The latter does recognize the occurrence of processes, but it considers them incidental, explaining them in terms of substances: processes contingently happen to substances, but the latter are essentially unchanging in character. Consider, for example, the phrase ‘the student is reading’ (Farmer, 1997: 64). The process of ‘reading’ is happening to the entity ‘the student.’ The student happens to be reading but this is incidental (not essential) – it is one activity among others. The student could have been walking, listening to music, eating, etc., and would still be the same student (Farmer, 1997: 64). The process does not change the substance. By contrast, from a ‘performative’ or (enactive or ‘strong-process’ perspective), process derives its meaning from process metaphysics – an ontological commitment that views the world as constantly becoming (Mesle, 2008; Mesle and Dibben, Chapter 2; Robinson, Chapter 4). Consider, again, the example of the student. From a strong-process perspective, the student is not an unchanging substance, unaffected by her experiences, but, on the contrary, is constituted by her experiences: reading is one process among others that constitutes the student. In fact, taken to its logical limits, the student does not exist apart of her experiences – she is her experiences (Farmer, 1997: 65) (for similar examples based on Whitehead, see Mesle and Dibben, Chapter 2). Just as the Heraclitian individual cannot step into the same river twice, the student who was reading this morning in the library is not the same student who is reading in her home in the evening: the experience of reading is different at these two points in time. As Farmer (1997: 65) observes, ‘the notion of the enduring substantial entity called the “self” of the student is an abstraction to be explained in terms of the repeated patterns found in a certain series of interrelated events.’ Process metaphysics regards change as endemic, indeed constitutive of the world. Every event reconfigures an already established pattern, thus altering its character. Every moment is qualitatively different and should be treated as such (Pepper, 1942; Tsoukas, 1994). The second wave of process organizational research described above has, to varying degrees, strained towards a ‘strong-process’ perspective,2 in line with the main insights of process metaphysics mentioned earlier. Here the emphasis tends to be on arrows all the way through – a particular phenomenon is thought to be constituted through the work agents do over time. Change is not something that happens to things, but the way in which reality is brought into being in every instant. Three articles from the recent special issue of the Academy of Management Journal (Langley et al., 2013: 5) illustrate what this means empirically. For example, Maguire and Hardy (2013) treat risk not as an objective attribute but as constituted through social practices over time (see also Hardy and Thomas, Chapter 29, this volume). Gehman et al.'s (2013) study of organizational values sees them not as cognitive or cultural entities but as a form of practice continually constituted and adapted through ongoing ‘values work’ enacted by organization members (for more on a practice perspective, see Nicolini and Monteiro, Chapter 7). Finally, for MacKay and Chia (2013) context is not something that is held constant and outside the changes being analyzed but is itself continually reconstituted within and by processes of interaction over time, generating unexpected and largely uncontrollable chains of activity and events in which agents, environments and organizations are all in constant and mutually interacting flux (reflecting an image of process that is fully incorporated into complexity theory perspectives, see Anderson and Meyer, Chapter 8; Garud et al., Chapter 28, this volume). As well as being committed to the ontology of becoming, strong-process philosophical thinking highlights the importance of experience, heterogeneity, and temporality. We briefly explain each one below. The importance of the notion of experience to process thinking is particularly emphasized by Mesle and Dibben, Chapter 2, this volume (inspired by Whiteheadian thought), as well as by Shotter, Chapter 5 (who reflects on James, Dewey and Mead's contributions). Since agency is accorded central role in the constitution of organizational phenomena, the experience of action and its consequences affects agents, changing qualitatively the phenomena they help co-create. Thus, Feldman's (2000) university administrators enacting a housing routine, Mintzberg's (2007) managers strategizing in their organizations, Dougherty's (2016) researchers Page 4 of 20

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and managers collaborating to come up with new pharmaceutical products, and Garud et al.'s (2011) 3M managers seeking to innovate through ‘bootlegging,’ to mention but a few examples, are affected by their interactions and the consequences they produce, so much so that the very phenomena they are part of keep changing. Not only is it impossible to step into the same river twice, but, as Bergson (2001: 153) aptly remarked, ‘the same does not remain the same’ (see also Khandker, Chapter 3). Experience is not a byproduct but a central feature of agency. To be sensitive to process means, among other things, to be alert to capture and understand others’ and one's own evolving experience. This is a major challenge for any empirical study of process. The emphasis on lived experience foregrounds two related notions – heterogeneity (or ‘multiplicity’ – see Khandker, Chapter 3, and Robinson, Chapter 4, this volume), as well as temporality. In the horizon of inner life, that is to say within the life of conscious beings, agents’ lived experience constantly evolves – one does not experience the same feeling twice. Although language makes us believe that experiences are distinct and recurrent (e.g. the experience of ‘frustration’ in a meeting), this is not phenomenologically the case: even when experiences appear to be recurrent (e.g. even when the feeling of ‘frustration’ is regular in meetings), they are modified, since the very fact of recurrence alters the experience (Guerlac, 2006: 81). What we experience, therefore, is heterogeneity: experiences are concrete and singular each time they occur, since they are tied to a particular moment of time, are embedded in a particular temporal flow, and engage the whole personality of the agent (Guerlac, 2006: 82; Khandker, Chapter 3; Robinson, Chapter 4). Capturing heterogeneity is an important challenge for process researchers. Since the human experience of the world is evolving and, therefore, temporally structured, what is that structure? For the commonsensical view, experiences are discrete events that have a before-and-after structure, namely they are chronologically arranged. For process philosophers, such as Bergson, James and Whitehead (see Chapters 2–5, this volume), this discreteness is only apparent. They argue that what is fundamental, which our pragmatic concerns in everyday life hinder us from noticing, is the flowing character of experience – the experience of temporal flow is more real than the apparent discreteness of the past-present-future structure we ordinarily notice. It should be noted that process philosophers do not dismiss the discreteness of the world we inhabit. On the contrary, they note that segmenting our experience into discrete items is necessary for us as active beings, on purely pragmatic grounds. Avoiding a truck that is running into my car is as pragmatically necessary as the efficient arrangement of machines on the shop floor for the operations manager or, the shipping of parcels to customers on time for an online retailer. The discreteness of the world comes from agents’ selecting features of the surrounding world according to their needs and projects (Moore, 1996: 27–32). However, because we segment the world and chronologically arrange our discrete experiences to fit whatever pragmatic needs we happen to have, it does not mean that what we apparently perceive is all there is. As Moore (1996: 55) notes, ‘on the contrary, so-called discrete elements are only apparent when we have a need to pluck them from our continuing experience’ (italics in the original). Stepping back from his pragmatic concerns, possibly after experiencing a disruption (Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011; Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009), allows an agent to recover portions of the continuing experience that temporarily escape her. It is the continuity of experience that process thinkers alert us not to (dis)miss (Guerlac, 2006, 2015). Awareness of that continuity is achieved through what Bergson (2001) famously called ‘durée’ (typically translated as ‘duration') (Khandker, Chapter 3, this volume). Whitehead (1978) calls a similar phenomenon ‘prehension’ – ‘the way in which what was there-then, becomes here-now’ (Cobb, 2007: 570; Mesle and Dibben, Chapter 2, this volume). As Khandker explains, Bergson's duration is the flowing forth of time as experienced by a conscious being whereby different temporal orientations are knit together – the past is brought forward to the present in anticipation of the future. Similarly, Whitehead's (1978) concept of ‘prehension’ indicates that past events are internally related to present ones because ‘experience is what it is, only as a continuation of what has prePage 5 of 20

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viously been’ (Cobb, 2007: 568) (Mesle and Dibben, Chapter 2, this volume). The continuity of experience means that inner states ‘overflow into one another, interpenetrate, even as they succeed one another’ (Guerlac, 2006: 65). The chronological (abstract) understanding of time, although pragmatically important, is limited since it fails to consider time-experienced-as-flow (Guerlac, 2015). Indeed, duration and prehension may be best illustrated through the figure of listening to a melody, a figure that is often used by process philosophers (Guerlac, 2006: 66; Cobb, 2007: 570; Mesle, 2008), since it enacts a temporal synthesis that is different from chronological time. While a melody is performed in chronological time, at a deeper level, by listening to it, we prehend the notes being played ‘as if they were inside one another and their ensemble was like a living being whose parts, through distinct, interpenetrate [one another]’ (Bergson, 2001: 101). In Chapter 18 in this volume, Albert and Bartunek offer an interesting and provocative example of how organizational processes might be represented differently if the musical metaphor were taken seriously. Time and temporality are also central themes in the chapters by Reinecke and Ansari (Chapter 25) and Hernes (Chapter 38). To sum up, strong-process thinking highlights the ever-changing nature of reality, focusing on becoming rather than being. Reality is seen as a process of creative advance, in which the past is brought forward to the present. As well as foregrounding the continuous flow of experience (thus, denying the fragmentation and discreteness of reality), strong-process thinking highlights the holistic character of temporal processes and activities: process taken as a whole (e.g. listening to or performing a melody, enacting a routine, making a decision, etc.) has onto-epistemological priority over its parts; the parts derive their sense from the whole process. A process orientation prioritizes activity over product, change over persistence and expression over determination (Hernes, 2014). Seeing process as fundamental, such an approach does not deny the existence of events, states or entities, but insists on unpacking them to reveal the complex activities and transactions that take place and contribute to their constitution. As process philosopher Rescher (1996: 29) argues, ‘the idea of discrete “events” dissolves into a manifold of processes which themselves dissolve into further processes.’ A process point of view invites us to acknowledge, rather than reduce, the complexity of the world (Tsoukas, 2016). It rests on a relational ontology, namely the recognition that everything that is has no existence apart from its relation to other things. Therefore, long-stablished dualisms such as mind and body, reason and emotion, humanity and nature, individual and collective, organism and environment, agency and structure, ethics and science, need to be creatively overcome. Chapters 2–5 in this volume offer sophisticated introductions to the main concepts of key process philosophers Whitehead, Bergson, Deleuze and the American pragmatists (James, Dewey and Mead), further elaborating the main themes identified above. We note that many other philosophers (phenomenologists, interpretive, Wittgensteinian, and postmodern philosophers, as well as some ancient ones) can also be seen through a process lens. However, this Handbook is not primarily a treatise on process philosophy, and other sources have amply explored this terrain (Helin et al., 2014). We are confident that the process philosophers we chose, all ably presented by our contributing authors and philosophers in their own right (Mesle and Dibben, Khandker, Robinson, and Shotter) form a very good start for anyone interested in exploring deeper what process is, and that the interested reader may well pursue this philosophical journey further on her own.

Theorizing process Of course, to explore process philosophically is quite different from empirically researching and theorizing process. While philosophers stand back from process to reflect on its received meanings, offering criteria on how to experience and identify process (often through first-person common-sensical thought experiments), empirical researchers need to explicitly and systematically operationalize and theorize process. By doing so, they strive, in effect, to stabilize process - to harness its becomingness. Page 6 of 20

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From Bergson's point of view, at least, this is to be expected. Empirical research constitutes an institutionalized activity (Whitley, 2000), not unlike other activities in which we regularly engage as social beings. On pragmatic grounds, therefore, process needs, to some extent at least, to be segmented and stabilized in order for it to be studied, just like when you drive you had better concentrate on the cars around you rather than be concerned about the philosophical understanding of flow. What, however, process philosophers so usefully do is to sensitize us to the limits of what we as empirical researchers undertake: what we take pragmatically to be process is always produced by deeper processes we need to further understand. To use Bergsonian imagery, if, at any point in time, on pragmatic grounds, we need to stabilize and segment the world, we also need to partially recover the underlying processes we inevitably ignore in our acts of segmentation. Looking at the landscape of process organizational research, it is important to grasp its diversity since, doing so, will enable us to better understand differences, clarify likely misunderstandings, and spot unexplored issues (see Sandberg et al., 2015). In this Handbook, we have tried to capture this diversity in two ways: first, by focusing on the different broad theoretical lenses that have been used to translate process thinking into coherent bodies of concepts and assumptions that can serve as inspiration in a variety of different settings (reflected in the section on process theories; Chapters 6–13) and second, by examining how different empirical phenomena have been addressed in specific research studies (the section on process applications to be discussed later; Chapters 20–36). The section on process methodology bridges the two (Chapters 14–19). We selected eight broad theoretical perspectives, which, in various ways, have provided enduring platforms for generating process insights. These are: contradiction, dialectics and paradox (Farjoun, Chapter 6); practice theory (Nicolini and Monteiro, Chapter 7); complexity theory (Anderson and Meyer, Chapter 8); symbolic interactionism (Dionysiou, Chapter 9); actor-network theory (Czarniawska, Chapter 10); ethnomethodology (Whittle and Housley, Chapter 11); discourse theory (Heracleous, Chapter 12); and evolutionary theory (Hodgson, Chapter 13). These perspectives provide distinctive and coherent process-sensitive vocabularies that are drawn upon by researchers studying particular issues. While they are different in several ways from one another, they also share some commonalities: they are all concerned with heterogeneity, emergence, interactivity, and open-endedness. These perspectives seek to account for particular outcomes by directing attention to the process that generated them. Some of these processes are stable mechanisms with unpredictable outcomes (e.g. mutations-selection-retention in evolutionary theories), while others are assembled ad hoc in each setting (e.g. actor-network theory). The authors do a brilliant job in summarizing the key tenets of each perspective and suggesting how they are used to convey process insights. Indeed, in many cases, they show a passionate and infectious commitment to the value of these generic conceptual tools for understanding organizations from a process perspective. Nevertheless, the theories do have distinct differences in emphasis. Dialectical theories, complexity theory and evolutionary theories all emphasize multiplicity and heterogeneity, and consider, albeit in different ways, how interactions among disparate elements lead to unexpected, unintended and potentially radical consequences over time (Farjoun, Chapter 6; Anderson and Meyer, Chapter 8; Hodgson, Chapter 13). In a similar vein, actor-network theory has most often been used to show how connections made between heterogeneous elements can lead to new arrangements (Czarniawska, Chapter 10). In other words, the first set of theoretical perspectives tends to emphasize processes of transformation and emergence. In contrast, practice theories, symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology focus more on regularities in activities and meanings, and the way in which mundane everyday phenomena are recursively reproduced and adapted in situ (Dionysiou, Chapter 9; Nicolini and Monteiro, Chapter 7; Whittle and Housley, Chapter 11). This does not at all mean that these approaches do not allow for transformation (nor that the first set of theories does not also allow for reproduction), but the emphasis is different. As Heracleous (Chapter 12 indicates), discourse theories may be situated at a variety of different levels within this spectrum depending on the variants favored. Relatedly, some of the theoretical perspectives tend to focus on human interaction and activity in specific situated contexts (ethnomethodology, symbolic interaction, practice theories), whereas others tend to take a more macro-level perspective focusing on higher-level systems or organizations as a whole (complexity thePage 7 of 20

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ory, evolutionary theory). Some eschew the notion of micro and macro levels, and argue for a flat ontology (actor-network theory, Czarniawska, Chapter 10) in order to capture how apparent macro constructs emerge from an assemblage of heterogeneous elements. In addition, the theoretical perspectives vary in the degree to which they incorporate considerations of materiality (e.g. central to actor-network theory, and often to practice theories, but less so for complexity theory and discourse theory). Finally, although there is no one-to-one correspondence, the theories often imply different kinds of methodological stance because different elements are assumed to be significant. In fact, we argue that process studies may be distinguished along two axes (see Table 1.1). First, they vary by the approach they undertake to process. In particular, process may be studied from within or from the outside. Studying a phenomenon from within involves an effort to capture the evolving meaningful experience – the qualia – of those involved in it, through eliciting first-person accounts or partaking oneself in that experience. This would fit, for example, with a practice theory or symbolic interactionist perspective (Nicolini and Monteiro, Chapter 7; Dionysiou, Chapter 9, this volume). Studying process from the outside involves capturing the process through which a phenomenon develops over chronological time; the emphasis is less on ‘what does it feel like?’ and more on ‘how and why did it change?’ (e.g. as in evolutionary theory, Hodgson, Chapter 13).

Table 1.1Four types of process research

Secondly, process studies may be distinguished by the focus of research projects. In particular, studies may explore the workings of process after-the-fact, typically starting with a particular outcome and going back to seek how it was produced (an approach usually adopted by actor-network studies, Czarniawska, Chapter 10, this volume). Or studies may focus on a phenomenon in-the-flow, namely study it while it is being enacted (essential for ethnomethodology, Whittle and Housley, Chapter 11). A subcategory of the latter are studies in which the researcher, as well as witnessing the phenomenon unfold, takes part in it, influencing the way it develops. Thus, as shown in Table 1.1, we can distinguish four categories of process studies: developmental, reconstructive, prehensive, and configurational. Each one is briefly described and illustrated below. Developmental studies (outside, after-the-fact) have been very common in the field: researchers focus on particular outcomes (e.g. a decision, a change program successfully installed (or not), corporate failure, new cognitive schemas, the adoption of a new policy or strategy, etc.), seeking to account for the process that led to it from the outside. The researcher stands outside the process and seeks to understand its contour backwards. The underlying image of process is that of motion, indicating a weak-process approach. Chandler's (1962) studies of the growth of corporations and Pettigrew's (1985) study of ICI (though partly studied in real time in this case), are among the best known examples of developmental studies of a historical kind. Additional examples include Bingham and Kahl's (2013) study of how groups in the life insurance industry developed their schema for the computer from 1945 to 1975, and Danneels’ (2010) study of the failure of Smith Page 8 of 20

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Corona through its inability to renew its resource base, especially after 1995 (the year it first went bankrupt), until 2001 when the company folded. Reconstructive studies (inside, after-the-fact) have also been common in the field, increasingly represented in the second wave of process research, subscribing to varying degrees of process depth, along the ‘weakprocess’ – ‘strong-process’ continuum. Researchers tend to focus on a particular outcome and they seek to account for the process that led to it from within, namely highlighting the evolving meanings, experiences, and the contingencies present at particular points in time, as well as the possible alternative paths the processes could have taken. There is, often, an explicit effort to show how the present draws on the past and is further shaped by current circumstances, and/or how particular events are intertwined over time. For example, Howard-Grenville et al. (2013), through a longitudinal case study, studied the process of collective identity resurrection through investigating how the members of a particular community reenergized a valued community identity, following years of decline. Their model draws particular attention to the role of community members’ experiences and emotions over time, and how community leaders help orchestrate such experiences. Prehensive research (inside, in-the-flow) typically subscribes to a strong-process view. Researchers tend to lodge themselves in the flow of events, in real time, seeking to offer accounts of the evolving process from within, by highlighting how present events, at any time, draw on (prehend) previous ones, how meanings and experiences evolve over time and in context, and how contingencies shape the paths taken or not taken. The level of analysis tends to be micro: double-interacts and group interactions. A good example of prehensive studies is Feldman's (2000) study of the housing routines in a US university. Another, recent, example is provided by Hussenot and Missonier (2016). The authors followed the development of an HRM tool (a competency management tool) at a bank, following an events-based approach, inspired by strong-process thinking, especially Whitehead. They show how particular past and anticipated events in the project under study were variably prehended throughout the project at hand: the same events were being redefined as the projected unfolded. Some researchers, acting as action researchers or consultants, seek not only to describe and account for the unfolding process at hand (usually a change management project at various levels of analysis), but to influence it as well (Lüscher and Lewis, 2008; Shotter, 2010). Insofar as they do so, such prehensive studies tend to be performative (enactive). For example, Lüscher and Lewis (2008), in their action research at the Danish Lego Company, sought to help managers make sense of issues surfaced by a major restructuring. The very process of ongoing sensemaking was not merely reported by researchers, but they actually took an active part in shaping it through making managers reflect on their experiences, articulate them and seek to reframe them. Old meanings were reflexively recast to fit new requirements; the very process of change was instrumental in generating particular outcomes. Finally, configurational studies (outside, in-the-flow) focus on the flow of events over time, and do so from the outside. Researchers seek to identify and represent distinct patterns along the flow, with their emphasis being not so much on providing an account that grasps agents’ experience as on capturing configurations of outcomes or actions making up distinct patterns. For example, Bresman's (2013) study of how routines in teams, in a pharmaceutical company, change by drawing on the prior experiences of other teams identifies four distinct phases in such a process (identification, translation, adoption and continuation). These phases make a loop, and each one may be further analyzed into its constituent components. Similarly, Van Oorschot et al. (2013) analyzed a new product development failure and how it came about through focusing on weekly decisions and the information filters they were subjected over time. Showing the causal loops present in the decision-making process that escalated the magnitude of initially wrong decisions, the researchers unraveled the anatomy of a decision trap. Of course, the above four types of process studies are indicative of ideal types. It is not uncommon for empirical research projects to combine elements of more than one type. Moreover, many process theories can also accommodate different approaches and foci depending on how they are conceived. For example, curPage 9 of 20

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rent theories of paradox are ambivalent as to whether paradox itself is an ‘objective’ observable phenomenon (i.e., to be labeled as such from the outside) or rather should be analysed as an experience of those that are embedded in situations (necessarily captured from the inside) (Farjoun, Chapter 6, this volume). In addition, pragmatic as well as theoretical considerations enter into choices of methodology as we now discuss.

Process Methodology It is in the domain of methodology that empirical approaches to process, based on a desire to capture and express the experience of temporality, flow, activity and emergence in concrete terms (Langley, 1999; Pettigrew, 1990; Van de Ven, 1992), confront the challenges set by the more purist strands of process thinking expressed by process philosophers and process theorists (Helin et al., 2014; Hernes, 2014; Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). Pettigrew (1990: 270) famously expressed this challenge as one of ‘capturing reality in flight.’ The set of chapters in the Handbook dealing explicitly with process methodologies (Chapters 14–19) offer ideas, reflections and recommendations about how this may be accomplished, and in several cases about how to bridge the pragmatic concerns of the empirical researcher with the philosophical aspirations of a strongprocess view. The four distinctive perspectives on process that we introduced in Table 1.1 are also implicitly highlighted in the contributions of these chapters. Many of the most obvious methodologies for conducting empirical research from a process perspective are not new in themselves. This is particularly the case of ethnography (van Hulst et al., Chapter 14, this volume), narrative approaches (Rantakari and Vaara, Chapter 17, this volume) and history (Kipping and Lamberg, Chapter 19 this volume), all of which, in different ways, naturally involve the analysis of temporally evolving phenomena, whether lived moment by moment (as in ethnography), expressed in the recollections and reconstructions of individuals and groups (as in narrative), or grounded in the ‘relics’ of the past (as in history). And yet, traditionally, writers on these methods do not always explicitly relate their discussions of methodology to process thinking more generally. For example, ethnography is described by Van Maanen (2011: xiii) as ‘the peculiar practice of representing the social reality of others through the analysis of one's own experience in the world of these others.' The emphasis is on capturing culture and meanings rather than process as such. Similarly, as noted by Kipping and Lamberg (Chapter 19), ‘In-depth analyses of organizational processes and even the broader notion of “process” are almost entirely absent from the work of business historians.' Narrative approaches have been more closely associated with process thinking, for example, by Bruner (1991) and Ricoeur (2010), but these authors’ perspectives remain highly philosophical, often loosely connected to the pragmatic methodological concerns of empirical researchers (but see, e.g. Boje, 2001). The contributors to this volume have, in contrast, explicitly situated their approaches in relation to the concerns of process scholars. For example, in Chapter 14 on ‘Ethnography and organizational processes,’ van Hulst et al. draw attention to the dual strengths of ethnography for process analysis in enabling both ‘longshots’ (studies of long-term change over time) and ‘close-ups’ (studies of moment-by-moment improvisations) through thick description that embeds specific incidents within their context, capturing change in motion both front-stage and back-stage, and doing so through the continued ‘in-dwelling’ of ethnographers within the contexts observed. Van Hulst et al. illustrate a form of process analysis that starts resolutely ‘from the inside.’ Its resulting analysis may reflect these processes ‘within the flow’ (in ‘close-ups') or ‘after the fact’ (when reconstituted in ‘long shots'), falling within the prehensive and reconstructive boxes of Table 1.1 respectively. In Chapter 17, Rantakari and Vaara take up the challenge of sorting through a variety of different approaches to narrative of relevance to process scholars, distinguishing between perspectives that use narrative as a form of representation, those that see narrative as meaning construction, those that focus on narrative polyphony and fragmentation, and those that view narratives as performative, i.e., as constructing the realities that they describe. Although the straightforward understanding of a narrative as a story told by an individual about their own experience would seem to emphasize an ‘insider’ and ‘after the fact’ approach to process (reconstructive), Rantakari and Vaara's analysis suggests that narrative approaches may be marshalled to reflect other Page 10 of 20

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forms of process analysis, sometimes referring to an ‘outsider’ analysis (narrative as representation in a developmental or configurational analysis), and sometimes capturing process ‘in the flow’ (the performative or prehensive view). In their presentation of historical methods, Kipping and Lamberg (Chapter 19) argue for greater cross-fertilization between process scholars and historians who have tended to ignore each other's contributions. They note, in particular, the ability of historical methods to examine the deep historical roots of phenomena in the present (e.g. something that can be easily lost in more time-bound ethnographic, narrative, or interview-based studies), to capture ‘complete’ processes including origins and final outcomes, and to engage in counterfactual analyses that are able to theorize about alternative process paths and their causal antecedents (see also Burgelman, 2011). Historical studies naturally examine processes ‘from the outside’ and ‘after the fact’ (the developmental view in Table 1.1) and as such appear to be less compatible with a strong-process perspective. Nevertheless, Lamberg and Kipping show that, contrary to what one might assume, historians themselves are experimenting with a variety of interpretations of history, some of which are quite reminiscent of the narrative approaches discussed by Rantakari and Vaara. While three chapters in the process methodology section of the Handbook deal broadly with classic methodologies relevant to process, the other three target more focused topics. Notably, Chapter 15 (Jarzabkowski et al., this volume) and Chapter 16 (Poole et al., this volume) deal specifically with the analysis of process data: qualitatively in the case of Jarzabkowski et al. and quantitatively for Poole and colleagues. Drawing on their own research experience with three in-depth qualitative process studies, Jarzabkowski et al. (Chapter 15) address the particular challenges of analysing processes qualitatively from a perspective professing a strong-process ontology. Their very practical contribution illustrates three forms of qualitative process analysis that place process and temporality in a different relationships with one another, discussing how each approach places a different emphasis on what they call ‘doing’ (activity in the moment) and ‘becoming’ (evolving over time). Clearly, these different perspectives relate strongly to van Hulst et al.'s (Chapter 14) notions of studying phenomena in ‘close-up’ and taking ‘long-shots’ as well as our own construction of process as ‘in the flow’ or ‘after the fact.' In Chapter 16, Poole et al. (this volume) introduce us to the potential and implications of quantitative sequence methods for analyzing process data. The authors argue that these formal methods offer complementary strengths to the more ‘informal’ and qualitative approaches adopted by most process researchers because of their capacity to handle large quantities of longitudinal data on multiple cases and to overcome human pattern-recognition biases. They discuss the centrality of event sequences for process theorizing, and offer practical insight into approaches for the identification, comparison, classification, and characterization of sequences. Clearly, by their very nature, these approaches tend to take researchers to the ‘after the fact,’ and ‘outsider’ (developmental) mode of process analysis. The chapter by Anderson and Meyer on complexity theory (Chapter 8) complements this one in illustrating the value and potential of quantitative methods for process analysis, although Anderson and Meyer focus on agent-based simulations as a methodology rather than empirical event sequence approaches. Finally, if this has not happened elsewhere in the Handbook, the remaining chapter in the process methodology section (Chapter 18, Albert and Bartunek, this volume) is guaranteed to shake readers out of their comfort zone. The authors have chosen to tackle the topic of collaborative research from an original and insightful angle: that of music. The metaphor of music reveals to us both the in-the-moment aspects of process in terms of fading and growing sound, but also the way in which processes constitute wholes after the fact (when we experience music as melody as suggested above). It also incorporates the notion of polyphony and heterogeneity as we experience harmony, discord or cacophony, all phenomena that are, indeed, likely to be encountered in collaborative process research. The tension inherent to process organization studies between a strong-process ontology and the desire to Page 11 of 20

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capture, hold and pin down processes in order to study them underlies these chapters, appearing more explicitly for some authors than others. De Cock and Sharp (2007: 245–246) have argued that the longitudinal field research methods that are the bread and butter of process research are inevitably mired in this paradox: Clearly the proponents of [longitudinal field research] have started out with the intention of making sense of change over time. Have they failed? Perhaps the answer is both no and yes? No, because the meanings they give incorporate a dynamic that would certainly be missing from any synchronic account. Yes, because surely they are still operating within the worldview of substance. They have to fix things first in order to describe how they change. Rather than studying dynamics they are dealing with a sort of incremental stasis. Pinning down the world methodologically in order to describe and make sense of it almost always involves the violation of certain strong-process ontological principles, since research that refuses to pin anything down can be limited in its intelligibility not to mention its publishability in disciplinary journals. The six chapters in the process methodology section of the Handbook offer pragmatic ways to deal with the paradox but they ultimately cannot entirely resolve it. The applications section of the Handbook illustrates further how process theories and methodologies have contributed to developing insight into specific empirical phenomena.

Process Applications The heart of this volume is constituted by the seventeen applications chapters (Chapters 20–36) dealing respectively with routines, sensemaking, organizational identity and culture, institutions, strategy, time, sustainability, entrepreneurship, innovation, power, learning, leadership, communication, materiality, organizational design, improvisation, and organizational change, all viewed from a process perspective. We chose these topics sometimes because they have engaged a large body of research of a processual nature that is worthy of synthesis (e.g. chapters on routines, on innovation and organizational change, on learning and improvisation, on strategy, and on communication), sometimes because they are simply very important topics that need to be addressed by process research (e.g. time, sustainability, power, materiality), and sometimes to invite readers to rethink concepts and ideas that have usually been viewed in more entity-like (substantialist) terms, or that have been dominated by variance theorizing despite their inherently processual nature (e.g. topics such as institutions, entrepreneurship, leadership, organizational design). Because of space constraints, we will not discuss each chapter in depth here, but a brief overview of the chapters is provided in Table 1.2, summarizing four key dimensions of the chapters in relation to their topic areas: conceptions of process, main themes, methodological implications and agendas for future research.

Table 1.2Process applications (overview of chapters 20–36)

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Table 1.2

Process applications {overview of Chapters 20-36)

Chapter

Conception of process

Chapter 20: HowardHistorical development Conceptions Grenville and Rerup: A of routines as stable 'entities' ~ Process Perspective on Conception of routines as generative Organizational ROUTINES systems (Feldman and Pentland, 2003) that endogenously produce both stability and change

Central themes

Methodologies emphasized

- How variations in routine performances - Qualitative inductive research enable both stability and change (often involving observation) - Important emphasis on routines and - Narrative networks (sequence materiality, learning, emergence analysis) - Nature of routines - Simulation modeling

Agenda for future research - View 'ostensive' aspects of routines processually - Consider contextual embeddedness, multiplicity, spatiality, temporality, creativity - Diversify methods (e.g. history, diaries)

Chapter 21: Vogus and Colville: SENSEMAKING, Simplexity and Mindfulness

Two resources for future-oriented Historical development Sensemaking perspective (Weick, 1995) sensemaking: - Simplexity (complex thinking and as inherently processual but retrospective ~ Need for a action to reduce equivocality) prospective conception of - Individual and collective mindfulness sensemaking based on two notions: simplexity and mindfulness

- None explicitly discussed but combination of qualitative and quantitative studies reviewed (not all explicitly processual)

- Link routines to simplexityl mindfulness - Link mindfulness to sensemaking accounts - Link simplexity and mindfulness to entrepreneurship - Consider affect

Chapter 22: Hernes and Schultz: A Temporal Understanding of the Connections Between OR GAN IZATI ONAL CULTURE AND IDENTITY

Three ways of applying process and temporality. 1. Evolutionary view (sedimentation over time); 2. Periodic view (cycles of change and stability); 3. Becoming view (ongoing accomplishment)

- New model of culture/ identity dynamics based on a becoming view - Four processes linking organizational culture and identity forward and backward in time building on Hatch and Schultz (2002)

- None explicitly discussed, but emphasis on qualitative case study research

- Develop an integrated becoming view of organizational culture and identity

Chapter 23: Surachaikulwattana and Phillips: INSTITUTIONS as Process

Historical development Institutional theory as inherently processual ~ Institution viewed as stable 'entity' in early research ~ Renewal of emphasis on process through focus on change and agency

Key constructs in institutional theory and - Move towards longitudinal data relationship to process: and qualitative research as - Organizational fields process view becomes more prominent, with focus on - Institutional logics - Institutional entrepreneurship change and agency - Institutional work

Chapter 24: Whittington: STRATEGY AS PRACTICE, Process and Institution

Three historical perspectives on strategy process. 1. Process as variable; 2. Process as evolution over time; 3. Process as activity (strong-process ontology)

- Convergence of strategy process, strategy - Need for longitudinal perspective - Temporal and spatial stretching as practice and institutional theory on to incorporate process insights of strategy as practice 'activity' in recent studies into strategy as practice research to incorporate -Value of process and institutional work to research; need for focus process and institutional expand strategy as practice studies on context to incorporate considerations institutional insights

- Further develop process perspective on institutions - Explore process questions on how actors can precipitate institutional change - Need to incorporate time more deeply

Chapter 25: Reinecke and Two perspectives on time: Ansari: TIME, Temporality 1. Clock-time (objective, linear, and Process Studies measurable) used to coordinate activity; 2. Process-time (subjective, event driven qualitative), time as experienced

- Process-time notions of present (duration); past (malleable memories); future (potentialities) - Competing temporal structures (e.g. in sustainability, strategy & innovation)

- Discusses how the need for clear research outcomes can turn process concepts into static representations - Tension between research goals (epistemological view) and practitioner experience (phenomenological view)

- Scrutinize clock-time assumptions - Consider the implications of process-time - Examine how duality of time plays out in different organizational contexts.

Chapter 26: Whiteman and Building on a specific process view. Kennedy: SUSTAINABILITY Five elements from process and Process philosophy (Helin et al., 2014): temporality, wholeness, openness, force and potentiality

- Role of five process elements to solve concrete sustainability problems: focus on connections over time, inclusivity, and links between human and non-human elements

- None explicitly discussed

- Study scaling up of sustainable practices - View organizing as a process of place-making/ destroying - Consider ecological and social embeddedness

Chapter 27: Chiles, Elias and Li: ENTREPRENEURSHIP as Process

Four worldviews (Pepper): 1. Formism (classification); 2. Mechanism (as in variance theories); 3. Organism (holistic emergence); 4. Contextualism (based on action in context).

- 25°/o of articles reviewed adopt pure

- Dominance of mechanistic methods (variance theory) - Dominance of case study research in contextualist studies

- Study entrepreneurial imagination using nonmechanistic methods - Enhance reflexivity: make assumptions explicit; take process seriously; avoid validation logic in research

Chapter 28: Garud, Gehman, Kumaraswamy and Tuertscher: From the Process of Innovation to INNOVATION as Process

Historically, two views of process and innovation: 1. Process of innovation (stage model; synoptic view); 2. Innovation as process (ongoing accomplishment; performative view)

Performative view of innovation as: - complex adaptive process; complex relational process (endogenizing context}, complex temporal process (endogenizing time)

Implications of performative view: - Symmetry to incorporate materiality - Focus on translation rather than diffusion - Focus on narratives

- Synoptic view: Study of links between stages; managing stakeholders - Performative view: Study of paradox of maintaining legitimacy and allowing flexibility

world view of either mechanism or contextual ism - 75°/o mix worldviews - Importance of imagination process but limited research

(Continued)

Table 1.2

Process applications (overview of Chapters 20-36) (continued)

Chapter

Conception of process

Central themes

Chapter 29: Hardy and Two perspectives on process and How discursive view of power can help Thomas: POWER and power. performative process theory address 1. Synoptic view (substance ontology) issues of (a) agency (production of Process: The Production of 'Knowing' Subjects and fits with work on people's uses of knowing subjects) and (b) object 'Known' Objects power; stabilization (production of known 2. Performative view (becoming ontology) objects) fits discursive view of power

Methodologies emphasized

Agenda for future research

Discursive perspectives on power largely emphasize qualitative approaches in common with performative process scholars

Suggestions for process researchers - Examine unfolding discourses - Consider how discourses create subject positions - Identify other voices - Analyse recursivity

None explicitly discussed

- Consider individual-level influences on organizational learning - Consider role of identity in organizational learning - Consider role of time and social factors in organizational learning

Chapter 30: Pettit, Crossan and Vera: ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING [OL] and Knowledge Processes: A Critical Review

Building on a specific process view (Weick, 1979): 'activities and behaviors or "ongoing interdependent actions" by individuals, groups and organizations involved in organizational learning'

Review focusing on who, what, why, where, when and how questions; critique of - limited attention to multi-level influences; fragmented focus on outcomes; limited focus on time and social factors

Chapter 31: Fairhurst: LEADERSHIP Process

Three perspectives on leadership processes. 1. Leadership talk-in-interaction (becoming view); 2. Historical leadership case studies; 3. Leadership as a dialectic process (last two - substantive ontology)

- Leadership process studies as temporal, Leadership talk-in-interaction - Focus on sociomateriality and - Conversation analysis; relational, contextual in contrast to leadership process mainstream leadership literature Quantifying interacts; Discourse - Better delineate issues of time analysis; Ethnography/Other in analysis - Rich variety of research but no common definitions of leadership - Combine micro-analytic approaches - Case studies; Ethnography and wide angle lenses on leadership

Chapter 32: Cooren, Bartels and Martine: ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION as Process

Three approaches to 'communication as constitutive of organization' (CCO) as process theory: 1. Text-conversation; 2. Four flows model; 3. Social systems theory

- Key concepts: flows; text-conversation; - Direct observation of interactions; - Study the articulations and textual agency; authority; video recording, shadowing interactions of organizing as Ventriloquism a configuration of human and - Major themes: Meta-conversation; non-human agencies space-time; attribution; appropriation

Chapter 33: Leonardi: Two ways to consider materiality Key views in the literature: None explicitly discussed - Technology development process: social MATERIALITY as processually. an Organizing 1. Material artifacts as reinterpreted in construction of technology (SCOT); Process: Toward a Process use (social constructivist); actor-network theory Metaphysics for Material 2. Materiality as constituted in process - Technology use process: structuration; (Rescher, 1996) following process Artifacts practice theories metaphysics

- Need to consider materiality from a process metaphysics that considers materiality as becoming

Chapter 34: Dunbar and Bechky: ORGANIZATION DESIGN as Process

Two views of organization design: 1. As planned static structure contingent on context (substantive ontology); 2. As process where designing and managing shade into each other, intertwine and evolve

Contrast between imposed and enabling - Case study methodologies used designs: in the paper to illustrate the - Organizational design as a learning dynamics of organizational process design - Organizational design as purposeful - Role of people in organizational design

- Consider organizational design as a learning process

Chapter 35: Pina e Cunha, Miner and Antonacopolou: IMPROVISATION Processes in Organizations

Improvisation as processual though sometimes studied with variance methods: Improvisation is the deliberate fusion of the design and execution of a novel production

Four types of processes on 2x2 (micro/ macro; shared purpose or not): 1. ad hoc action at work; 2. adaptive strategy; 3. political ingenuity; 4. strategic struggle

Case studies, detailed historical descriptions, fine-grained analysis of organizational activities. Need for attention to the sequence of design and performance in time

- Topics: interpretive processes; motivations; role of emotions - Improve methods - Consider retention and multilevel issues - Relate explicitly to process

Chapter 36: Dooley and Van de Ven: Cycles of Divergence and ConvergenceUnderlying Processes of ORGANIZATION CHANGE AND INNOVATION

Building on a specific view of process concerned with 'identifying the order and sequence in which events unfold as things emerge, develop, grow, or terminate over time' (developmental)

Illustration of insights from three - Event sequence analyses used in thee sampled studies innovation studies: - Common pattern underlying cases: cycles of divergence and convergence - Pattern transferable to other process theories

- Review links between different models of change - Rethink managerial levers for change - Need for multi-dimensional leadership - Transferability?

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The first theme concerning the conception of process that each of the authors brings to their chapter deserves some comment in this Introduction. Many of the chapters implicitly or explicitly make the weak (synoptic) vs. strong (performative) process distinction using these or other labels. Sometimes, this distinction is used to enable authors to describe the historical development of research in their field as moving from a non-processual and/or a weak-process ontology towards a stronger process view (e.g. notably, Howard-Grenville and Rerup, Chapter 20 on routines; Surachaikulwattana and Phillips, Chapter 23 on institutions; Whittington, Chapter 24 on strategy). The trend described by these particular authors reflects the energy and dynamism those intellectual fields have recently experienced in terms of the development of process and practice-based theorizing. In other cases, authors draw on the weak-strong distinction to note the existence of two or more parallel streams of scholarship that while both processual, position themselves differently on this continuum generating different kinds of research outputs and dilemmas and constituting a kind of duality. For example, Fairhurst's chapter on leadership process (Chapter 31) reveals on the one hand the rich heritage of leadership studies dealing with talk-in-interaction (coming closest to a strong-process view) in parallel with broader-brush case studies of leadership phenomena that pinpoint longer term dynamics surrounding leadership behaviors invisible within narrow micro-level interactions. In their chapter on time and temporality, Reinecke and Ansari (Chapter 25, this volume) note the coexistence of competing temporal structures based on ‘clock-time’ and ‘process-time’ respectively (in Bergson's terms chronological or abstract vs. experiential or concrete time, see Guerlac, 2015; and Khandker, this volume). While strong-process concepts such as ‘duration,’ ‘malleable memories’ and ‘potentialities’ (inherent to process-time) may motivate process researchers and better reflect intra-subjective experience, Reinecke and Ansari note the need to accommodate and recognize the tension between these concepts and the clock-time constraints and preoccupations that structure coordinated action (inter-subjective time). The complexities underlying the ‘duality of time’ offer multiple opportunities for future research. Finally, other scholars draw on the distinctions between weak- and strong-process views to position their own preferred view (usually a performative or strong-process perspective) and to further deepen its implications (e.g. Hernes and Schultz, Chapter 22 on organizational identity and culture and the linkages between them; Whiteman and Kennedy, Chapter 26 on sustainability; Garud et al., Chapter 28 on innovation; Hardy and Thomas, Chapter 29 on power; Cooren et al., Chapter 32 on communication; Leonardi, Chapter 33 on materiality). Many of these chapters stretch the boundaries of existing thought both within and beyond their topic areas and offer interesting perspectives for future research (see Table 1.2). For example, Hardy and Thomas (Chapter 29) argue that the discursive perspective on power that they favor has lessons for other process scholars struggling with how to incorporate agency within strong-process studies without reifying individuals (which would, of course, run counter to strong-process assumptions). Leonardi (Chapter 33) challenges scholars to pursue investigation of materiality in strong-process terms (something he argues is not quite achieved in many existing treatments of sociomateriality in the literature). While not associating themselves with a strong-process view, Dooley and Van de Ven (Chapter 36) also put forward a new model of development and change that challenges existing understandings. Other chapters stop short of distinguishing different conceptions of process but provide reviews of existing research that show the gaps in current theorizing and opportunities for further development of process perspectives (e.g. Vogus and Colville, Chapter 21 on prospective forms of sensemaking; Chiles et al., Chapter 27 on entrepreneurship; Pettit et al., Chapter 30 on learning; Dunbar and Bechky, Chapter 34 on organizational design; and Pina e Cunha et al., Chapter 35 on improvisation). Surprisingly, some (though not all) of these topics seem inherently processual, and yet the literatures reviewed suggest that variance or ‘mechanistic’ (Chiles et al.) methods often remain dominant. Clearly, then, there is scope for more process-oriented research here. Overall, these chapters offer a rich, diverse and insightful collection of contributions that illustrate in very explicit, grounded and engaging ways how process thinking can be applied to a variety of empirical phenomena Page 14 of 20

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in and around organizations.

Process Perspectives For the final section of the book (Chapters 37–42), we invited six scholars, most of whom have had longstanding links with process organization studies explicitly or implicitly, to provide us with short and provocative reflections on the field. These authors were assigned no specific topic other than the overall theme of the Handbook – they were simply given an opportunity to vent, share, explore or experiment with a view to ending the volume with an opening up rather than a closing down, as befits a process philosophy. Robert Chia (Chapter 37, this volume) exploited this opportunity in his inimitable style by showing us theoretically how the concept of dynamic capabilities may be rethought from a practice perspective using the notion of habitus, while Joep Cornelissen et al. (Chapter 39, this volume) draw skilfully on the notions of metaphor and metonymy and their interactions to show us four different ways of thinking about process research. Tor Hernes’ and Hugh Willmott's contributions (Chapters 38 and 40 respectively) are more challenging to our current modes of process scholarship. Hernes reflects on the role of temporality in organizing and how we incorporate it into our research, noting that we need to consider not just temporal trajectories but the trajectories of temporal trajectories as they are reaffirmed or rethought in every moment. His position is challenging because it seems to place us in that uncomfortable ephemeral spot on the cusp of time and experience where the strongest of strong-process philosophical views may ultimately lead us (see also Shotter, Chapter 5), but that most of us rarely attempt to face as researchers and scholars. Relatedly, Willmott's reflections on labor process challenge the ex post, backward-looking and ‘distal’ or ‘explanatory’ (in our terms, ‘developmental’ and ‘configurational') type of theorizing that most process scholars engage in. In contrast, he urges a more engaged ‘proximal’ perspective, arguing that the political-ethical commitments and embeddedness of the researcher are important in deriving value from process understandings, which from his perspective can best be oriented towards transforming the future rather than explaining (and thus reproducing) the past. Again, Willmott brings us (though by a very different route) to that uneasy spot where some of the process philosophers would seem to want to place us, perched on the cusp of time, enriched with political-ethical concerns. Martha Feldman's contribution (Chapter 41, this volume) is, on the other hand, more reassuring. Process scholars have long struggled with how to actually represent processes in better ways than connecting boxes with lines (Langley et al., 2013). Feldman offers some pragmatic examples, in a very engaging, almost conversational, style. How useful! Finally, Robin Holt's chapter (Chapter 42) is more in the experimental vein. He challenges the nature and even the possibility of truth for process researchers but does this elegantly and poetically, thus offering us a fitting and appropriately open-ended way for us to close the volume.

Conclusion Looking at what is published in our field's leading journals, what is discussed in academic conferences, and the plethora of books that are published, it is fair to say that the process agenda is currently well established and thriving in organization and management studies. It is not accidental, and, most likely, will continue. There are at least three reasons for this. First, there tends to be an internal dynamic in any scientific field to seek to complicate its language of understanding, in the researchers’ effort to obtain more insightful accounts of reality. If static snapshots, in the Page 15 of 20

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form of variance theorizing, have tended to long prevail in organization and management studies, it is only natural that researchers want to overcome its limitations, thus seeking more complex, and more dynamic approaches. Secondly, the fluid, fast-moving, globally inter-connected world we live in is conducive to more dynamic forms of inquiry. In such a world, change is not the exception but the norm; unexpected outcomes are everywhere; resilience is appreciated; novelty is valued; self-organization is made easy. Thirdly, in fluid, late modernity we have an acute sense of human agency, in all its manifestations – from the innovativeness of Silicon Valley to the self-organizing movements (social, economic and political) we regularly see, to the destructiveness of terrorist groups. A world connected by information highways and 24/7 communication channels, as well as global mobility of capital, goods and people, incessantly generates non-trivial change, which needs to be accounted for in terms of how it is produced, with what effects. One need not be a sage to predict that the emphasis on process will intensify. Process organizational research, therefore, needs to grapple with several challenges. First, to find ways to engage more extensively in types of research that are more difficult to conduct, but potentially rewarding, namely studies that adopt an explicitly strong-process orientation (especially prehensive studies). Second, perhaps the most important feature of a strong-process orientation is temporality. Finding ways of incorporating time into organizational research will be increasingly important. Variance theorizing often explicitly ignores time (Bettis et al., 2014), while weak-process studies usually take a purely chronological approach to time. However, expanding the scope of temporality to include experienced time needs to be further developed. Third, linking levels of analysis is ever more important. Finding ways to show the paths that connect microlevel and short-time-span phenomena (e.g. double interacts and group interactions) with larger-level and longer-term phenomena (e.g. organizational decision making, strategy making, and institutional field developments) will be important. In particular, finding ways to dynamically explore the micro-foundations of meso- or macro-level phenomena, such as, respectively, for example, organizational capabilities and global changes in the form of the developments of standards, sustainability, community decline and regeneration, social movements, risks, etc., will add value to our search for a more holistic understanding. Fourth, further developing points of convergence between different perspectives which lend themselves to process thinking, such as practice-based, complexity-based, and narrative perspectives will be important. For example, practice and process converge on the notion of performance. Moreover, the emphasis of practice theory on action and the first-person experience and open-endedness underlined by process perspectives can generate actionable knowledge, which will be useful to, as well as help generate, reflective practitioners. Similarly, the emphasis of complexity theory on emergence, interactivity, and open-endedness is aligned with the strong-process emphasis on open-endedness. The textual openness highlighted by interpretive philosophers can inform narrative approaches to process research. Fifth, a process orientation, espousing a complex onto-epistemology (Tsoukas, 2016), lends itself to explore more deeply context-dependent socio-material interactions over time. The more we realize that the social world overlaps deeply with the material world, the more important will be for us to understand how such overlap is accomplished, with what results. Moreover, a process orientation is sensitive to the constructive role of embodied-cum-embedded agency in bringing about the world we come to experience as an independent structure and to the experiences generated by human and non-human agency. Cognition and symbolic interaction are understood to be embedded in social practices arising from embodied interactions with the world, mediated by artifacts. Since a process worldview is not a doctrine but an orientation, it can be developed in several different directions, exploring a variety of topics in organizational research. For example, traditional topics such as organizational design, leadership, trust, coordination, change, innovation, learning and knowledge, accountability, communication, authority, technology, etc., which have often been studied as ‘substances,’ from a process Page 16 of 20

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perspective can be approached as situated sequences of activities and complexes of processes unfolding in time. Perspectives drawing on post-rationalist philosophies, social constructivism, discourse and narrative theory, practice theory, actor network theory, path-dependence theory, complexity science, Austrian economics, socio-cultural, discursive and ecological psychology, activity theory, business history, ethnomethodology, and symbolic interaction are examples of a process sensitivity to the study of organizational phenomena that treats them not as faits accomplis but as (re)created through interacting agents embedded in sociomaterial practices, whose actions are mediated by institutional, linguistic and objectual artifacts. Finally, taking a process perspective allows considerable room for creativity. Process philosophers-cum-theorists provide a sophisticated (and ever-developing – see Ingold, 2000, 2011; Shotter, 2011; Bortoft, 2012) process vocabulary but do not tell us how to empirically research and theorize process in organizations. Inventing research designs that capture reality in the making, and finding ways of analyzing and theorizing process data will continue to be challenging. The agenda described above (enriching notions of temporality, fusing levels and theories, and integrating materiality in more process-sensitive ways) will add to these challenges and require the empirical researchers among us to stretch and adapt our methodological toolkits. Combining process research with process consultation (Schein, 1999) and process-sensitive practice (Shotter, 2011) can creatively span the world of academia with the world of organizational practice, and is likely to be useful as well as revealing. At the end of the day, a shift towards a process approach to organizations, and social life more generally, is aligned with a new understanding of doing social science – one that is not so much obsessed with establishing statistical generalizations as concerned with elucidating the complexities of agency through which much in social and organizational life is accomplished. Becoming aware of process is becoming aware of the vitality of life itself. We hope you enjoy this volume, and find its contents as stimulating, useful and insightful as we did!

Notes 1The distinction between ‘weak process’ vs ‘strong-process’ has no evaluative connotations whatsoever. It is merely descriptive, highlighting different metaphysical assumptions concerning the status of ‘process.’ This distinction parallels the well-known distinction in Artificial Intelligence (AI) between ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ AI (see, Preston, 2002: 43–4; Searle 2002: 52). 2Certain elements in this paragraph are taken or paraphrased from Langley et al. (2013: 5).

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691–710. Langley, A., Mintzberg, H., Pitcher, P., Posada, E. and Saint-Macary, J. (1995) ‘Opening up decision making: The view from the black stool', Organization Science, 6(3): 260–279. Langley, A., Smallman, C., Tsoukas, H. and Van de Ven, A. H. (2013) ‘Process studies of change in organization and management: unveiling temporality, activity, and flow', Academy of Management Journal, 56(1): 1–13. Lawrence, T. B. and Suddaby, R. (2006) ‘Institutions and institutional work', in S. Clegg, C. Hardy, W.R. Nord and T. Lawrence (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Organization Studies, Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, pp. 215–254. Lüscher, L. S. and Lewis, M. W. (2008) ‘Organizational change and managerial sensemaking: Working through paradox', Academy of Management Journal, 51(2): 221–240. MacKay, R. B. and Chia, R. (2013) ‘Choice, chance, and unintended consequences in strategic change: A process understanding of the rise and fall of Northco Automotive', Academy of Management Journal, 56(1): 208–230. Maguire, S. and Hardy, C. (2013) ‘Organizing processes and the construction of risk: A discursive approach', Academy of Management Journal, 56(1): 231–255. Maitlis, S. (2005) ‘The social processes of organizational sensemaking', Academy of Management Journal, 48(1): 21–49. March, J. G. (1994). Primer on Decision Making: How Decisions Happen. New York: Simon and Schuster. McDaniel, J. and Bowman, D. (2006) Handbook of Process Theology, St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press. Mead, G. H. (1934) Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mesle, C. R. (2008) Process-Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press. Mintzberg, H. (2007) Tracking Strategies. New York; Oxford University Press. Moore, F. C. T. (1996) Bergson: Thinking Backwards. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nicolini, D. (2012) Practice Theory, Work, and Organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Orlikowski, W. J. (1996) ‘Improvising organizational transformation over time: A situated change perspective', Information Systems Research, 7(1): 63–92. Pepper, S. C. (1942) World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Pettigrew A. M. (1985) The Awakening Giant: Continuity and Change in Imperial Chemical Industries. Oxford: Blackwell. Pettigrew, A. M. (1990) ‘Longitudinal field research on change: Theory and practice', Organization Science, 1(3): 267–292. Preston, Introduction. In J. Preston and M. Bishop (Eds.), (2002), Views into the Chinese Room: New Essays on Searle and Artificial Intelligence, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.1–50 Pugh, D. S. (1981) ‘The Aston Program Perspective', in E. L. Trist, A. H. Van de Ven and W. Joyce (Eds.), Perspectives on Organization Design and Behavior. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 135–166. Rescher, N. (1996) Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Ricoeur, P. (2010) Time and Narrative (Vol. 3). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rouleau, L. (2005) ‘Micro-practices of strategic sensemaking and sensegiving: How middle managers interpret and sell change every day', Journal of Management Studies, 42(7): 1413–1441. Sandberg, J. and Tsoukas, H. (2011) ‘Grasping the logic of practice: Theorizing through practical rationality', Academy of Management Review, 36(2): 338–360. Sandberg, J., Loacker, B. and Alvesson, M. (2015) ‘The conceptions of process in organization and management: The case of identity studies', in R. Garud, B. Simpson, A. Langley and H. Tsoukas (Eds.), The Emergence of Novelty in Organizations, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schein, E. (1999) Process Consultation Revisited, Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. Schultz, M. and Hernes, T. (2013) ‘A temporal perspective on organizational identity', Organization Science, 24(1): 1–21. Searle, J. (2002) Twenty-one years in the Chinese Room. In J. Preston and M. Bishop (Eds.), (2002), Views into the Chinese Room: New Essays on Searle and Artificial Intelligence, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 51–69 Page 19 of 20

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PART I

Process Philosophy

The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Whitehead's Process Relational Philosophy

Contributors: C. Robert Mesle & Mark R. Dibben Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Whitehead's Process Relational Philosophy" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n2 Print pages: 29-42 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Whitehead's Process Relational Philosophy C. Robert MesleMark R. Dibben People say that machinery and commerce are driving beauty out of the modern world. I do not believe it. A new beauty is being added, a more intellectual beauty, appealing to the understanding as much as to the eye. Alfred North Whitehead, 1917: 67 My point is that the final outlook of philosophic thought cannot be based upon the exact statements which form the basis of special sciences. The exactness is a fake. Alfred North Whitehead, 1941: 700

INTRODUCTION Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) was 21 when Darwin died. He was profoundly influenced by Darwin's vision of a world in an evolutionary process rather than a fixed state. He and his graduate student, Bertrand Russell, wrote the three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910–1913), widely regarded as a cornerstone of modern mathematics. An intellectual contemporary and peer of Einstein and Heisenberg, Whitehead embraced (with his own revisions) Einstein's vision of relativity (Lowe, 1985). But while Einstein rejected Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, Whitehead saw its enormous implications for rethinking everything, not just physics. Whitehead also lost a son in WW I, taking an active role in the collapse and rebuilding of visions and values emerging from that cultural catastrophe. Born the son of an Anglican vicar, Whitehead's philosophical journey took him from atheism to a radical new vision of the nature of the divine which, along with the work of his student, Charles Hartshorne, spurred an entirely new branch of interfaith, intercultural, and interdisciplinary religious thought (process relational theology), reflected in the websites Jesus, Jazz, and Buddhism (http://www.jesusjazzbuddhism.org), and Process Philosophy for Everyone (http://www.processphilosophy.org/), created by Jay McDaniel, with contributors from around the world. Contemporary process thinkers come from disciplines as diverse as organization studies, physics, economics, education, agriculture, business, religion, and environmental studies. Perhaps its greatest influence is in China where, through for example the Centre for Process Studies’ China Project (http://www.ctr4process.org/projects/china-project) it is inspiring concrete changes in education and the effort to envision an ecological civilization. As a Cambridge mathematician and Harvard philosopher, Whitehead is in many respects one of the least well-known, most misunderstood, and yet most influential philosophers of the 20th century. He was a prolific author with over 90 English language publications (Lowe and Baldwin, 1951). His work has played a significant part in advances in theoretical physics and underlies ways of thinking in biology that have ultimately led to the development of epigenetics – the realization that even genes change in response to changes in their environment. A large body of secondary literature has grown up around his thought,1 including the journal Process Studies.2 Whitehead spent his academic life at Cambridge as a mathematician before moving to University College London in his fifties (Lowe, 1990), producing important works in the philosophy of natural science (The Organisation of Thought, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, The Concept of Nature, and The Principle of Relativity) and education (The Aims of Education). Whitehead's process metaphysics can best be understood through his work at Harvard, where he was invited to take up a chair in philosophy at the age of 64. His magnum opus, Process and Reality set out a speculative philosophy – the philosophy of organism – through which Whitehead examined the nature of experience in the context of a range of philosophical Page 2 of 14

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problems manifest in the work of Descartes, Newton, Locke, Hume, and Kant. In so doing, he sought to put ‘the various elements of our experience into a consistent relation to each other’ and thereby produced what is regarded as one of the major philosophical works of the modern world (Whitehead, 1978 [1929]: back cover). Whitehead's other Harvard writing can best be seen as either prologues (e.g., Science and the Modern World and Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect) or as epilogues (e.g., Adventures of Ideas and Modes of Thought) to Process and Reality, and it is for this reason that our chapter will purposefully focus on the magnum opus instead of the other works. In essence, Whitehead's thought focuses on the development of a worldview that renders all things in purely processual and relational terms. What is Whiteheadian process relational philosophy and why should it interest social scientists? John Cobb has spoken personally about this in respect of management and organization studies (Cobb, 2008). We will endeavor to extend his explanation by answering the first question in a manner that clearly addresses the second. In doing so, several themes will quickly emerge: subjectivity, process, relationality, freedom, relational power, and values. While these themes are hardly exhaustive, we hope they will be useful as tools for introducing basic concepts in Whitehead's process relational philosophy so as to show its importance for social scientists, especially in organization studies. Our task is to explain Whitehead's novel vision of reality for readers not already familiar with it, in the somewhat informal introductory approach taken by Mesle in Process Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead (2008), which readers might wish to consult for a more extensive introduction. References to Whitehead's Process and Reality will be identified as (PR).

LANGUAGE First, we must point to a major problem in any effort to explain process philosophy. The English language, like most Romance languages, is fundamentally shaped by an inherited worldview that is so oriented around ‘substance’ thinking rather than process thinking that it becomes terribly difficult to think clearly about certain obvious problems and realities. Whitehead reminded us that Every science must devise its own instruments. The tool required for philosophy is language. Thus philosophy redesigns language in the same way that, in a physical science, pre-existing appliances are redesigned. It is exactly at this point that the appeal to facts is a difficult operation. This appeal is not solely to the expression of the facts in current verbal statements. The adequacy of such sentences is the main question at issue. It is true that the general agreement of mankind as to experienced facts is best expressed in language. But the language of literature breaks down precisely at the task of expressing in explicit form the larger generalities–the very generalities which metaphysics seeks to express. (PR 11) If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography. Every scientific memoir in its record of the ‘facts’ is shot through and through with interpretation. (PR 15) Consider the simple phrase, the wind blows. Martha Feldman shared this marvelous example at the 6th International PROS Symposium.3 What is the wind but the blowing? Yet, English treats wind as a static, unchanging thing existing apart from the processes that we all know constitute it. We can easily multiply examples. The fire burns. The river flows. Rain falls. A smile appeared on her lips. Substance thinking is especially deep when merged with Cartesian philosophy, treating the mind as a mental substance: I think. She felt. He experienced. Am ‘I’ not the thinking; is ‘she’ not the feeling; is ‘he’ not the experiencing, just as surely as the wind is the blowing, the fire the burning, the river the flowing of the water? We make the same kind of mistake if we treat ‘the office’ as if it were a static, unchanging thing rather than a complex interweaving of human actions, feelings, thoughts, and conversations constantly interacting with diverse physical objects, technologies, and Page 3 of 14

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each other. It is almost impossible for us – even for the most committed process relational thinkers – to write, speak, or think about the self in English without treating the ‘I,’ ‘she,’ or ‘he’ grammatically as a substance that endures unchanged by, and is disconnected from, the processes which actually constitute the self. These inherited patterns of language and thought cannot help but shape the discourse of the social sciences. Likewise, Newtonian physics, rooted in substance thought and an atomistic view of nature, did help get modern science started, at the cost of vastly oversimplifying the fundamental character of nature as atomic, materialistic, and mechanical. But this oversimplification, so helpful to Newton, is a set of blinders we have been struggling to shake off ever since Einstein realized that even space and time are relative (relational) and processive. Physicists constantly speak of elementary ‘particles,’ even though this early modern idea of the world as composed of tiny hard things has been thoroughly rejected (Griffin, 1998). So, here we are – trapped, boxed in, thinking, and speaking in categories and grammar shaped by a long history of substance philosophy that traces back to Plato, Aristotle, and Democritus. Even compliments like ‘that idea has substance,’ or ‘that was a substantive presentation,’ reveal the prejudice of the language. Whitehead set out to confront these issues head on. Like Plato and Descartes before him, he worked to radically rethink the nature of both reality and our knowledge of it. We will start with his effort to address the long-standing question: What is the place of experience, subjectivity, in nature?

SUBJECTIVITY Whitehead built his vision of reality around the experiencing subject, which is surely central to any social science. Whitehead, unlike most early modern thinkers, saw subjectivity as inherent in nature, a view that radically reframes the social sciences (see Halewood, 2011) as well as environmental thinking. Following Whitehead, we invite you to consider the example of your own personal experience. What do you experience? What is it like to be you? While much of what you experience is unique to you, and shaped by your culture and biography, much is shared by all subjects of experience. Whitehead argued that the most basic features of human experience are universal, and extend beyond human beings to the roots of nature. So far as that is true, thoughtful attention to your own experience can cast a light much further and wider than you might expect. Whitehead argued (PR 17) that philosophy's ‘ultimate appeal is to the general consciousness of what in practice we experience. ... The ultimate test is always widespread, recurrent experience ...' Whitehead sought to fully integrate our own experience into a comprehensive view of the nature of nature, rather than treating it as transcendental or supernatural, or simply ignoring its existence as inconvenient to physical science. It is the accepted doctrine in physical science that a living body is to be interpreted according to what is known of other sections of the physical universe. This is a sound axiom; but it is double-edged. For it carries with it the converse deduction that other sections of the universe are to be interpreted in accordance with what we know of the human body. (PR 119) How far ‘down’ does experience, or subjectivity, go? How deeply embedded in nature is subjectivity? To address this question, we need to remember that ordinary language creates barriers here. ‘Words and phrases must be stretched toward a generality foreign to their ordinary usage; and however such elements of language be stabilized as technicalities, they remain metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap’ (PR 4). Whitehead stretched the word ‘experience’ in this way. He began with our own ordinary experience, but then pushed the word, the concept, far beyond our normal use. The challenge is to persuade you that he did Page 4 of 14

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not merely equivocate on ‘experience,’ but legitimately stretched it to show us a new vision of reality. It is essential to understand that for Whitehead ‘experience’ does not imply consciousness. Consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg of experience. Psychologists and neurologists show that our brains take in far more information than rises to the level of consciousness. Our eyes and ears and other senses engage in a wide range of experience, while we are conscious of only a small portion, as if the mind were shining a flashlight on a large open field. There is nothing unfamiliar or very controversial about that for most psychologists or neurologists. As evolutionary geneticist, Ursula Goodenough (1998: 98) observes: ‘Indeed, what we consider to be our conscious selves is but a small fraction of what our brains are doing.' Whitehead argued that consciousness presupposes experience, but not the reverse. Given that, he proposed an idea that will seem wildly crazy, even impossible, unless it is compared to the even crazier idea of dualism, in which your pets cannot feel pain or pleasure, or idealism, in which there is no material world, or pure materialism, in which nothing and no one has experience. Compared to those options, we propose, Whitehead's view will make far more sense of everything, including your own experience. Experience, or subjectivity, normally unconscious, goes all the way down. Human beings have very complex experience. We are capable of abstract thinking like the kind you are doing right now. But close to us are many other animals capable of less complex but still very rich kinds of experience, problem solving, and communication. Anyone who lives with dogs is likely to believe that dogs feel a wide range of pleasures, pains, and emotions. Other primates, whales, dolphins, dogs, cats, octopi, elephants, and birds, clearly have complex subjectivity. Strong empirical evidence supports the claim that some of these animals are self-aware, play games, feel compassion, and are capable of problem solving and using tools. That does not mean that they do philosophy, social science, or math, but it does powerfully support the claim for subjectivity, purpose, and intrinsic value in the lives of these animals. Clearly, the range of complexity of experience is wide. We move ‘down’ as we consider animals with less complex experience, less self-awareness, and a narrower range of emotional reactions and problem-solving skills. Yet, there is abundant evidence that bees and ants have complex social arrangements and forms of communication. Why is it strange to posit some form of subjectivity to creatures capable of such social communication (Goodenough, 1998: Chapter 7)? At the core of it all, Whitehead was persuaded by the idea that you cannot get something out of nothing. You cannot get any experience to emerge out of a natural world with no experience. What you can do is get more complex experience out of less complex experience. Nature constantly evolves something more out of something less. What is that something less? Whitehead stunningly proposed that what physicists describe as a quantum event, like one moment in the life of an electron or photon, is a drop of spatial–temporal experience. In other words, nature's basic unit of physical existence is also nature's basic unit of experience. The building blocks of the cosmos can be seen as momentary experiences of temporal-spatial-energy relationships. Whitehead coined the terms ‘actual entity’ or ‘actual occasion’ to name these quantum events of experience. ‘Actual entities’ – also termed ‘actual occasions’ – are the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real. They differ among themselves ... But, though there are gradations of importance, and diversities of function, yet in the principles which actuality exemplifies all are on the same level. The final facts are, all alike, actual entities; and these actual entities are drops of experience, complex and interdependent. (PR 18) Physics treats quantum events, these drops of experience, only with regard to their character as events of temporal–spatial relationships. These experienced physical relationships constitute the fields of energy, force, and mass of the physical world. Page 5 of 14

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However, Whitehead took the evidence of indeterminacy in nature (now supported by a century of conclusive experimental evidence) to argue that each actual entity also ‘experiences’ the alternative possibilities relevant to its own becoming. This potentiality is simply the different ways in which that photon or electron can create itself within the temporal-spatial field – the possible ‘quantum states’ open to it in the next moment. As we shall discuss later under the category of freedom, actual entities confront the range of possibilities and must decide. Crucially, Whitehead explains (PR 43) that ‘The word “decision” does not here imply conscious judgment, although in some “decisions” consciousness will be a factor. The word is used in its root sense of a “cutting off.”’ Some possibilities must always be cut off in order to actualize others. So, what would a simple actual entity, a quantum event in the life of an electron, experience? Only its spatial relationships, like gravitational connections, to the other quantum events constituting the physical universe, along with options like ‘this way or that way?’ In more complex, living, organisms, the range of possibilities to be confronted, the range of choices open for actualization, becomes vastly more complex. We will return to this discussion of decision by quantum events later, but for now just consider this simple approach. Your mind is a flow of experience. Although Whitehead was not the only one to conceive of a processual view with this underpinning ‘flowing’ premise, importantly he insisted that your experience is 100% natural, not something mysteriously transcendental or supernatural (Griffin et al., 1993). Assuming experience is 100% natural, one possibility is that at some level subjectivity suddenly bursts into nature, arising from material stuff totally devoid of experience. The other option, proposed by Whitehead, is that subjectivity is present in a simple (certainly unconscious) form in quantum events – actual entities. Some ways of organizing these events of experience make it possible for more complex forms of experience to emerge, while other ways of organizing do not. Tables do not; living cells, neurons, and central nervous systems do. In terms of experience, or subjectivity, evolution has created something more out of something less, but not out of nothing – not out of no experience at all. The ‘less’ is the incredibly simple experience of the fundamental building blocks of the cosmos like electrons and photons, experiencing energy relationships, but also the range of possibilities for their own future becoming.

SUBJECTIVITY, PROCESS, AND RELATIONALITY If your subjectivity is a clue to the nature of nature, what is your experience like? Clearly, it is a process. Experience becomes and perishes. You cannot make it stand still. Whitehead (PR 68) cites William James’ argument: ‘Either your experience is of no content, of no change, or it is of a perceptible amount of content or change. Your acquaintance with reality grows literally by buds or drops of perception. Intellectually and on reflection you can divide these into components, but as immediately given, they come totally or not at all'. Whitehead proposes that in this fundamental respect your experience is an example of, not an exception to, the deepest character of nature. Like your own experience, the entire cosmos is bursting into existence in each moment. This is a difficult intuitive leap for most of us. The world feels so solid that we assume unconsciously that its solidity must be temporal as well as spatial. But modern physics confirms that the world is a seething process of creative events. Physicist John Jungerman (2000: 194) explains: Matter is not what we perceive. ... The mass that we associate with an object is confined to point-like electrons and quarks that occupy only a trillionth of a quadrillionth of its volume. However, the void that remains is not empty but filled with virtual particle pairs and virtual photons and gluons, a trillion trillion being born and dying every second—a fantastic dance of energy holding matter together. Quantum mechanics teaches us that even the vacuum itself is not empty but filled with the birthing and dying of particle pairs. As we have argued above, however, our language makes it incredibly difficult for us to think of the world as fundamentally process rather than substance. Page 6 of 14

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Our deep-seated bias for substance and being over process and becoming is especially rooted in the influence of the 17th -century philosopher, Rene Descartes, who gave us Cartesian dualism and the early modern idea of substance as basic units of reality. Descartes proposed that all substances share two properties. First, they are atomic; they exist independently, not relationally. Descartes was strikingly clear on this point: ‘By substance, we can understand nothing else than a thing which so exists that it needs no other thing in order to exist' (Descartes, 1955, emphasis ours; also 1980). Second, being independent, they endure unchanged through the changes of their qualities, including all of their accidental encounters with other substances. Relationships, he believed, are purely ‘external’ – having no effect on the internal constitution of a substance. Descartes was enormously influential but glaringly wrong. Consider a toddler named Parker. Parker clearly needs the world in order to exist. She was born of a mother and father. She breathes air, eats food, and drinks water. It is the peak of absurdity to suggest that she ‘needs no other thing in order to exist.’ She is her flow of physical interactions with the world around her. She is her memories, her acquiring of language, her sorrows and joys, her eating and breathing, her playing with her sister, her hearing a story at bedtime. She is also the flow of her own choices within these relationships. This flow of interwoven relational processes is who she is. We must not mistake language for reality. Our usual English grammar treats ‘Parker’ the same way as it treats wind and fire – as an unchanging thing – because in a sentence we can change the verbs and predicates without changing the name, Parker. If we confuse grammar with reality, we are easily seduced into thinking that we could remove all her experiences, all her relationships, all knowledge, memories, and choices, and still have the same Parker. In fact, we would have nothing, no Parker at all. Whitehead rejected the entire ‘subject/predicate’ (substance) way of thinking because it leaves us with a ‘vacuous actuality’ (PR xiii). Parker cannot be separated from her becoming. Her process of becoming is who she is. Any good therapist knows this. Parker can move through a process of reflection and choice, reframing and reconceiving, which brings her to a new place, a new kind of personhood. But she can never be without her biography or her choices. In Whitehead's technical language (PR 23): ‘The process is nothing else than the experiencing subject itself’ (PR 16). All of this means that ‘... How an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is; ... Its “being” is constituted by its “becoming.” This is the principle of process.’ This is what it is like to be us, and the world. Obviously, subject/predicate (substance) grammar has endured because it is a convenient shorthand way of describing our experience. It works for many purposes in the same way that Newtonian physics does. As Whitehead observed (PR 16): ‘There are simplicities connected with the motion of a bar of steel which are obscured if we refuse to abstract from the individual molecules ... .’ Yet, Einstein and others showed us the deep inadequacy of the Newtonian substance worldview for relativity and quantum physics. Whitehead showed us the deep inadequacy of that same substance thinking at every level of reality. He urged us to learn new patterns of thought and language that enable us to see that our perceptions and conceptions of ordinary objects are ultimately abstractions from the processes that constitute them. Interestingly, Whitehead never used the term event in any technical sense. This is in contrast to Einstein and, perhaps most importantly for the present discussion, in contrast to Deleuze. Whitehead only means ‘event’ in the way we tend to mean it colloquially. A wedding is an event. That event, however, is made up of a multitude of smaller events, like cutting the cake, laughing, or saying ‘I do.’ So are the apparently unchanging objects of ordinary sense experience. It may also be useful to distinguish what Whitehead meant more technically by ‘objects’ and ‘subjects.’ This is clear enough in your own experience. Your subjective ‘now’ of experience and decision perishes and becomes the objective past. The past is fixed and settled and cannot be changed. Those past events are ‘objective’ for the new subject. Whitehead emphasizes that we do feel the feelings of past occasions. You continue to feel, with slight variation, the pleasure you felt a moment ago. He coined the term ‘prehend’ – as to ‘grasp’ Page 7 of 14

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– to describe the way in which present actual occasions take in the past in order to create themselves out of it. Every subjective moment, every actual entity, must create itself out of the past events. In this way, ‘the many become one, and are increased by one’ (PR 21). The entire cosmos, including our own lives, communities, and organizations, are constructed out of momentary events of experience – out of a flow of relational processes. The power of Whitehead's philosophy is that he places the experiencing subject, not the passive object, at the center of reality. Social scientists should be right at home with a process approach within their own disciplines. ‘The office’ is clearly an abstraction from a flow of human and technological events that have somewhat blurred boundaries, overlapping with ‘the lunch crowd,’ ‘school,’ ‘home,’ and all the other relational processes that constitute our interwoven lives. As convenient as those categories are, social sciences could not function meaningfully without distinguishing the abstractions from the relational processes.

RELATIONAL POWER It becomes increasingly obvious that ‘subjectivity,’ ‘process,’ and ‘relationality’ are categories that cannot be understood apart from each other. The experiences are the process; the relationships are the process. The process is experience, which is the weaving of relationships. To shine new light on this vision, we must examine two conceptions of power. Plato had argued (1937: 2:255) that ‘the definition of being is simply power,’ with which Whitehead agreed. The problem is to understand the nature of the power that constitutes becoming and process rather than static being. Plato had acknowledged that power might be either the ability to affect or the ability to be affected. But Plato, the Western tradition, and some forms of Eastern thought have taken the power to affect as primary, and the ability to be affected as a kind of weakness or deficiency. Following Plato, we ordinarily think of power as ‘unilateral.’ Unilateral power is the ability to affect or control others (whether people or things) without being affected or controlled by them. Raymond Aaron made this explicit in his classic text, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations (1967: 47): ‘On the international scene I should define power as the capacity of a political unit to impose its will upon other units ... . This definition suggests several distinctions: between defensive power (or the capacity of a political unit to keep the will of others from being imposed upon it) and offensive power (or the capacity of a political unit to impose its will upon others) ...' If unilateral power is taken as the superior form of power, the nature of being is ultimately static, as in Aristotle's God – the Unmoved Mover. It affects the world but is entirely unaffected by it. This becomes the model for the true nature of personhood. In the Western religious tradition, people are thought to be made in the image of God, and become more fully human as we become more fully in that image. Because God is usually thought to exercise unilateral and controlling power, it seems that to be more like God is to exercise active, unilateral, and controlling power. In patriarchal terms, men were seen as more active and women as more passive. In racist concepts, white people were more fully in the image of divine active power, whereas other races were seen as more animal-like and passive. Just as fundamentally, the standard of unilateral power supported the Western value of individualism, of the ‘self-made man,’ of the ‘rugged individualist’ who can ‘stand on his own two feet’ and can say, ‘I don't need anyone.' If we try to imagine a person or group of persons who exercise nearly absolute unilateral power – to affect others without being affected by them – over another person or group of persons, we end up with extremely troubling examples: rape, child abuse, tyranny, slavery, and torture.

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Process relational thinkers propose an alternative vision of power, personhood, and community (Loomer, 1976a; Loomer, 1976b; Mesle, 1993; Mesle, 2008). Relational power can be described from three standpoints: the capacity to be actively and intentionally open to the world around us; the strength to creatively integrate the new insights and experiences into a novel synthesis; and the endurance to sustain relationships that can deepen community with the ideas, experiences, and people with whom we are related. Relational power is obviously how we learn about the world around us. The alleged unilateral power to resist being affected by the world is the power of stones and steel. Babies can do what stones cannot – see, feel, taste, touch, smell, learn, and love. Babies are already engaged in bonding, in weaving relationships with those about them in ways stones never can (Delafield-Butt, 2009). Soon they will begin to develop greater capacity for integration, connecting experiences in new ways, discovering cause and effect, learning to understand sentences, discovering more tastes they love and hate. As they grow, they increase in patience and endurance, in the ability to sustain interactions with sounds, words, images, people, and ideas. Babies are masters of relational power. Stones are not. Clearly, we grown-ups continue to live through relational power. In some ways, we have much greater relational power than toddlers, more strength to engage in creative interchange with the world about us and to creatively integrate new experiences with old. We can learn to love, to be deeply empathic and compassionate, taking in the feelings of others and responding with care and support. Of course, life experience and personal choice may lead us in other directions, to become more offensively and defensively unilateral, closing off empathy and compassion in favor of coercion and control. Or, we may simply learn to be more stone-like, closing out the demands and threats of the world in order to keep our life simple and manageable, trading richness for easy triviality. Social scientists should immediately see the implications for endless contrasts between unilateral and relational power in human relationships. Imagine the difference between these visions of power and personhood as applied to parenting, studying, teaching, leading, managing, friendship, marriage, and comforting in times of grief. In Whitehead's vision, each new drop of experience constituting an electron or an individual mind must exercise relational power in order to become. This is a better understanding of Plato's insight that ‘the definition of being is simply power.’ Relational power lies at the root of becoming, it is the essential activity of each new actuality. In Whitehead's words: ‘Each actual entity is conceived as an act of experience arising out of data. It is a process of “feeling” the many data, so as to absorb them into the unity of one individual “satisfaction”’ (PR 40). Each actual entity experiences the world from its unique standpoint in the temporal–spatial web of becoming. No two are alike. Each one must, with varying degrees of connection and relevance, take in or ‘prehend’ the entire past and create itself out of it. Of course, most of the past is relegated to triviality, but everything must find its place in how the current moment is woven together. Without the big bang, none of us would be here. In each moment, we create ourselves out of our relationship with the world, out of the earth, sea, air, and each other. That requires relational power.

FREEDOM The self-creativity of relational power entails some degree of freedom in every actual entity. Building from the foundations of nature once again, let us consider this passage from Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (2010: 72 emphasis original): According to quantum physics, no matter how much information we obtain or how powerful our computing abilities, the outcomes of physical processes cannot be predicted with certainty because they are not determined with certainty. Instead, given the initial state of a system, nature determines its future state through a process that is fundamentally uncertain. In other words, nature does not dicPage 9 of 14

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tate the outcome of any process or experiment, even in the simplest of situations. Rather, it allows a number of different eventualities, each with a certain likelihood of being realized.... Quantum physics might seem to undermine the idea that nature is governed by laws, but that is not the case. Instead it leads us to accept a new form of determinism: Given the state of a system at some time, the laws of nature determine the probabilities of various futures and pasts rather than determining the future and past with certainty. Hawking and Mlodinow clearly describe a central feature of quantum physics – that natural law determines a range of probabilities, but not outcomes. It is not just that we do not have good enough equipment or that we lack data. The indeterminacy is inherent in nature. The future does not exist and is not determined, except as a range of possibilities and probabilities. Yet, they assert about humans that ‘It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion’ (2010: 32). Whitehead argued that this is an unnecessary incoherence. Remember Whitehead's argument that we are examples of natural law, not exceptions? So why dogmatically insist that the powerful evidence of our own internal experience of freedom is purely illusory? The process approach is quite direct. As quantum physics repeatedly demonstrates on hard empirical evidence, freedom of a very negligible kind exists at the roots of nature. Most structures in nature do not increase that degree of freedom. Rocks are not individuals, just closely bonded molecules with no freedom greater than their component parts. Other structures in nature, like living cells, work together to magnify that minimal quantum freedom, making a wider range of alternatives possible, increasing the capacity for novel response to the environment. Gradually, organisms evolve with greater freedom. Whitehead argues thus (PR 47): In the case of those actualities whose immediate experience is most completely open to us, namely, human beings, [our own experience of self-creativity] is the foundation of our experience of responsibility ... of self-approval or self-reproach, of freedom, of emphasis. This element in experience is too large to be put aside merely as misconstruction. It governs the whole tone of human life. What physicists have shown, based on a century of experiments, is that quantum events like photons and electrons definitely have the power to ‘decide’ between alternative possibilities for their own future. Whitehead argued that what is true of electrons is true of us, but at a vastly more complex level. Nature has evolved something more out of something less, again.

VALUES Value is intrinsic in nature because subjectivity includes a sense of immediate self-valuing. Just as we each value our own life, so dogs, dolphins, whales, mice, and insects value theirs. The creatures of nature have intrinsic value for themselves, not merely instrumental value for humans. This recognition has crucial implications for rethinking our traditional approaches to natural resources, economics, consumerism, sustainability, and the creation of an ecological civilization. Whitehead recognized the complexity of values in a creative world. We need order and stability to achieve any degree of richness of experience, but stability can be stifling, so some element of chaos is also necessary for the creative advance of novelty. ‘If there is to be progress beyond limited ideals, the course of history by way of escape must venture along the borders of chaos in its substitution of higher for lower types of order’ (PR 111). Triviality can arise from excess chaos or from harmony reduced to too much sameness. What Whitehead envisioned was a union of harmony and intensity of feeling, arising from creative contrasts in experience. Page 10 of 14

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The capacity to integrate such contrasts is central to the relational power described above. We must nurture in ourselves and others an active, intentional openness to the complexities and contrasting values of the world around us. A scientific world that increasingly associates ‘value’ with ‘cost,’ and strives to make quantities out of qualities, correspondingly forces us to make increasingly instrumental judgments about values. In contrast, Whitehead's philosophy places the importance upon making value-laden judgments about rights and wrongs. A person ‘may ground his judgment of truth upon his realization of value’ (PR 185). Because conscious realizations of truth are ‘particularly complex instances of the subjective experience of value’ (Moore, 2009: 274; also PR 104 and 262), we must therefore nurture the creative strength to appreciate alternative values, so as to integrate these contrasts into richer and more complex – more truth-full – realizations. This is hard work, especially within human relationships, but value is inherent in genuinely ethical human relations (Macklin, Mathison, and Dibben, 2014). So relational power, and the growth of value in our personal and communal experience, requires the capacity to sustain relationships, to supportively engage with others in an ongoing way, even in the face of challenges. Although Whitehead did not frame it this way, we believe that compassion emerges as a fundamental value in process relational philosophy. Compassion is a capacity and willingness to be actively and caringly open to others, to feel their joys and sorrows, to accept into ourselves both the pain and happiness of others, and to work to build caring relationships. Compassion is obviously closely linked to relational power. Both require enormous strength and endurance, and a willingness to share the suffering of others. As a final point, and to tie off the earlier example of traditional conceptions of God as the ultimate example of unilateral power, it follows that a process relational conception of God as developed in process theology (Cobb, 2016; Hartshorne, 2010) focuses on infinite relational power!

CONCLUSION Whiteheadian process relational philosophy envisions subjectivity, process, relationality, freedom, and inherent value as fundamental to our understandings of nature and of all human relationships and social structures. Relationships are never purely external because we constantly create ourselves out of our relationships with each other. It cannot work to think of people as purely atomic entities simply bouncing off each other without changing who they are. We are inherently persons in communities. Contrary to so much scientific thought that accepted the Cartesian vision that we need ‘no other thing in order to exist,’ we are emphatically not substances that ‘endure unchanged through change’ or ‘exist independently.’ We are relational processes. Each of us is a somewhat stable but continually changing flow of relational experience. Remove all of our experience, all of our relationships, and we are gone. Our fundamental relationality is why unilateral power as the effort to affect others without being affected by them is deeply misguided as a model for personhood and community. Rather, we need to nurture relational power as our capacity to be actively and intentionally open to relationships, as the strength to continually integrate novel contrasts of values and experiences into our lives, and as the endurance and commitment to sustain mutual relationships with those about us. Relational power entails the values of openness, freedom, self-creativity, harmony, and intensity of contrasts, and compassion. All of these aspects of process relational philosophy bear direct relevance to the social sciences in general and to the study of organizations in particular.4

Notes 1A reading list of books introducing process philosophy and/or unpacking the technical detail of Whitehead's version in particular (as opposed to that of, e.g., Bergson or Deleuze) would include but not be limited to: Cobb, J.B. 2008. Whitehead Word Book. Claremont: P&F Press; Cobb, J.B. and Griffin, D.R. 1976. Process Page 11 of 14

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Theology: An Introductory Exposition. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press; Gunter, P. 2009. Preface. In Dibben, M. and Newton, R. (eds), Applied Process Thought II: Following a Trail Ablaze. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, pp. 21–37; Krauss, E. 1998. The Metaphysics of Experience: A Companion to Whitehead's Process and Reality. New York: Fordham University Press; Mesle, C.R. 2008. Process-Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead. West Conshohocken: Templeton Foundation Press; Rescher, N. 1996. Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy. New York: SUNY; Sherburne D. W. 1966. A Key to Whitehead's Process and Reality Chicago: University of Chicago Press; and Weber, M. 2008. Introduction. In Weber, M. and Desmond, W. (eds), Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought, Vol.1. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, pp. 15–40. This latter book is part of a two-volume set focusing on the influence of Whitehead's process philosophy, covering thematic entries ranging from Aesthetics through to Urbanism, as well as biographical entries on Whitehead's historico-speculative context, his contemporaries, and his scholarly legacy. An excellent reader on the relationship between Whitehead and the analytic tradition in philosophy is Shields, G.W. (ed.). 2003. Process and Analysis: Whitehead, Hartshorne and the Analytic Tradition. New York: SUNY Press. A process philosophical exposition of, among others, high-energy physics and quantum mechanics can be found in Jungerman, J.A. 2000. World in Process: Creativity and Interconnection in the New Physics. New York: SUNY Press, and that of evolutionary biology in Birch, C. and Cobb, J.B. 1981. The Liberation of Life: From the Cell to the Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; and Cobb, J.B. (ed.). 2008. Back to Darwin; A Richer Account of Evolution. Cambridge: Eerdmans. All three of these latter books engage in what one might term the analytical synthesis of their topics. The Library of Living Philosophers, Volume III (Schilpp, P., ed., 1941. The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Illinois: Open Court), contains interpretations of Whitehead's work by many of his contemporaries, as well as an autobiographical entry and Whitehead's last published work, entitled ‘Immortality’ – the final paragraph of which forms the second header quote at the beginning of this chapter. In addition, the International Process Network has now published an approved ‘ideal type’ curriculum to guide the teaching of process philosophy in higher education, focusing on the themes to be found in this secondary literature to guide the comprehensive study of Whitehead's work, and at the same time setting Whitehead's contribution in a wider process philosophical context (see https://internationalprocessnetwork.com/education/). 2Process Studies has published double-blind peer- reviewed articles in multiple issues per annum, uninterrupted since its establishment in 1971. It published a special issue edited by Dibben and Cobb on ‘Process Thought and Organization Studies,’ Vol. 32(2), in 2003. This included a long article by Tsoukas and Chia especially put together for the issue, entitled ‘Everything Flows and Nothing Abides’ (pp. 196–224); this remains arguably one of the most complete uses of process thought from an organization studies perspective. The editors comment that management writers engaged in ‘the explicit application of process thinking ... have gone a long way toward both enhancing our understanding of management and also influencing the development of one of the key phenomena of 21st Century life ... and, thus, are worthy of our [i.e., process philosophers'] further attention, for they are directly helping to make this a genuine, processually aware century – even if it is not specifically a Whiteheadian one’ (Dibben and Cobb, 2003: 182). 3Martha Feldman, keynote address at the 6th International Symposium on Process Organization Studies in June, 2014. Via e-mail (Aug. 11, 2014) she said the original source was Norbert Elias, as quoted by Mustafa Emirbayer in ‘Manifesto for a Relational Sociology,’ The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 103, No. 2 Sep., 1997, pp. 281–317, The University of Chicago Press, Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2782992, Accessed: 21/11/2008 20:01 4A thoroughgoing review of the use specifically of Whitehead's work in management and organisation studies, and the opportunities for its extension therein, may be found in Dibben, 2008.

Further Reading

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Selected Works by Alfred North Whitehead The journal Process Studies offers this list of most frequently cited books by Whitehead, along with their standard abbreviations for use in the journal, listing both original publication dates and dates of currently used editions. Essays in Science and Philosophy. New York: Philosophical Library, 1947. (ESP) The Function of Reason. 1929. Boston: Beacon, 1958. (FR) Interpretation of Science. A. H. Johnson (ed.). Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961. (IS) Religion in the Making. 1926. New York: Fordham UP, 1996. (RM)

References Aaron, R. 1967. Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations. Howard, R. and Baker, A. (trans.). New York & Washington: Frederick A. Praeger, p. 47. Cobb, J. 2008. Whitehead Word Book: A Glossary with Alphabetical Index to Technical Terms in Process and Reality. Claremont: P&F Press. Cobb, J. 2007. Person-in-community: Whiteheadian insights into community and institution. Organization Studies 28(4): 567–588. Cobb, J. 2016. Jesus’ Abba: The God Who Has Not Failed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Delafield-Butt, J. 2009. Containment and reciprocity in biological systems. In Dibben, M. and Newton, R. (eds), Applied Process Thought Vol. 2: Following a Trail Ablaze. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, pp. 133–148. Descartes, R. 1980 [1637 & 1641]. Discourse on Methods & Meditations on First Philosophy. Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co. Descartes, R. 1955. Philosophical Works of Descartes. Haldane, E.S. and Ross, G.R.T. (trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Originally published 1911, Reprinted with corrections 1931. Reprinted 1955. Dibben, M. 2008. Management and organisation studies. In Weber, M. and Desmond, W. (eds), Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought, Vol. 1. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, pp. 127–144. Dibben, M. and Cobb, J.B. 2003. Focus Introduction. Process Studies 32(2): 179–182. Goodenough, U. 1998. The Sacred Depths of Nature. New York: Oxford University Press. Griffin, D.R. 1988. The Reenchantment of Science. Albany, New York: SUNY Press. Chinese publication 1995. Griffin, et al. 1993. Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy: Peirce, James, Bergson, Whitehead and Hartshorne. Albany: SUNY Press. Hartshorne, C. 2010. Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Hawking, S.W. and Mlodinow, L. 2010. The Grand Design. New York: Bantam Books. Jungerman, J.A. 2000. World in Process: Creativity and Interconnection in the New Physics. Foreword by John B. Cobb, Jr. Albany: SUNY Press. Locke, J. 1959. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Fraser, A.C. (ed.). New York: Dover Publications. Loomer, B. 1976a. Two kinds of power. Criterion, Winter 1976. Loomer, B. 1976b. S-I-Z-E is the measure. In Cargas, J.C. and Lee, B. (eds), Religious Experience and Process Theology: The Pastoral Implications of a Major Modern Movement. New York: Paulist Press. Lowe, V. 1985. Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and His Work, Vol. 1. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Lowe, V. 1990. Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and His Work, Vol. 2. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Page 13 of 14

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Lowe, V. and Baldwin, R.C. 1951. Bibliography of the writings of Alfred North Whitehead. In Schilpp, P.A. (ed.). The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Illinois, Open Court, pp. 745–778. Macklin, R., Mathison, K., and Dibben, M. 2014. Process ethics and business: Applying process thought to enact critiques of mind/body dualism in organizations. Process Studies 43(2): 61–86. Mesle, C.R. 1993. Process Theology: A Basic Introduction. St. Louis: Chalice Press. Mesle, C.R. 2008. Process Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead. Philadelphia: Templeton Press. Moore, D. 2009. Propositions in Corporations: Unconscious and non-conscious experience. In Dibben, M. and Newton, R. (eds), Applied Process Thought Vol. 2: Following a Trail Ablaze. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, pp. 263–276. Plato 1937. The Dialogues of Plato: The Sophist, Jowett, B. (trans.). New York: Random House. Whitehead, A.N. 1917. The Organisation of Thought. London: Williams and Norgate, pp. 58–68. Whitehead, A.N. 1919. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. (PNK) Whitehead, A.N. 1920. The Concept of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. (CN) Whitehead, A.N. 1922. The Principle of Relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. (R) Whitehead, A.N., and Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica. 1 ed. Three volumes, 1910, 1912, 1913. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Whitehead, A.N. 1927. Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect. New York: Macmillan. (S) Whitehead, A.N. 1941. Immortality. In Schilpp, P. (ed.). The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Illinois: Open Court, pp. 682–700. Whitehead, A.N. 1967. Science and the Modern World. 1925. New York: Free Press. (SMW) Whitehead, A.N. 1967. The Aims of Education. 1929. New York: Free Press. (AE) Whitehead, A.N. 1967. Adventures of Ideas. 1933. New York: Free Press. (AI) Whitehead, A.N. 1968. Modes of Thought. 1938. New York: Free Press. (MT) Whitehead, A.N. 1978 [1929]. Process and Reality, Corrected Edition. Griffin, D.R. and Sherburne, D.W. (eds), New York: The Free Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n2

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Henri Bergson: Toward a Philosophy of Becoming

Contributors: Wahida Khandker Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Henri Bergson: Toward a Philosophy of Becoming" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n3 Print pages: 43-55 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Henri Bergson: Toward a Philosophy of Becoming Wahida Khandker

Introduction What is the relationship between stability and process in Henri Bergson's philosophy? To attempt an answer to this question, I will examine the following key concepts and problems in detail: the concept of ‘duration’ (Bergson's proposed alternative to the linear model of time), the idea of multiplicity, the relation between ‘virtual’ and ‘actual', creativity, and intuition. In this chapter, I will look in detail at Bergson's early text, Time and Free Will (which was originally published in 1889). There, the contrast is most starkly drawn, in the analysis of heterogeneity and homogeneity, between the temporal and the spatial, and it gives us some first clues concerning the nature and role of ‘duration’ in Bergson's thought. As I will go on to discuss, by the time of Matter and Memory (published in France in 1896), Bergson complicates this dualistic relation in his challenging conception of time or duration as a ‘continuum', where all things oscillate between greater or lesser capacities for action. If there is still a dualism, it is only a negative or retrospectively constructed one between virtual actions and real actions. If it is still appropriate to ascribe an identity to a thing or a subject (i.e., what constitutes its ‘being'), we must refer now to its capacities or tendencies. It ‘is’ only insofar as it ‘becomes'. I will go on to examine a broader ontological account of this model of becoming as set out in Bergson's 1907 work Creative Evolution. There, Bergson provides, first, some cosmological speculations on the evolution of life on earth, posing the problem of thinking evolutionary development no longer in terms of space (or a spatialized concept of time) but rather in terms of time properly understood as ‘becoming’ or ‘process'. Second, Bergson sets out a complementary epistemological account of the human intellectual tendency to think time or process in spatial terms. Human intelligence has evolved to manipulate matter, which it does by projecting a static, conceptual framework onto a fundamentally dynamic universe. Thus, the facility with material objects that characterizes human ingenuity also brings with it the constant risk of forgetting that the static framework is merely a distorting abstraction projected onto real dynamism. Methodologically, Bergson does not end with a pessimistic ascription of limitation to human intelligence. In my final section of this chapter, I will discuss Bergson's claim that it is through fostering our capacity for an ‘intuitive’ contact with reality that we are capable of reflecting on thought itself in its activity. At the very least, to acknowledge that stability is a projection for the purposes of useful action is also to acknowledge the primacy of process.

Homogeneity and Heterogeneity Consider a recent memorable event that you have experienced, perhaps a concert or a celebration of some sort. Now try to remember it and describe it so that someone else can get a sense of what you experienced. Despite first appearances, this is not an easy thing to do. Can you describe with any accuracy how long the event lasted? How many people were there? What you saw and heard? How many details of the event would you have to identify and then set down in words in order to communicate its ‘essence’ to another person? A memory is, in fact, both a simple whole and a complex multiplicity. This is the basic claim with which Bergson commences his early text, Time and Free Will, and my focus in this section will be on the difference between the quality of our mental states and the everyday method we employ for thinking about and describing the number of things. Although Time and Free Will should by no means be taken as a representative statement of his theories of time, memory, and consciousness, it does nevertheless indicate a set of key themes or contentions that BergPage 2 of 14

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son will develop over the course of his writings. In the second chapter of Time and Free Will, these themes include the identification of two kinds of multiplicity, the opposition between space and duration (with the underlying claim that time or duration is not ‘spatial'), the limitations of scientific enquiry, and the associated limitations of language. Indeed, Bergson commences his enquiry with the identification of the problem of thinking time in spatial terms with the problem of language. The latter, he states, requires the same sharp distinctions as those that are drawn between material objects (Bergson, 2001: xix). Bergson goes on to ask whether this introduction of sharp distinctions by language into philosophical thinking does not in fact create the many insurmountable problems that define the history of philosophy (e.g., distinctions made between minds and bodies, free will and determinism, possible and real, being and nothingness). Perhaps, as a start, rethinking the terms with which we formulate these problems might help us to solve them. In Time and Free Will, for example, Bergson sets out to disentangle what he sees as a number of commonly confused terms, including duration and extensity, and quality and quantity (Bergson, 2001: xx). Turning to Chapter 2 of Time and Free Will, Bergson continues with a discussion of the idea of number, which is defined as the ‘synthesis of one and many’ (Bergson, 2001: 75). Now, taking apart this definition, and thinking about the respects in which these units are identical, we find that number implies a ‘simple intuition of a multiplicity of parts or units, which are absolutely alike. And yet they must be somehow distinct from one another, since otherwise they would merge into a single unit’ (Bergson, 2001: 76–77). Bergson makes the simple point that in order just to think about the number of things, we must be able to hold successive images of things alongside one another, and this ‘picturing’ occurs in space (TFW, p. 77): it is a succession in space, rather than a succession in time. What this now gives us is two meanings of ‘unit': the one ultimate, out of which a number is formed by a process of addition, and the other provisional, the number so formed, which is multiple in itself, and owes its unity to the simplicity of the act by which the mind perceives it. (Bergson, 2001: 80) In turn, we then arrive at an identification of two kinds of multiplicity: matter on the one hand, and mind on the other. What Bergson refers to as matter here will, in his subsequent work Matter and Memory, be developed into a theory based on the multiplicity of ‘images'. Despite the terminology change in the later text, the key characteristics of material objects/images are already presented here in Time and Free Will. Material objects are perceivable (visible, audible, tactile, etc.); they can be localized in space; and they are directly given to us, and do not need to be represented symbolically in order for us to count them (Bergson, 2001: 85). Mental objects (or states of consciousness), however, are not given to us in space, and must be symbolically represented (carved up in some way), in order for us to count them (Bergson, 2001: 86). Return to the problem of recalling an event that was posed at the start of this section. Whenever we try to bring to mind a recollection of something, we must break it down into distinct, but artificially and only subsequently determined, parts in order to describe it in words. The organization of the words that describe the event are set out in space, but the memories (the mental states) are not. What is more, the further into the depths of consciousness that we delve, the more confused these states, ideas, or memories become. Thus, the concept of number is not so readily applicable to mental states; what we call mind is a kind of multiplicity, but not of units juxtaposed in space in the way that bits of matter form a multiplicity. What, then, are the consequences of thinking that conscious states exist in time rather than in space? Among other formulations, Bergson wishes to argue against the idea of time as some homogeneous medium or container of states of consciousness, operating much in the same way that space does as a homogeneous medium containing parts of matter. A famous formulation of the role of space in conscious perception can be found in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. According to Bergson: the theory which [Kant] works out in the Transcendental Aesthetic consists in endowing space with an existence independent of its content, in laying down as de jure separable what each of us sepaPage 3 of 14

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rates de facto, and in refusing to regard extensity as an abstraction like the others. (Bergson, 2001: 92) That is, for Kant, space is a priori insofar as nothing can be thought without it. Furthermore, space is not a concept, as there is no ultimate concept of spaces under which other kinds of space can be subsumed. It is an intuition that serves as the condition of possibility of our experience of sensible intuitions (sensory data) in general. In order to think through what we actually mean by space, Bergson asks whether such formulations are indispensable for any kind of consciousness, such as the consciousness of other animals. The question here is: Does space exist in animal consciousness? For Bergson, examples from a range of species indicate that methods of orientation determined by different sensitivities to the light spectrum or by more dominant auditory or olfactory senses are quite different from our own spatially based kind: Attempts have been made to explain this feeling of direction by sight or smell, and, more recently, by the perception of magnetic currents which would enable the animal to take its bearings like a living compass. This amounts to saying that space is not so homogeneous for the animal as for us, and that determinations of space, or directions, do not assume for it a purely geometrical form. (Bergson, 2001: 96) Discoveries of such diverse senses of direction in the animal kingdom suggest that the concept of a homogeneous spatial medium is, in fact, an extraordinary phenomenon in nature. Homogeneous space is not a fundamental characteristic of the physical universe: ‘Therefore, instead of saying that animals have a special sense of direction, we may as well say that men have a special faculty of perceiving or conceiving a space without quality’ (Bergson, 2001: 97). Conscious perception in humans, in fact, involves an artificial separation between ‘different kinds of reality, the one heterogeneous, that of sensible qualities, the other homogeneous, namely space. This latter, clearly conceived by the human intellect, enables us to use clean-cut distinctions, to count, to abstract, and perhaps also to speak’ (Bergson, 2001: 97). To demonstrate this, Bergson appeals to a simple exercise involving the inspection of the contents of our conscious apprehensions. An example he employs is of a swinging pendulum, the oscillations of which count the 60 seconds of a minute. Rather than perceiving each beat or oscillation as a single second, each following on from the other in succession until we reach an awareness of the idea of ‘one minute', he hypothesizes that the oscillations are perceived rather as a multiplicity: … each [oscillation] permeating the other and organizing themselves like the notes of a tune, so as to form what we shall call a continuous or qualitative multiplicity with no resemblance to number. I shall thus get the image of pure duration; but I shall have entirely got rid of the idea of a homogeneous medium or a measurable quantity. By carefully examining our consciousness we shall recognize that it proceeds in this way whenever it refrains from representing duration symbolically. (Bergson, 2001: 105) We must therefore realize that time thought as a homogeneous medium (as Kant does so in The Critique of Pure Reason) is a spurious concept, ‘the ghost of space haunting the reflective consciousness’ (Bergson, 2001: 99). Thus, Bergson argues, we operate with two concepts of time: on the one hand, pure duration, which is the form or mode of our conscious states (states which interpenetrate, that is, where past and present states are not separated), and ‘spatialized time’ on the other. Bergson traces the problem of thinking time in spatial terms back to the paradoxes of the Presocratic thinker, Zeno of Elea. Zeno's paradoxes of motion include the famous examples of Achilles (or the hare) who can never catch up to the tortoise given a head start in a race, and the Arrow, which can be thought as simultaneously at motion and at rest. These arguments are often thought of as attacking the very possibility of movement, Page 4 of 14

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which is something that Zeno's contemporary, Parmenides, seems to have taught. However, it has been suggested that Zeno is showing the implications of thinking mathematical plurality (the relation of infinite parts to wholes) for the very possibility of thinking motion at all. On this view, Zeno is not saying that motion is impossible, but that motion would be impossible if we thought of wholes as infinitely mathematically divisible. Writing in Creative Evolution, Bergson responds to Zeno's paradox of the arrow with the following: Motionless in each point of its course, [the arrow] is motionless all the time that it is moving. Yes, if we suppose that the arrow can ever be in a point of its course. Yes again, if the arrow, which is moving, ever coincides with a position, which is motionless. But the arrow never is in any point of its course. The most we can say is that it might it be there, in this sense, that it passes there and might stop there. (Bergson, 1998: 308–309) The paradox only arises if we confuse the distance traversed, which can be measured and broken up into parts, with the trajectory of the arrow, which is ‘created in one stroke’ with its own particular duration. The trajectory is ‘an act in progress’ (Bergson, 1998: 308–309). What Bergson is trying to get at is that in order for us to extricate ourselves from Zeno's paradoxes, we must get ourselves out of the habit of thinking of time, as we do of space, as a series of points or moments. We must avoid the confusion between motion and the space traversed, and instead rethink each of our actions and thoughts in time as ‘single indivisible strokes'. Inheriting the Eleatics’ confusion of motion and traversed space, the modern sciences (referring here to the age of Kepler and Galileo) have been no more able to think time without eliminating its qualitative element (duration). Bergson discusses this inheritance in terms of the process by which an astronomer predicts celestial events, such as an eclipse: [the astronomer] shortens infinitely the intervals of duration, as these do not count for science, and thus perceives in a very short time a few seconds at the most a succession of simultaneities which may take up several centuries for the concrete consciousness, compelled to live through the intervals instead of merely counting their extremities. (Bergson, 2001: 117) Thus, what the astronomer, employing mechanistic principles, retains of time is simultaneity; what he retains of motion is immobility; ultimately, the objects of such measurements are never duration and motion themselves (Bergson, 2001: 119). Such distortions of time and motion are ultimately manifestations of the way in which individual consciousnesses can be viewed as fundamentally divided into ‘two selves': … below the numerical multiplicity of conscious states, a qualitative multiplicity; below the self with well-defined states, a self in which succeeding each other means melting into one another and forming an organic whole. But we are generally content with the first, i.e. with the shadow of the self projected into homogeneous space. Consciousness, goaded by an insatiable desire to separate, substitutes the symbol for the reality, or perceives the reality only through the symbol. As the self thus refracted, and thereby broken to pieces, is much better adapted to the requirements of social life in general and language in particular, consciousness prefers it, and gradually loses sight of the fundamental self. (Bergson, 2001: 128) We will see, in the next section, that Bergson's suggestion here in Time and Free Will that there is a stark distinction between quantitative and qualitative multiplicities is significantly problematized. However, it is sufficient at this stage to underline two key problems that Bergson identifies in the passage above for further examination. The first concerns, as we have already seen, the limitations of scientific thinking based on the homogenization of a range of processes, and ultimately of time itself, enacted in order to render it measurable and predictable. The second problem, more broadly, pertains to the limitations of language. As Bergson states, in order for us to do something as simple as articulate a thought (e.g., the memory of an event) to Page 5 of 14

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another person, we need to break up our thoughts into identifiable moments, append names and dates to them, organize them into a succession and order of generality, all for the purposes of turning those memories into symbols capable of being read and interpreted by another individual. Necessarily, this articulation into words entails a significant distortion of the real, although it is, at least, a useful distortion. Further problems arise when we start to mistake these distortions, necessary for the ‘solidification’ of our thoughts into verbal or written expressions, for the original real object (in this case, a memory): ‘we confuse the feeling itself, which is in a perpetual state of becoming, with its permanent external object, and especially with the word which expresses this object’ (Bergson, 2001: 130). At this stage, then, it is sufficient to note Bergson's simple claim that there are two discernible layers of the self. The relation between the two – how they interact – is not yet fully worked out. The depth of the movement between perception and action, at the level of the numerical multiplicity, and memory at the level of qualitative multiplicity, will be the subject of the next section.

Virtual and Actual In Matter and Memory, Bergson says the following about the nature of our conscious lives: Every moment of our life presents two aspects: it is actual and virtual, perception on the one side and memory on the other. Each moment of life is split up as and when it is posited. Or rather, it consists in this very splitting, for the present moment, always going forward, fleeting limit between the immediate past which is now no more and the immediate future which is not yet, would be a mere abstraction were it not the moving mirror which continually reflects perception as a memory. (Bergson, 1975: 165) Bergson's rejection of any absolute division between the mental and the physical is the main focus of this later text, and in this section I want to follow Bergson's line of questioning and his extended discussion of the fundamental relationship between memory (the ‘subjective’ end of experience) and perception (the ‘objective’ part of experience). His analysis defends the idea that what we understand by perception is always already clothed in our recollections, and that what we understand by memory is always engaged in some relation with our present perceptions insofar as they are implicated in the preparation for an action. To help us to think through this claim, Bergson asks us to start with what it might mean to have ‘pure perception'. By this he means: … a perception which exists in theory rather than in fact and would be possessed by a being placed where I am, living as I live, but absorbed in the present and capable, by giving up every form of memory, of obtaining a vision of matter both immediate and instantaneous. (Bergson, 1991: 34) This way of thinking of perception in its pure state is, in fact, already problematic. It seems only to refer to those moments when one is doing something without thinking about it. For example, sometimes I might find myself walking down a familiar street, or reading a book and then realize that I have failed to take in any of the words I have just read. Such actions, while helping us to obtain ‘a vision of matter both immediate and instantaneous', uncontaminated as they are by our expectations (our memories), are also devoid of intention. Without the intervention of memory, my actions are blind. Examining this kind of ‘pure’ perception is not sufficient to help us explain the exercise of a conscious will. Pure perception thus seems to correspond to such moments of what we might call ‘inattention to life': contact with an object is only attentive when perception is brought into combination with our memories, which embellish the object with potential uses that we might have for it. Perceptions remain inattentive in those moments when we perceive and act without thinking about those perceptions or willing those actions. (Bergson, 1991: 101) Thus, we need to think about how this state of immediate perception can become conscious, that is, how we move from inattention to attention to life. Page 6 of 14

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Here, Bergson deals with the basic problem of how matter can be translated into a ‘representation’ or a conscious perception of matter. In this respect, matter, however conceived, for example, as atoms in motion, centres of force, and so on, must always be determined in relation to some eventual contact, vision, or perception of it. In other words, there must be some sense in which it is capable of becoming an image for us, even if this ‘image’ exists without ever actually being perceived (here, ‘image’ refers to all the ways in which we can have contact with objects: through sight, sound, touch, etc.). Let us think of the two main elements of this proposed model of perception: (1) a present object, and (2) a representation of that object. Do we need to add something to (1) in order to convert it into (2)? To do so, Bergson argues, would be to make the passage from object to perception an ‘impenetrable mystery'. It would serve merely to accentuate the absolute difference and division between matter and mind. Bergson takes the alternative route, that is, to think of our representation or (conscious perception) of an object as some sort of ‘diminution’ or selection from the actual, perceivable object itself. Recall, in the last section, the description of material objects as perceivable, localizable in space, and directly given to us. Bergson asks us to think of the world around us as a vast series or network of ‘images’ (perceivable objects), each connected with a whole series of others which precede and follow it on all sides. Our perception in this world begins as the awareness of a correspondingly vast array of possible or virtual actions upon the objects around us. We do not see the world purely as it is. Rather, we carve out a course of action, and several other potential paths, for us to follow. The world is, for us, virtual until we choose to execute a particular action. In order for this array of virtual actions to be converted into actual or real actions, we obscure from our attention those possible actions which hold no interest for us. Thus: To obtain this conversion from the virtual to the actual, it would be necessary, not to throw more light on the object, but, on the contrary, to obscure some of its aspects, to diminish it by the greater part of itself, so that the remainder, instead of being encased in its surroundings as a thing, should detach itself from them as a picture. (Bergson, 1991: 36) In these terms, all living beings (not just human beings) are ‘centres of indetermination’ (of many potential actions), and through this relation with our surroundings, we are constantly in contact with objects in terms of the relative use which they have for us. They are constantly illuminated by the light which our bodies reflect back onto those objects, and those objects will appear to turn towards our bodies as if they were created for our purposes from the beginning. This purposefulness of objects – this illumination of their usefulness for us – is, Bergson contends, a reflection of what we call our freedom. Here, the connection between my body and objects is formed with the help of memory. However, what we understand to be ‘memory’ is itself a theoretical challenge for Bergson, as he attempts to formulate a truly temporal account of its operation, as opposed to reinforcing existing theories that make memories ‘contained in the brain’ the physical repository of our past actions. For Bergson, memories cannot simply be localized in the brain, because the brain forms just one part of the total sensory-motor system of our bodies. It is simply an organ for the conversion of memories into perceptions and actions. The relation between memory and perception is certainly a relation between past and present, but it is not the case that memories are simply weakened versions of once-present perceptions. In other words, we cannot simply describe the formation of memories as the throwing back of particular present moments (perceptions) into the past (memories). Each perception forms a complex with others, and our minds can carve up and recompose them in a multitude of ways. Thus, the processes of perception, springing forwards, and memory, backwards, occur constantly and simultaneously. We are, typically, creatures focused on useful action. It is our present perceptions that interest us the most, and it is this interest or bias that gives rise to the illusion, as Bergson calls it, that memory comes after perception. A memory appears to us to be a weak echo of a previously present perception. Bergson illustrates this illusion with the example of a strong sensation: applying pressure to an arm and then gradually weakening that sensation of pressure. This weakened sensation is clearly not the same as a memory of the strong sensation. Memory must be something of a Page 7 of 14

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completely different nature or kind, but conceiving of memory in its real operation requires us to break certain deep-seated habits of thought: … we find that innate in our mind is the need to represent our whole inner life as modelled on that very small part of ourself which is inserted into the present reality, the part which perceives it and acts upon it. (Bergson, 1975: 162) Associationist psychology or models of action and learning based on conditioned physical responses all succumb to this tendency to generalize our actions in the present. Furthermore, Bergson points to facts from pathological phenomena (loss of visual and auditory recollections) to show that the loss of certain recollections does not arise from the concomitant loss of sight or hearing. If memory was indeed a lesser degree of perception, then pathologies of memory would be linked to pathologies of sensation. But they are clearly not linked. For Bergson, this confirms that there is a difference in kind between memory and perception (Bergson, 1975: 164). Rather, actuality or ‘our present’ consists, for us, in the duplication of our objects of experience with a virtual image of them. Thus, ‘every moment of our life […] is actual and virtual, perception on the one side and memory on the other’ (Bergson, 1975: 165). To summarize so far, we can say that our array of conscious and unconscious recollections or memory constitutes our ‘past', while contact with matter or perceptions constitute our ‘present’ states. Where Bergson diverges from the model of representation (as a superimposition onto objects that are, initially, separated from us), and from the idea of memories as weakened perceptions, is in his account of the conversion of material objects into conscious perceptions. In Bergson's view, there is a sense in which our ‘interests’ are already implicated in the objects that we perceive. The ‘repository’ of our interest – our memory – is always already involved in making selections from the material world whenever we consciously perceive something. Thus, instead of the divisions between memory and perception, or mind and matter, we must think the relation between ‘virtual action’ and ‘real action'. And thus, Bergson claims: ‘Both definitions [of memory and perception] being granted, I hold that the formation of memory is never posterior to the formation of perception; it is contemporaneous with it’ (Bergson, 1975: 157). Let us return to the example of the remembered event, for example, a concert. My original experience of that event was not simply a ‘taking in’ of sensory data: sounds, lights, and smells. Rather, at the same time as I was receiving the many pieces of sensory data, my memories (thoughts, expectations) were also being combined with my perceptions. My experience of the event was unique because, for example, certain elements more than others grabbed my attention, such as the violin solo, and the reactions of my friends who had told me that they were particularly looking forward to the final section of the performance. In other words, consciousness, in these terms is constituted by the virtual coexistence of our past with our present. In the light of this relation between past and present, we can now turn to the role and actions of individual bodies or acting subjects. First of all, my body is primarily defined by its sensori-motor activity (that the body senses things, it acts, and it reacts to sensory data); it is a centre of action. We have seen that memory is, from the beginning, already implicated in perception insofar as perception consists of a process of excluding all elements of objects in the world that do not interest us. In this respect, to use Bergson's terminology, perception gives us our present moment in the form of a ‘quasi-instantaneous section’ of the flowing mass of material reality (Bergson, 1991: 139). Consider Bergson's famous cone diagram (see Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1Cone diagram, matter and memory

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The diagram illustrates the relation between memory, perception, and action. First of all, the points S, A, and B form a cone that depicts the ‘sum total of recollections’ (my memories). These recollections meet at plane (P), the plane of action (or the present) beneath the inverted pyramid or cone. The momentum of the acting body effectively constitutes my present, and it ‘moves forward unceasingly, and unceasingly also touches the moving plane P of my actual representation of the universe. At S, the image of the body is concentrated, and, because it belongs to the plane P, this image does but receive and restore actions emanating from all the images of which the plane is composed’ (Bergson, 1991: 152). In our example of the concert, it is not that I innocently or passively take in the perceptions from the concert hall, but rather that I think and act with the force of my memories to generate my own unique experience of ‘the present', and my attention or concentration on this plane of action will vary for the duration of the concert. I am thus defined by my greater or lesser capacities for action. I oscillate between moments of intense concentration on an activity, and moments where that concentration lapses and I ‘dream’ or, if I am acting, then my action comprises reflex or habitual motor impulses only. This existence that fluctuates across a continuum of virtual and real actions describes the variations in ‘attention to life’ that characterize all forms of life, although the possible variations increase relative to the complexity of each organism.

Intelligence and Creativity What is it that drives human beings to create works of art, literature, and technology, to pursue scientific enPage 9 of 14

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quiry and invent solutions to problems? Bergson's answer to this question looks to the evolution of human consciousness itself, and he finds that creativity is not a privilege of human life, but rather that it is found throughout the whole of organic life in general. In order to understand Bergson's theory of creativity, it is necessary to follow his line of enquiry from a biological point of view. By looking at evidence from the biological sciences, and evolutionary theory, we can see that there is a creative drive or impulse that exists in all living organisms, and indeed in the very process that created them. Bergson will call this the élan vital or ‘vital impetus'. In Creative Evolution, Bergson begins by explaining the homogenizing operation of consciousness. He does this not only in terms of the direction of any individual organism's life towards useful action, but also ‘cosmologically’ in terms of the wider relation between organic and material existence. Evolution, Bergson claims, has given rise to human intellectual activity not as an exception to the broader sweep of life on earth, but rather as one expression of life understood as a multiplicity of tendencies that has developed along divergent lines of evolution. By the time of Creative Evolution, Bergson's original characterization (in Time and Free Will) of the division of human consciousness into a ‘fundamental self’ and a ‘social self’ has developed into an exploration of the possibilities that intelligence affords us compared to other living organisms.1 Citing the other major development in social organization in the animal kingdom, that of the Hymenoptera (ants, bees), Bergson identifies a pivotal distinction between human (intelligent) and insect (instinctive) forms of communication. The communication of meaning, for instinct-driven beings, is fixed, while for intelligence-driven beings, meaning is flexible: ‘the instinctive sign is adherent, the intelligent sign is mobile’ (Bergson, 1998: 158). What is made clear here is the dual potential of language. It is both a reflection of the intellectual tendency to superimpose discontinuity onto continuity, to think movements in terms of immobility; and it is a vehicle for creativity, or the novel use of matter for purposes not originally contained in its composition. The latter is the very essence of invention in art, science, and the development of technology (Bergson, 1998: 239). As we saw in both Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory, an individual consciousness can be defined by its spatialization of originally continuous processes, including its own processes of memory formation. However, as we now see in Creative Evolution, intelligence affords itself a certain capacity to reflect on the conditions of its own emergence. But it must also account for and mitigate, where possible, the ever-present risk of thinking only in terms of discontinuity and immobility in space. Bergson's analysis of the function of the intellect attempts just such an explanation of the dominant tendencies of human thought, commencing with his identification of the purpose of intelligence as one of ‘fabrication’ which ‘consists in shaping matter, in making it supple and in bending it, in converting it into an instrument in order to become master of it’ (Bergson, 1998: 182–183). Reiterating the difference with a merely instinctive grasp of an object for use as a tool in a particular situation (e.g., a bird's use of a rock to break an eggshell), what characterizes the intelligent ‘mastery’ of an object is what one might call its ‘conceptual yield'. The application of a material object, definable by certain properties, to a particular task, again definable by certain key characteristics, produces a ‘model’ that can be applied to many alternative tasks, provided there is sufficient homology between them (Bergson, 1998: 182–183). This is the very work of the intelligent sign: not simply to fix a meaning or use onto particular objects, but rather to release potentiality from matter. An understanding of the nature and function of the intellect, then, goes hand-in-hand with an understanding of the nature of matter. In line with Bergson's broader attempt to think the real in terms of time or process, any definition of matter will also be formulated in terms of the process that it manifests. The concept that we have of space is not a mere illusion or fabrication, but is rather derived from the inversion of the mind's ‘natural movement'. If mind, as Bergson outlined in Matter and Memory, is a fluctuation between moments of concentration, effort or ‘tension', in free action, and the loosening of that tension in habitual actions, then matter can be understood as the correlate of the latter movement: as ‘detension’ or ‘extension'. Our idea of pure or geometrical space is derived from the movement of extension that we find in matter. Pure space is the completion of matter's continuous process of extension. Thus, we can say that geometrical space is certainly Page 10 of 14

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suggested by material processes, and it is useful for us to think and operate in spatial terms (to think in terms of inertia, passivity, and the relation of causes and effects), but it is ultimately a superimposition that should not be confused with matter itself (Bergson, 1998: 202). We have seen that any ‘spatial’ understanding of material organization, whether in physical and chemical substances or in complex living organisms, invoke an artificial division into isolable states or units. Thus, Bergson's account of the complementary genesis of the intellect and matter implies the operation of two kinds of order in our thinking of both living and non-living processes: what Bergson calls geometrical and vital orders. We have also abandoned any notion that the relation between these two kinds of order is one of illusion to reality. The two categories of order are complementary and attempt to describe the same movement viewed from opposing ends, so that geometrical organization or the tendency towards extension is the inverse of vital organization or the tendency towards concentration or intensity. If we turn now to the vital order in detail, and recount Bergson's critique of Darwinian evolutionary theory, we see that the creation of new functions and species is not simply the reorganization and sedimentation of material units (in later terms, this might refer to the reorganization through mutation of gene sequences).2 When Bergson sets out to understand the nature of living processes, it is in response to the apparent manifestation of ‘perfect order’ out of seemingly mundane elements. Anything from a free action, and a ‘great work of art’ to the emergence of a new species of organism, is the product of a process of ‘creative evolution'. While random reorganization and sedimentation is rejected, the doctrine of finality (teleology or pre-established harmony) is also rejected for its ascription of a pre-existing idea or purpose that has somehow guided and determined a creative act in advance. What appears to us as ‘perfect order’ in a living organism, or in the collective behaviours of particular species such as in the social orders of ant and bee colonies, is not the instantiation of a planned idea or structure, although we are prone to interpreting the relative perfection of the organism as the end product of such an idea (Bergson, 1998: 223–224). This would make evolution a category of ‘internal finality', where the idea or cause that determines each particular individual organism, or even each specialized organ in a living organism, is somehow contained within and defines that individual. Rather, for Bergson, the evolution of life is better understood in similar terms to processes of the mind, specifically the execution of free actions. Bergson offers a revised idea of an ‘external finality', such that the specificity of any supposed cause for each individual product (a free act, a work of art, a living organism) is abandoned in favour of the acknowledgement of a broader movement that encompasses them all. This broader movement or impulse that Bergson names élan vital or ‘vital impetus’ is the tendency to concentrate or accumulate energy and release it in creative acts. This vital impetus should not be understood, then, as an energy or entity that exerts its power over some separately existing substance we call ‘matter', but instead it is Bergson's attempt to reflect on a movement – or a trajectory – that involves the production of material, organized beings, which continues beyond the creation of those individual products. Each product provides us with an indication of the movement that created it, but we should be wary of confusing these products with the ‘end’ or purpose of a process. Just as an action perfected through repetition, such that it now forms a habit, describes only one small part of the overall capacities and movements of a living organism, each living organism forms itself just one small part of a broader movement of life in its processes of accumulation and creative discharge of energy along multiple paths.

Intuition The relationship between homogeneity and heterogeneity that we saw in Section 1 has now developed into a relationship between the geometrical and vital orders.3 However, Bergson's analysis of the complementary relation between them does not consign us to the fate of an illusory or fabricated understanding of real processes. It is not that reality, as process, is inaccessible to us because we are only capable of thinking things in rigid, spatial terms. The intellect's tendency to think time itself, and processes such as the evolution of living organisms, in terms of geometry or ‘pure space', is complemented by ‘intuition': Page 11 of 14

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We have shown that intellect has detached itself from a vastly wider reality, but that there has never been a clean cut between the two; all around conceptual thought there remains an indistinct fringe which recalls its origin. And further we compared the intellect to a solid nucleus formed by means of condensation. This nucleus does not differ radically from the fluid surrounding it. It can only be reabsorbed in it because it is made of the same substance. (Bergson, 1998: 192–193) What is intuition? In Bergson's terms, there are two approaches to answering this question. The first approach invites us to compare the human capacity for intuition with the other dominant modes of knowledge seeking in nature: instinct and intelligence. We have seen that intelligence is marked by its tendency to carve out the useful aspects of objects from our surroundings. Intuition is the ‘indistinct fringe’ surrounding intellect, and it indicates our ability to think outside these rigidly defined conceptual boundaries. Instinctive movements, on the other hand, while limited, are in fact perfected forms of action upon matter. Different animals have evolved a range of instinctive actions that have enabled them to survive through domination of a range of environmental conditions. Bergson calls this instinctive ‘sympathy’ with the living environment. The intervention of memory into instinctive activity is minimal, such that perception in this case is ‘uncontaminated’ by alternative possible action, and is thus immediate and decisive. In contrast to instinct, Bergson proposes the emergence of intuition, which he describes firstly as ‘instinct that has become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it indefinitely’ (Bergson, 1998: 176). In humans, this intuitive sympathy has the potential to turn its attention towards itself, and thus be applied to living processes, such that we can form a better understanding of life no longer simply from the perspective of ‘inert matter', but in terms of duration or process itself.4 If humans are distinctive among animals, it is only for this manifestation of instinct that has become reflective. The second approach compares intuition with the human ‘aesthetic faculty'. This complements our ability to process sensory information with an appreciation of the ‘mutual organization’ of things. When we look at a work of art, we view it not just as an imitation of a real object, living thing, or landscape. We can see that the artist has somehow captured the ‘the simple movement that runs through the lines, that binds them together and gives them significance’ (Bergson, 1998: 177). The ‘sympathy’ mentioned above (the ‘disinterested’ instinct), in the case of the artist, is directed at capturing this unity of organization of the object. Bergson's suggestion is that this effort of intuition can be directed towards other objects of enquiry, such as the nature of material reality, and the processes that govern and underpin it. A philosophical enquiry, utilizing intuition, could turn its attention to the very processes of organic life, though the kind of conclusions yielded from it would not have the precision of scientific knowledge. What we have said thus far concerning intuition appears to place this ‘faculty’ above all others, including intelligence. However, this would be to oversimplify Bergson's claims about the nature of knowledge, and it would overlook the importance of the complementary nature of the different faculties, or rather tendencies, that Bergson discusses. The whole thrust of his enquiry into the emergence of human intelligence from the point of view of natural history is to show that we possess abilities that are not exclusive to human beings. In fact, Bergson's stance, I would argue, poses a challenge to the idea of human exceptionalism. Instinct, intelligence, and intuition are tendencies that exist and have developed across the multiple forms of life on this planet, and it is only in the predominance of one or more of these tendencies that we can distinguish between different species. Human beings are dominated by intelligence, which allows us to manipulate our physical environment to our advantage, thus it is not the specific technology that we invent that is important, but rather the ‘mastery’ we can gain over matter (Bergson, 1998: 183). Intuition, though present, is ‘vague and above all discontinuous’ (Bergson, 1998: 267), but it offers us a way to think about aspects of life that are otherwise ‘unintelligible’ (that is, not amenable to division into distinct units of measure). Thus intuition might be able to cast light ‘on our personality, on our liberty, on the place we occupy in the whole of nature, on our origin and perhaps also on our destiny’ (Bergson, 1998: 268). No more inert states, no more dead things; nothing but the mobility of which the stability of life is Page 12 of 14

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made. A vision of this kind, where reality appears as continuous and indivisible, is on the road which leads to philosophical intuition. (Bergson, 1992: 127)

Notes 1Lefebvre and White (2010) underline the significance of Bergson's preference for biological over sociological explanations for human behaviour, most notably developed in his 1932 book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. For example, noting that animal societies may well be characterized predominantly by instinctive behaviour, the centrality that Bergson accords to the function of habit attests to the dominance of a ‘virtual instinct’ in the formation of human social structures: ‘… no human society could constitute itself without a system of habits. Habits organize social pressure into a weave of obligations that integrates the individual into collective life. They at once actualize social pressure into a diffuse network of everyday practices, and, at the same time, draw strength from the whole, such that the whole of obligation is immanent to each habit’ (Lefebvre and White, 2010: 467). 2Paul-Antoine Miquel (2007) suggests a number of affinities between Darwin and Bergson, despite the common assumption of fundamental differences between them. A more subtle reading of Darwin's thought, Miquel suggests, illuminates some key divergences between Darwin and ‘Neo-Darwinian’ evolutionism, the latter being Bergson's real target: ‘Darwin wondered whether the relation between hereditary variations and natural selection might not itself be “accidental”. At any rate, nowhere in his writings does he say that hereditary variations occur randomly. He is defending a blending theory of inheritance, which assumes that modifications of the germs occurring during the development of the species, by change of conditions and habits, can be transmitted to offspring. […] This is nothing but a Lamarckian vision of species transformation. However, Darwin's disagreement with Lamarck does not come from this vision of inheritance. In opposition to Lamarck, and with this neo-Darwinian vision, Darwin assumes that natural selection is “the paramount power” of evolution. It is natural selection that comes first and not chance, which means that random variation is not the real engine of evolution’ (Miquel, 2007: 45). 3Ruth Lorand (1992) criticizes the identification of two kinds of order, arguing that it requires an additional consideration of degrees or intensities of order: ‘Not all works of art are admirable masterpieces. A theory which allows ideal instances only is not very useful, especially when we deal with real objects, not ideal entities. Recognizing the fact that order, vital or geometrical, comes in various degrees also means accepting the concept of disorder as part of the concept of order. Bergson takes disorder to be simply the absence of one kind of order, but actual experience tells us otherwise: a disordered work of art is not necessarily a perfect intellectual order. This suggests the existence of another, third, pole to oppose both orders’ (Lorand 1992: 593). Lorand goes on to expand on Bergson's account with a discussion of what we might call geometrical and vital forms of disorder. 4The significance and relevance of Bergson's account of intuition is attested to by Gunter (2005), who notes that the apprehension of lived time resonates with the method of the calculus: ‘The infinitesimal calculus is flexible, it can be used in dynamic ways, it requires a new method of thought and a new symbolism (traditionally, that of Leibniz). But it involves, in each case, a precise method of calculating. So by analogy, Bergson's intuition is intended as precise, though flexible, though understood dynamically, and though requiring new modes of thought. It is intended to focus on specific levels of duration and to conceptualize them each on their own terms’ (Gunter, 2005: 146).

References Bergson, Henri (1975). Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays. Tr. H. Wildon Carr. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. Page 13 of 14

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Bergson, Henri (1991). Matter and Memory. Tr. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books. Bergson, Henri (1992). ‘Philosophical intuition'. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. Tr. Mabelle L. Andison. New York: Citadel Press. Bergson, Henri (1998). Creative Evolution. Tr. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Dover. Bergson, Henri (2001). Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Tr. F. L. Pogson. New York: Dover. Gunter, Pete Addison Y. (2005). ‘Temporal hierarchy in Bergson and Whitehead'. Interchange 36, no. 1–2: 139–157. Lefebvre, Alexandre and White, Melanie (2010). ‘Bergson on Durkheim: Society sui generis'. Journal of Classical Sociology 10, no. 4: 457–477. Lorand, Ruth (1992). ‘Bergson's concept of order'. Journal of the History of Philosophy 30, no. 4: 579–595. Miquel, Paul-Antoine (2007). ‘Bergson and Darwin: From an Immanentist to an Emergentist approach to evolution'. SubStance 36, no. 3: 42–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n3

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Gilles Deleuze and Process Philosophy

Contributors: Keith Robinson Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Gilles Deleuze and Process Philosophy" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n4 Print pages: 56-70 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Gilles Deleuze and Process Philosophy Keith Robinson

Introduction The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) was one of the most important and innovative thinkers of the 20th century. The central theme of his philosophy is the very nature of thinking itself. Over the course of nearly 40 years and 25 books or so, coauthored and written in his own name,1 Deleuze has profoundly rethought for us precisely what it means to think. The relentless Deleuzian quest or search for the conditions of new thought and its expression roams across the ‘non-philosophical’ – mathematics, biology, painting, music, cinema, literature, etc. – but also, of course, through philosophy, ‘plain old philosophy’ (2006: 176). For Deleuze, thinking in philosophy is never the product of ‘common sense', of the voluntary and harmonious exercise of our faculties. Rather, the intellect must be disturbed and shocked into thinking through problematization and experimentation. For Deleuze, something involuntary forces us to think, tearing us from our everyday intellectual habits and forcing us to dive deep beneath the ‘clear and distinct', enabling the creation of new concepts and the production of new thought. No pre-existing label fully captures Deleuze's philosophy. Although he is usually thought of as a so-called ‘continental’ philosopher, in contrast to Anglo-American or ‘analytic’ philosophy, Deleuze explicitly and extensively draws upon and reworks the thought of British and American philosophers, writers, and artists. Many of the conventional classifications for 20th century French philosophy do not seem to apply to Deleuze either: he is not a phenomenologist, nor is he an existentialist, a Marxist, a Freudian, a spiritualist, a vitalist, or a structuralist, although he takes something from all of these. The labels ‘post-structuralism', ‘postmodernism', ‘French Theory', and ‘pensée “68”', which are often used to situate Deleuze's thought, are mostly rhetorical inventions of little value for thinking about Deleuze. The first three labels are products of the Anglo-American academy, and the last a product of French opposition internal to France. Like the other great French thinkers of his generation – Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard – Deleuze is a ‘singularity', impossible to classify. However, we can sketch out some approximate coordinates for Deleuze's thought and, insofar as it is useful to find a specific generic lens through which to read his texts, these coordinates, as we will see, will bring Deleuze into close proximity with process thought and the tradition of process philosophy.2 That Deleuze can be counted among the ‘men of flux’ will become apparent in what follows. Indeed, Deleuze's thought, I will argue, offers a unique perspective on a specific line of process thinking that passes through Nietzsche and goes all the way back to Heraclitus. That line of thinking stresses the idea that the traditional ontology of substance is grounded in a conception of static being, a notion of being in itself that is, to use Nietzsche's phrase, an ‘empty fiction’ (1990:46). Static or changeless being in itself is an abstraction rooted in the illusion of substance that tends to mask and conceal the flux of becoming. On the one hand, Deleuze gives an ontogenetic account of the production of the ‘actual’ as relatively changeless being or as more or less stable becomings with its fully formed organisms, substances, individuals, and identities. On the other hand, Deleuze offers another account that maps out paths back to the ‘virtual’ and absolute becoming, paths or lines that experiment with ‘counter-actualizing’ the unchanging identities and fixed substances of being. Thus, the fundamental aim of Deleuze's process thought is twofold: to give a critical account of the genesis of static being in itself as a ‘transcendental illusion’ with its forms, substances, things, and modes of organization; and, secondly, to find the means to undo static being, to release the processes and flows congealed within it in order to open it to, and experiment with, its own conditions.

Concepts and the Image of Thought Deleuze's thought consists then in two aspects, sides, or dimensions that coexist and are in perpetual exPage 2 of 14

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change, communication, opposition, conversion, translation, and interdependency: one aspect that corresponds to a critical task which targets being in itself and another that demands a creative task which corresponds with becoming. Many process philosophers offer a critique of the Western tradition of metaphysics that, as Hegel remarked, has always tended toward treating static substances as ontologically primary. Deleuze is no exception. In numerous texts, Deleuze refers critically to an ‘image of thought'3 that underpins being in itself. This is a model of thinking that claims to ‘represent’ what thinking is. All the good thinker needs to represent thought is a desire for and love of truth; to think truthfully one needs a method, one that will guide the pursuit of truth. The image of thought refers, however, not just to a method but something deeper which precedes thought and grounds it, enabling it to find its bearings and give it sense and direction. The image of thought in this sense points to ‘a system of coordinates, dynamics, orientations: what it means to think and to orient oneself in thought’ (1995: 148). The image of thought that underlies being in itself is constituted by a set of orientations and presuppositions that determine our goals when we want to think. For example, in what Deleuze calls the ‘dogmatic’ or ‘classical’ image of thought that corresponds with thought as being in itself, we presuppose the good nature of thought and the good will of the thinker who naturally wants the truth. We presuppose the model of recognition where the faculties come together in a harmony of common sense around the same object. We assume that the fundamental enemy of thought is error and that error can be avoided with a rigorous method that will lead us to truthful solutions in the form of propositions that give correct answers. For Deleuze, this image of thought ‘prejudges everything: the distribution of the object and the subject as well as that of Being and beings’ (1994: 131). Dogmatic or orthodox thought presupposes a pre-philosophical image of what is, what Deleuze and Guattari came to call a ‘plane’ of thought. But there are two intersecting planes in Deleuze's thought: a plane of organization, development, and transcendence on the one hand that constitutes relatively stable beings, forms, and substances and, on the other hand, a plane of immanence and consistency concerned with becomings, processes, and free intensities; an orthodox or dogmatic plane of being in itself that Deleuze subjects to critique and a plane of becoming that intersects with the plane of being conditioning its development and modes of organization. It is on this latter plane, the plane of becoming and immanence, that the experimental and creative task takes effect. For Deleuze, the creative task of philosophy, and its defining feature, is the creation of concepts. Indeed, it is only through the creation of concepts that philosophical thinking takes place. As Deleuze and Guattari put it: ‘the following definition of philosophy can be taken as decisive: knowledge through pure concepts’ (1994: 7). But Deleuze refuses to distinguish knowledge acquired through concepts and knowledge through intuition. The ‘Nietzschean verdict’ for Deleuze is clear: you will only know something through concepts if you have constructed them in an intuition specific to them. All of Deleuze's thought revolves around the claim that concepts are created as a function of a problem. In this Deleuze carries out what he believes all the great philosophers have done: ‘what is the best way to follow the great philosophers? Is it to repeat what they said or to do what they did, that is, create concepts for problems that necessarily change?’ (D&G, 1994: 28, italics in text). Concepts, for Deleuze, respond to changing problems in terms of specificities not generalities, intuitions not abstract universals, events rather than essences or, indeed, processes rather than static things or substances. Deleuzean concepts are neither eternal nor universal, nor are they somehow pre-given and waiting for us. Following Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari say that concepts are not a ‘wonderful dowry from some sort of wonderland’ (1994: 5). Rather, concepts ‘must be invented, fabricated or rather created’ (1994: 5). Concepts in this sense do not refer to, designate, or signify separate things or objects in the world as such nor are they innate, given, recollected, or contemplated. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, the concept is ‘selfreferential; it posits itself and its object at the same time as it is created’ (1994: 22). Deleuzean concepts, then, are unlike ordinary, traditional, or pre-given concepts in that they do not correspond to, reproduce, copy, or represent a pre-formed object but make their ‘objects’ in a creative process that engages a localized problem. If traditional concepts attempt to determine an essence, substance, thing, or the being of what is by referring to properties, predicates, and qualities Deleuzean concepts are created in relation to the where, when, and how of circumstances, the whole story of the ‘what happened?’ and ‘what's going to happen?’ that sketches out the spatiotemporal coordinates of the concept. As Deleuze describes it, ‘Philosophy's like a novel: you have to ask “What's going to happen?”, “What's happened?” Except the Page 3 of 14

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characters are concepts, and the settings, the scenes, are space-times. One's always writing to bring something to life, to free life from where it's trapped, to trace lines of flight’ (1995: 140). In earlier texts, Deleuze described this as a ‘dramatization’ of the concept, a drama driven by spatiotemporal ‘dynamisms’ that direct the specification and division of the concept. These dynamisms preside over the distribution of singularities that problems express and concepts articulate. Thought is provoked or shocked into thinking through events that happen to it or pass through it so that concepts become ‘singularities … acting on the flows of everyday thought’ (1995: 31). The flows of everyday thought constitute doxa, common sense, and the world of ‘everybody knows,’ a set of pre-formed ideas, clichés, and opinions that form the basis for everyday communication and the exchange of views. For Deleuze, the creation of concepts disrupts and disturbs this world of common sense: ‘concepts are what stops thought being mere opinion, a view, an exchange of views, gossip’ (1995: 136) helping to overturn a dogmatic image of thought in the creation of the new. Deleuze occasionally refers to a passage in Plato's Republic where two types or modes of encountering things in the world are distinguished: those that leave the mind inactive or give it only the pretext for the appearance of activity, requiring only ‘ready-made’ or pre-given concepts; and those things that force one to think, requiring the transformation of existing concepts or the creation of new ones. The first are objects of recognition where all the faculties are exercised together: ‘this is a finger', ‘this is an apple', and so on. Conversely, there are those things that escape recognition and force us to think, what Plato called ‘simultaneously contrary perceptions’ (Deleuze, 2000: 101). Thus, we can say that there are (at least) two types of concepts for Deleuze4: those that are not created as such, or no longer connected to their conditions of creation, but pre-given in ordinary, everyday experiences of recognition and that correspond to an orthodox or dogmatic image of thought; and those that are created for specific problems and remain connected to their creative conditions, forcing us to think; concepts that are abstract, eternal, and unchanging (universals) and those that are concrete processes in continuous variation (singularities); concepts that give us the essence and answer the question of ‘what is’ and those that relate to questions regarding the ‘where, when, and how’ of happenings as events. At one point in their last book – What Is Philosophy? – Deleuze and Guattari say that the latter type of concepts are simply ‘processual, modular’ (1994: 20). In the history of Western thought, these differing types of concepts are often mixed or combined and can exchange their places: a ‘new’ concept invented for a specific problem can become an ordinary concept just as an ordinary concept can be transformed into a processual concept or its components can be drawn out by being put to work or expressed in relation to a new problem. Let us use the example of what the philosopher Ian Hacking has called ‘making up people’ (2002: 99). Hacking argues that the creation of concepts, for example ‘homosexuality', ‘pervert', or ‘multiple personality', opens up (or closes down) possibilities to be a certain kind of person or to do certain kinds of acts rather than simply naming a reality that was waiting to be discovered. Concepts in this sense create their objects or, as Hacking puts it, ‘a kind of person came into being at the same time as the kind was being invented’ (2002: 106). In what Hacking calls ‘dynamic nominalism', making up people changes the space of possibilities for thought and action such that new ways to be come into existence and other ways to be may disappear or be transformed. The key idea here, that parallels Deleuze, is that the classification and the classes emerge hand in hand in a kind of feedback loop ‘each egging the other on’ (2002: 106). Ways to be can settle into stable formations, but they are always open to challenge and modification as the space of problems and questions shifts and pulls in new directions with the transformation or creation of concepts and the realities that emerge.

Empiricism and Process This understanding of concepts reflects the commitment to empiricism and process found throughout Deleuze's work. But this is clearly not the empiricism of the textbooks where the intelligible is said to derive from the empirical. Indeed, Deleuze utterly transforms empiricism, re-imagining and re-envisaging it in novel ways. In Deleuze's empiricism, a new and strange world begins to unfold, a world in which the concrete richPage 4 of 14

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ness of the sensible begins to appear like a harlequin's jacket or a patchwork. This ‘radical’ or ‘transcendental empiricism’ (1994: 57), as Deleuze sometimes calls it, explains problems not through abstractions but, as we have seen, through concepts specifically created in relation to them. As Deleuze says of his own thought, it is ‘inspired in its entirety by empiricism’ (1990: 20). Thus, rather than any simple appeal to lived experience, or an aversion to concepts that we might associate with the textbook versions of British empiricism, what Deleuze calls the ‘secret’ of empiricism involves ‘the most insane creation of concepts’ (1994: xx) in which the concept becomes indiscernible from the thing in itself in its free and wild state. For Deleuze, we find the conditions of real experience or a novel experience in the making by following what he calls a ‘multiplicity’ long enough to create a concept that expresses it. For Deleuze, states of things are not unities or totalities but multiplicities. A multiplicity is not the idea that there are several states of things or that each state is multiple. Rather, ‘the essential thing, from the point of view of empiricism, is the noun multiplicity, which designates a set of lines or dimensions which are irreducible to one another’ (1987: vii). For Deleuze, every ‘thing’ is made up of lines and dimensions which might include processes of unification, points of subjectivation and centers of totalization as well as lines and processes that are desubjectivating and detotalizing. The task of the process philosopher or process empiricist in the Deleuzean mold is ‘to extract the concepts of which a multiplicity is made up, to determine the nature of these lines, to see how they become entangled, connect, bifurcate, avoid or fail to avoid the foci’ (1987: vii). It is by focusing on these lines that one traces out and distinguishes those processes that are ‘true becomings’ (1987: vii) from those processes that form unities, organize forms, and determine substances. What counts from the point of view of empiricism is the idea that multiplicities are formed through relations that are external to their terms. ‘Empiricism is fundamentally linked to a logic – a logic of multiplicities of which relations are only one aspect’ (1987: vii). Deleuze's process metaphysics is a philosophical experiment in which he ‘never renounced a kind of empiricism that sets out to present concepts directly’ (Deleuze, 1995: 88–89). What is the source of this empiricism in Deleuze? Rather than classical British empiricism, I want to suggest that the source of this empiricist metaphysics is found directly in the tradition of process philosophy (James, Bergson), but particularly in Whitehead. In the preface to the English translation of his Dialogues Deleuze says: I have always felt that I am an empiricist, that is, a pluralist. But what does this equivalence between empiricism and pluralism mean? It derives from the two characteristics by which Whitehead defined empiricism: the abstract does not explain, but must itself be explained; and the aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness). (1987: vii) These two characteristics of Deleuze's process empiricism correspond with the twofold task, both critical and creative, that we identified earlier in Deleuze's thought: to explain the abstract or the transcendent and thereby create the conditions for the construction of the plane of immanence. For Deleuze, Whitehead, and many process thinkers abstractions (the Universal, the Eternal, Substance, the Subject) do not explain anything. Indeed, abstractions produce ‘illusions', ‘false problems', and ‘fallacies’ by covering the real processes and conditions of production and preventing the creativity and novelty of experience from being thought. Abstract universals are products that must themselves be explained by exploring the processes that produced them. Just as we can say that for Deleuze there are two planes or images of thought and (at least) two sets of concepts, then we can say that there are two types of process that correspond with these concepts and planes: those processes that tend toward their relatively stable and stratified products on the plane of transcendence and being in itself, and those processes that tend toward their own consistency on the plane of immanence and becoming. For Deleuze, all universals are processes that tend toward abstractions that block becomings. As he explains, ‘there are no such things as universals, there's nothing transcendent, no unity, subject (or object), reason; there's only processes, sometimes unifying, subjectifying, rationalizing, but just processes all the same’ (1995: 145). Universals are not just concepts in the traditional sense so much as they are processes at work in multiplicities. Unifications, subjectifications, rationalizations, centralizations are processes ‘that often amount to an impasse or closing off that prevents the multiplicity's growth, the extension and unfolding Page 5 of 14

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of its lines, the production of something new’ (1995: 146). To use the language of Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, on the one hand there are processes that tend toward ‘stratification’ (1980: 40) and, on the other hand, there are processes that ‘destratify’ (1980: 3) and tend to free up the lines of the multiplicity. These latter are ‘processes [that]take place on the plane of immanence and within a given multiplicity’ (1995: 146). There are what Deleuze calls ‘arborescent processes’ (1995: 146) where lines of flight are temporality halted, knots and bottlenecks are created, and processes of becoming are blocked. And then there are ‘rhizomatic processes’ that tend to free or ‘deterritorialize’ the line, opening it up to new becomings. These two types of process are, in fact, explicitly marked in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus by their use of the French terms ‘procès’ and ‘processus’ and their translation into English as ‘process’ and ‘proceedings’ (1980: xvii). Procès refers only to the processes of stratification on the plane of organization and transcendence, processes that produce forms, substances, and being in itself. Processus is translated as the English ‘process’ and can refer to processes of destratification (and stratification) that undo those substances and organisms, releasing intensities and becomings from their ‘imprisonment’ in forms and beings. Let us take the example of the Internet. Originally developed as a means of enhancing military communications, currently around 3 billion people and counting, or 40% of the world's population, now have an Internet connection (up from 1% in 1995).5 Touted early on by some commentators as a liberating space of connectivity and democratization, the Internet could appear as the very model of the rhizome cutting across preexisting arborescent lines, enabling the destratification and free circulation of all kinds of materials, goods, services, and information. However, the Internet is now increasingly stratified by capital, nation-states, and various regulatory bodies, sometimes with collaboration between them. A case in point is search engine and advertising giant Google. The benignly stated mission of Google is ‘to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful’ (http://www.google.com/about/). The image of Google liberating and empowering humanity through access to information is, at times (some would say too often), in tension with their actual practices. For example, Google keeps a log of every search made and retains the data indefinitely. They install different types of ‘cookie’ on every computer that uses their search engine to extract different types of information from the user. Because each computer has a unique IP address, every website visited can be tracked and matched with the IP address. The key questions here are obvious: who can get access to this information and how might it be used? In 2012, Google responded to a U.S. Justice Department blanket request for information relating to employees of WikiLeaks by handing over all e-mail and digital data without informing the individuals concerned (until December 2014, in contrast to Twitter who fought the request and notified the individuals).6 In May 2014, the European Court of Justice passed what has been called the ‘right to be forgotten’ law requiring that Google remove links in accordance with European data privacy laws. Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google, has already made it clear that this will only apply to its European subdomains and not to Google.com unless they are forced to do so by the court.7 What this example suggests is that the Internet is not an ‘in itself’ or substantive thing subjected to external forces but a multiplicity, that is, an evolving product constituted by the ongoing struggle between processes of stratification and destratification. Although many of the processes that currently constitute the Internet are being aggressively shaped into a stratified commercial space in the grip of megacorporations (not only Google but Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.), from a Deleuzean perspective, it is unclear whether or how long this might continue, and there is no guarantee that these companies will be around that long. This is because processes of stratification that constitute what ‘is’ always and necessarily leave open the possibility of destratifications and becomings – the work of the ‘And’ – that uproot the strata and take them down newly constructed ‘lines of flight'. This is Deleuze's process empiricism which enables a decisive break with the ultimate substance illusion: the verb ‘to be’ and its attributes, so that finally ‘is’ yields to ‘and'. As Deleuze says, ‘empiricism has no other secret: thinking with And instead of Is. It is quite an extraordinary thought, and yet it is life’ (1987: 57).

Between ‘Is’ and ‘And' Page 6 of 14

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The path out of philosophical abstractions leads back to life and things in their wild state. This is the heart of Deleuze's process metaphysics. For Deleuze, this kind of conceptual experimentation and creativity seeks to ‘undermine being, make it topple over’ (1987: 57), creating a thinking outside of ‘Is', a thinking with the ‘And'. In several texts, Deleuze explicitly contrasts the ‘is’ and the ‘and’ and connects this to a new type of empiricism. For example, in his Dialogues with Claire Parnet, Deleuze says that ‘in Hume there is something very strange which completely displaces empiricism, giving it a new power, a theory and practice of relations, of the AND …’ (1987: 15). The ‘new power’ that Deleuze speaks of here is the autonomous power of relations freed from their subordination to ‘is', freed from the verb ‘to be'. The ‘and’ is not a specific relation but subtends all relations, giving them another direction ‘outside everything which could be determined as Being, One, Whole’ (1987: 57). The ‘and’ is not just an example of a conjunction but a special form of every possible conjunction, constituting its own logic. In Deleuze's process thought, the ‘and’ is always in between things, freeing up relations from their static ‘terms', enabling conjunctions to escape from their ‘dominant and conformist use based on the verb “to be”’ (1995: 44). As Deleuze says, ‘when you see relational judgments as autonomous you realize that they creep in everywhere, they invade and ruin everything: AND isn't even a specific conjunction or relation, it brings in all relations, there are as many relations as ANDs, AND doesn't just upset all relations, it upsets being, the verb …’ (1995: 44). In short, one must actually practice a ‘thinking with AND, instead of thinking IS, instead of thinking for IS’ (1987: 57). Thinking with ‘and’ is learning to creatively think with and alongside becomings. I want to suggest, then, that perhaps the key idea that motivates Deleuze's critique of the ‘traditional image of thought’ (1994: xvi) is its commitment to and grounding in the notion of a relatively static, timeless, and self-same being, a being in itself supported by a certain conception and use of language (the verb ‘to be') and judgment (the judgment ‘is'). Here, language and judgment conspire together and reinforce each other in the assumption that being, or what the world is like, consists of identifiable essences, beings, things, or objects each of which has a definite spatiotemporal location and a set of determinate properties. Such objects causally interact with each other and can, in principle, be fully accounted for in a complete description. This image, for Deleuze, covers over and distorts the operation and genesis of the real processes and becomings that constitute thought, experience, and life. In place of this image, Deleuze proposes a thinking with becoming that ‘substitutes the And for Is’ (1987: 57). Thinking with the ‘and’ provokes the ‘simultaneously contrary perceptions’ of becoming that underlie the model of judgment, a thinking with the intensities and differences that produce being in itself as effects of their functioning. In other words, when Deleuze and Guattari propose to ‘overthrow ontology’ (1980: 25), their target is the image of static being and its attributes that acts as a ground, foundation, and network of presuppositions for an explanation of what is. As Deleuze says: ‘all our thought is modeled, rather, on the verb “to be”, IS’ (1995: 44). For Deleuze, the history of philosophy is encumbered with the whole problem of being in itself and the question of the ‘isness’ of things. Philosophers ‘discuss the judgment of attribution (the sky is blue) and the judgment of existence (God is), which presupposes the other. But it is always the verb to be and the question of the principle’ (1987: 56). If the dogmatic ‘arborescent’ image with its tree-like structures and branches imposes the verb ‘to be’ on thought, it is through the ‘rhizome’ image subterraneously operating through the conjunction ‘and … and … and’ that thinking makes its escape. This conjunction ‘and', Deleuze and Guattari claim, ‘carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb “to be”’ (1980: 25). Thus, Deleuze's process philosophy will offer a genetic account and critique of a whole network of interconnected arborescent concepts (‘substance', ‘individual', ‘universal', ‘particular', ‘identity', ‘similarity', ‘thing', ‘person', ‘subject', ‘object') modeled on the logic of changeless being and the grammar of the verb ‘to be’ as well as create a new image and plane of thought – what we referred to earlier as a ‘plane of immanence’ – as much creating new dynamic concepts (e.g., ‘rhizome', ‘smooth space', ‘body without organs') as revitalizing and transforming traditional ones (‘becoming', ‘event', ‘difference') on the basis of the model of flow, process, change, and becoming. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, the point is to ‘move between things, establish a logic of the AND, overthrow ontology, do away with foundations’ (1980: 25). As the last point makes clear for Deleuze and for Deleuze and Guattari, the logic of ‘and’ or the model of Page 7 of 14

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change and becoming is not a simple inversion, reversal, opposition, or turning around of being in itself since it no longer acts as a new ground or foundation for change. Rather, the Deleuzean model of becoming effects a universal ‘unfounding’ (1990: 263) of all grounds and models. The distinction between two types of plane, between ‘is’ and ‘and', does not preclude their interrelation and interconnection. Deleuze and Guattari remark here that it is not that there are multiplicities that are arborescent and some that are not. Rather, in concrete terms ‘there is an arborification of multiplicities’ just as rhizomes are constantly ‘inventing connections that jump from tree to tree and uproot them’ (1980: 506). Rhizomes have points of arborescence just as trees have rhizome lines. The plane of organization tries to plug up the lines of flight and block the movements of the ‘and’ by reconstituting subjects and forms of being and, conversely, becomings are constantly extricating themselves from being through special processes and affects. Indeed, one problem is that one continually passes from one plane to another ‘without being aware of it, or one becomes aware of it only afterwards’ (1980: 269). All too easily, the plane of immanence can ‘pass to the other side and assume the role of a ground’ (1980: 269). Let us take the example of languages. For Deleuze and Guattari, there has always been a struggle in languages between the ‘is’ and the ‘and', the verb (to be) and the conjunction (and). In French, this is a struggle between est and et, which are identical in French pronunciation. The ‘is’ uses the verb ‘to be’ to subordinate conjunctions, forcing them to gravitate around it. The ‘is’ does this by extracting ‘constants’ which serve as a standard or norm by which to measure variables, whereas the ‘and’ subjects variables to continuous variation. The ‘is’ and the ‘and’ are thus two different ways of treating the variable: in the first, the variable is fixed and rendered uniform; in the second, the variable is opened to a continuum of variation. The ‘is’ and the ‘and’ do not represent two different kinds of languages but two processes at work within languages. These processes do not correspond to the distinction between the unity of a major language and a proliferation of dialects, or between major and minor languages where regional situations distribute bilingual or multilingualisms on the basis of a dominant and dominated language. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, dialects or ghetto languages can and have been analyzed in terms of homogenous systems, drawing out constants from them. ‘Black English', Deleuze and Guattari maintain, ‘has its own grammar’ (1980: 102) which is studied from the point of view of a major language. In addition, when French ‘lost its world-wide major function’ (1980:102), it did not lose the characteristics of a major language: constancy, homogeneity, and centrality. Conversely, Afrikaans as a regional minor language began to acquire some of these major characteristics in its struggle with English. What these examples show is that, from the point of view of the struggle between ‘is’ and ‘and', the major/minor distinction in language is less important than the characteristic processes and functions, major or minor, that a language retains, acquires, or deploys. Let us take English. In Deleuze and Guattari's terms, English is a globally major or arborescent language, a universal lingua franca full of hegemonic and imperialist tendencies. Yet, because of this status English is vulnerable to the subterranean workings of dialects and ghettoizations that open it up to all kinds of rhizomatic corruptions, transformations, and variations from within. The worldwide imperialism of English means that it is worked upon and open to subversion by all the minorities of the world just as it hegemonizes and subordinates all the languages that it comes into contact with. Thus, the futility of those who demand, for example, a ‘pure French’ uncorrupted by Anglicization or who protest the spread of ‘Franglais’ or, indeed, those (like the Acadèmie Française) who denounce the widespread use of English words like ‘e-mail’ in worldwide electronic language communications. This struggle between the ‘is’ and the ‘and’ can be clearly seen in relation to processes of individuation and the events they express.

Individuation and Events Deleuze's ontology not only moves between ‘is’ and ‘and’ but creates a whole new type of process ‘entity’ or individuated content based on the ‘superior empiricism’ (1994: 57) of relations of becoming. These new types of individuated process are subjectless and impersonal activities produced in between things, persons, and subjects. They do not ‘belong’ to persons or things, are not ‘possessed’ by them as such, and cannot be Page 8 of 14

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counted or quantified even though they have their own unique individuations. These new process entities are a-subjective, pre-individual, and non-particular forms of individuation; dynamic forms of activity without unity that in effect constitute what, as we have seen, Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘multiplicity'. The processes that make up the content of this multiplcity are characterized by movements and forces that create unique individuations. A time of day, an hour, a season have a very special kind of individuality, Deleuze and Guattari say, ‘even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a subject’ (1980: 260). As Deleuze says, ‘maybe it's a mistake to believe in the existence of things, persons or subjects. The title A Thousand Plateaus refers to those individuations that don't individuate persons or things’ (1995: 26). In an interview, Deleuze describes his own ‘individuality', and that of Guattari, in similar terms: ‘we're not at all sure we're persons: a draft, a wind, a time of day, a stream, a place, a battle, an illness all have a nonpersonal individuality … If you speak like most people on the level of opinions, you say “me, I'm a person”, just as you say “the sun's rising”. But we're not convinced that's definitely the right concept. Felix and I, and many others like us, don't feel we're persons exactly. Our individuality is rather that of events….’ (1995: 141). Deleuze's new process entities are impersonal individuations or ‘singularities’ that cannot be thought of in relation to the conventional philosophical notion of particulars. Borrowing and reworking Duns Scotus’ concept of ‘haecceity’ as a special type of individuation or ‘thisness', the haecceity of a life is not the same as the subject that lives it or serves as its support. What differentiates these types of individuation is that they ‘consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected’ (1980: 261). Thus, the constituent elements of the new types of individuated process are relations of movement that retain powers or capacities independently of things and persons, capacities to affect or be affected. Processes themselves, in Deleuze and Guattari's sense, create and carry these capacities along with them, autonomous capacities or powers to combine intensities and connect affects. But again, Deleuze and Guattari stress, we must avoid a simple opposition between formed subjects, things, and persons on the one hand and individuations of the haecceity type on the other. As they say, ‘you will yield nothing to haecceities unless you realize that that is what you are, and you are nothing but that’ (1980: 262). As an example of the individuation of ‘a life', let us take Deleuze's own extraordinary description of one of Charles Dickens’ characters from his novel Our Mutual Friend. ‘Rogue’ Riderhood is a scoundrel and universally scorned. He makes his living by fishing out corpses from the river Thames. Involved in an accident on the river, and in a serious condition, Riderhood is attended by a doctor and assisted by several onlookers. No one has the least regard for the man, but what they do have a ‘deep interest in', according to Dickens, is the ‘spark of life’ (Dickens:1998) that appears separable from Riderhood the man. Everyone displays a care, an urgency, and respect for this ‘spark’ and makes it their business to save this man. When their efforts succeed and the man begins to respond, ‘his benefactors turn cold, and he himself rediscovers his old vulgarity and meanness’ (2006: 386). What interests Deleuze and Dickens is the ‘spark’ of a life where the individual's personal qualities (Riderhood's meanness and vulgarity) are suspended, revealing ‘a haecceity … of singularization: a life of pure immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil, since only the subject who incarnated it in the midst of things [Riderhood's personal characteristics] made it good or bad’ (2006: 387). The haecceities and individuations of a life coexist with the life of the empirical individual but cannot be reduced to it. As Deleuze puts it, ‘the life of the individual has given way to an impersonal and yet singular life, which foregrounds a pure event that has been liberated from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what comes to pass’ (2006: 386–387). A life is a mode of individuation, a movement, and power, distinct from the properties and empirical determinations of the life of the individual. It is constituted by haecceities, singularities, or what Deleuze calls pure events. As the above points make clear, one special type of individuating process is the ‘event'. The concept of the event has considerable significance in Deleuze and in Deleuze and Guattari, appearing in numerous books across the range of their thought. In his The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Deleuze even uncovers a ‘secret school’ within the philosophical tradition devoted to answering the question ‘What is an Event?’ Of course, the 20th-century successor to this secret school, the diadoche as Deleuze calls him, who inherits the question of the event is none other than fellow process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1993: 76). What is the Page 9 of 14

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significance of this concept in Deleuze's and in Deleuze and Guattari's work? One important point is that the event contests the status of objects or ‘things’ as the central element in ontology. As Deleuze puts it, ‘I have it's true spent a lot of time writing about this notion of the event: you see I don't believe in things’ (1995: 160). But the event is not just a way to think around the concept of ‘things’ since, as we have seen, other modes of individuation do this as well. Perhaps the central target of the event is the notion of being in itself. As Deleuze remarks, ‘I've tried in all my books to discover the nature of events; it's a philosophical concept, the only one capable of ousting the verb “to be” and attributes’ (1995: 141). The event contests the category of things and offers the possibility of challenging being in itself by reconceptualizing the spatiotemporal character of individuations on the plane of immanence. Deleuze's concept of the event receives various formulations in his work, but the basic structure is well known: on the one hand, a state of affairs that relates to actualized bodies and individuals and, on the other, an incorporeal reserve of infinite becoming and virtual movement. Ordinarily we might think of processes as sets of events where the event is relatively localized in space and tine and the process, of which the event is a part, is a longer or extended duration. The event in Deleuze does not individuate processes in this way. Like other nonpersonal individuations, Deleuzean events are not extended in space and time as such, although they are actualized in space and time. Like all individuating processes, we have to think of events in Deleuze as twofold. There is the event that is actualized in space and time and has spatial and temporal parts, but there is also the event that insists and subsists in an ‘intensive spatium’ (2004: 97) but is not extended as such. In this section we will focus on the spatial characteristics of the event. Deleuze and Guattari call the non-extended space of events ‘smooth space’ in contrast to the ‘striated space’ of extended actualized events. It ‘is filled by events or haecceities’ (1980: 479), whereas striated space is constituted by perceived and formed things. Smooth space gives rise to movements, speeds, and affects, whereas striated space contains properties, qualities, and actual forms. It is a space of ‘distances not of measures and properties’ (1980:479); it is non-metric, a-centered, and directional. What is perceivable in a smooth space are events as affects and intensities: ‘wind and noise, forces, and sonorous and tactile qualities, as in desert, steppe or ice. The creaking of the ice and the song of the sands’ (1980: 479). The smooth space of events and haecceties is constantly being translated into striated space just as striated space is continually reversed and returned to smooth space. As an example, let us take the sea, as Deleuze and Guattari do. The sea is a smooth space par excellence, yet was among the first to be subjected to strict striation. Maritime space was striated through two astronomical and geographical gains: bearings obtained by calculations based on observation of the stars and the sun; and the map, which coordinates meridians and parallels, longitudes and latitudes plotting known and unknown spaces onto a grid (D&G, 1980: 479). Long before these calculations, navigators used complex individuated events and intensive features to guide the way: the wind and the noise, the colors and sounds of the seas (D&G, 1980: 479). As the striated takes hold, the sea passes from a smooth, intensive, directional, non-metric multiplicity to an extended, dimensional metric space. This struggle between smooth and striated spaces shows that they can be distinguished in principle, but in reality they are always mixed. Let us take another contrasting example. In a perhaps surprising development, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) claims to have deployed the concept of smooth space strategically to rethink operations in urban warfare (Weizman, 2006). Rather than expose themselves to the dangers of moving through and occupying the striated spaces of a city (e.g., a booby-trapped door handle, a bomb in an alleyway), the IDF have attempted to ‘smooth’ striated space avoiding streets, roads, alleys, and courtyards by moving ‘horizontally through party walls and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors’ (Weizman, 2006). This movement effectively redraws the ‘syntax’ of the city's architecture turning it into a pure event: a ‘flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux’ (Weizman, 2006). Here the ‘smoothing’ operation is in the service of a ‘war machine', demonstrating that striation can give rise to the smooth space of events just as the smooth can communicate with forces that end up striating events in new ways. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, ‘never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us’ (1980: 500). In the next and final section, we will situate Deleuze's process philosophy by giving an account of change and becoming in his work in the context of the Page 10 of 14

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philosophical tradition.

Change and Pure Becoming Western philosophy and the history of metaphysics have long been preoccupied with the description of being in terms of stable and static substances where change is thought to be secondary, derivative, mere appearance, or even illusion. According to Aristotle (1941: 693–694; Metaphysics, 983b6–27), the majority of the first philosophers are said to have attempted to explain what is by proposing a primary ‘element’ or ‘stuff’ as a first principle where the first principles, whether material or not, have been regarded as unchanging and independent realities and only what emerges from them or is generated out of them is subject to change and transformation. If there is change on this schema, it is the change of one static quality into another. Thus, change is only ‘weak’ or secondary in relation to the ontological primacy of the unchanging element. It is perhaps with the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides that even this weak or derived change is first regarded as error stricken, deceptive, and illusory since we cannot know what is not. If a thing is constantly changing its properties and is not determinately this or that, then we cannot make true statements about it. The argument that change is unintelligible because we cannot know what is not passes through Plato, Platonism, and the form-matter distinction and is given perhaps its most decisive historical articulation and reformulation in the scholastic interpretations of Aristotle, but also arguably in Aristotle himself. For example, in Aristotle's formulation of the principle of non-contradiction (‘The same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject’ 1941: 736; Metaphysics, 1005b18–19), being is itself tied to identity such that the essence of a thing, what it is in itself, is bound to an unchanging identity with itself. This is what a ‘subject’ is in its independent reality. However, the subject as independent reality has predicates or attributes that are dependent upon it. An attribute cannot both belong and not belong to a subject at the same time on pain of contradiction. Contrary attributes (e.g., a body in motion and a body at rest) can be predicated of a subject but only at different times. Here change is not regarded as unintelligible as such but is reduced to an analysis of the changing states (e.g., motion, rest) or predicates of the entity that undergoes the change. On this schema, the essential identity of the thing, its substance or ‘primary matter', what makes it the kind of being or thing that it is in itself remains unchanged while the attributes, properties, or modifications are subjected to the ‘accidents’ of change. Thus, the key question and problem regarding change in relation to the history of philosophy and the being-substance scheme is how something – a concrete individual or particular – remains the same through change. How does a person, thing, or object persist in its identity through time despite the changes that it undergoes? And one of the key answers in the philosophical tradition to this question has been to appeal to a ‘substratum', the being of substance, a subject, identity, or ‘thing in itself’ that supports attributes or properties and persists unchanged beneath the changes that properties undergo. Although explicit appeals to the ‘substance-attribute’ scheme in contemporary philosophy are now relatively rare, the presuppositions of this conceptual scheme, forming a ‘common-sense’ inferential system and network of explanation that Deleuze will call, as we have seen, an ‘image of thought’ or the ‘world of representation’ (1994: 262), are still deeply embedded within philosophy and contemporary modes of thought. These schemas give expression to all kinds of static isolatable entities, substance substitutes, and transcendent alternatives that pervade all areas of philosophy as well as other disciplines and methodologies throughout the humanities, social sciences, and the sciences. In contrast to this view, Deleuze gives an account of change in which change is all there ‘is'. Following Bergson, for Deleuze there is change and movement but no ‘things’ that underlie change or movement. In Deleuze, we might say the ‘Heraclitean element’ (1988: 113) runs deep. Heraclitus famously claimed that all was change and flux: ‘everything flows'. But what does this mean? One interpretation of what that means is to say that a thing is always in a state of change with respect to some of its properties. Another interpretation is to say that a thing is always in a state of change with respect to all of its properties. Both of these interpretations can be classed as what we earlier referred to as ‘weak’ views of change or what we can call examples of ‘relative’ becoming. In some of Plato's dialogues, Socrates establishes that there are two ‘kinds of change’ Page 11 of 14

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that correspond to the two forms of ‘weak’ change that we have described. The first kind of change relates to ‘movement'. A flux changes through movement in space and time. A second kind of change is ‘alteration'. In a flux, qualities or predicates are constantly altering their features by degree or kind. If a flux changes only in respect to one kind of change, say movement, then this ‘weak’ change can be qualified in certain respects. This is a view identified by Aristotle as that in which ‘not merely some things but all things in the world are in motion and always in motion’ (1941: 361; Physics, 253b 10–11). If a flux changes in respect to both kinds of change, then it can still be said to be becoming in both of those respects. There is nothing contradictory or particularly radical in the claim that something is continually changing with respect to both its spatiotemporal location and its predicates. Indeed, one could argue that the majority of thinkers in the process tradition have argued this. This is a coherent and respectable thesis and, one could argue, true of all things. However, a further interpretation, perhaps the most radical of all, would be a ‘strong’ view of change in which things with their changing properties are the effect of a flux that always changes with respect to itself, a flux that differs from itself continuously. This is Socrates’ famous ‘thing in flux flows white, but changes’ (1977: 151; Theatetus, 182d 1–7). On this view, there could not be said to be a determinate ‘flux’ or ‘flow', let alone a ‘thing’ that is in the process of becoming white. On this more radical interpretation, no thing can be said to be in a process of ‘becoming white’ since each ‘thing’ is in absolute change in absolutely every respect including these more relative becomings. In other words, even the seemingly stronger view of the two forms of change where all the predicates of a thing are in becoming still leaves the relative stability and identity of the processes or flows that are said to characterize the thing. On what I am calling the strong or ‘radical’ view of change, no flow, process, or becoming persists long enough for it to be identified as such. It is not simply that the color ‘white’ is in perpetual becoming, but the flow, process, or ‘becoming white’ itself which is subject to continuous variation. This more radical or strong view of change is Deleuze's own notion of absolute becoming, a becoming that he attributes to Heraclitus. As Deleuze remarks, ‘We have to reflect for a long time to understand what it means to make an affirmation of becoming’ (1983: 23). Deleuze says that Heraclitus affirms becoming and in two senses. Firstly, Heraclitus affirms that there is no being, only becoming. This is what Deleuze calls Heraclitus’ ‘working thought’ (1983: 23). This working thought is consistent with the more conventional understanding of Heraclitean becoming as the idea that both place and quality are subject to change and are perhaps always changing. The working thought is consistent with the idea that ‘things’ are flows or processes, but flows or processes that are identifiable flows or processes. Deleuze, for his part, recognizes these identical or ‘relative’ becomings and, as we have suggested, one aspect of Deleuze's process philosophy aims to give a genetic account of their production. Second, Deleuze claims that Heraclitus affirms the idea that there is a being of becoming, that being is the being of becoming. In what he calls Heraclitus’ ‘contemplative thought’ (1983: 23), Deleuze argues that Heraclitus affirms that the being of becoming is return: ‘return is the being of that which becomes’ (1983: 24). This ‘contemplative’ or speculative thought is Deleuze's notion of absolute becoming where, as we saw earlier, what returns is precisely the difference that does not allow a becoming to be identified. This is the only ‘being’ that absolute becoming can have. In several of his books, Deleuze gives the notion of absolute becoming the Nietzschean name ‘eternal return': ‘the eternal return is predicated only of becoming and the multiple. It is the law of a world without being, without unity, without identity. Far from presupposing the One and the Same, the eternal return constitutes the only unity of the multiple as such, the only identity of what differs: coming back is the only “being” of becoming. Consequently, the function of the eternal return as Being is never to identify but to authenticate’ (2004: 124). What is authenticated is the ‘superior’ ever-changing form of what ‘is', the transformation of recognized and identifiable values by the creative chaos of absolute becoming. For Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and much of the Western philosophical tradition, this view of change and becoming is contradictory and paradoxical. For Plato, if the world is in constant change in this sense, then ‘every answer to any question whatsoever is equally correct’ (1977: 158; Theatetus, 183a). For Aristotle, in a world of absolute becoming, every statement about things must be false (1941: Metaphysics, 1005b: 20; 1010a: 5–14; esp. 1012b: 26–31). In either case, and for the tradition generally, to think change in itself or absolute becoming is contradictory, incoherent, impossible. This is because change is thought on the basis of Page 12 of 14

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the model of being in itself alongside the principle of non-contradiction and the logic of identity. In contrast, Deleuze's central philosophical project is to think absolute becoming and change, to show that they can thought and affirmed, and to apply the insights they yield to a new process vision of the world that problematizes conventional philosophical ideas and deep-rooted assumptions about knowledge, thought, and life.

Notes 1Deleuze co-authored several books with the radical psychoanalyst and political thinker Felix Guattari (1930–1992). Most notably, they wrote the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia together – AntiOedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). 2Several philosophers have begun to read Deleuze in the context of process philosophy. In particular, see James Williams’ Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time (Edinburgh University Press, 2011). Works by Massumi (Parables for the Virtual, Duke University Press, 2002), Shaviro (Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead and Deleuze on Aesthetics, MIT Press, 2012), and Stengers (Thinking With Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts, Harvard University Press, 2014) all read and use Deleuzean inflected process ideas in their work. Also, see my ‘Back to Life: Deleuze, Whitehead and Process', Deleuze Studies vol 4, 1, March 2010. 3Accounts of the image of thought can be found throughout Deleuze's work. In particular see Difference and Repetition (1994, Ch. 3); Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983, Ch.3:S.15), and with Guattari, Proust and Signs (2000, Pt 1). 4In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari contrast their own view of concepts with what they call pseudophilosophical and quasi-scientific ‘conceptual functions.’ In the latter view, concepts have been reduced to propositional functions which totalize their elements or quantify universally over them. 5 http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/ 6Ed Pilkington, ‘Google waited 6 months to tell WikiLeaks it passed employee data to FBI.’ The Guardian February 12, 2015. Online at: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/12/google-wikileaks-data-fbidata 7 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014–11-26/google-pushed-to-extend-forgotten-requests-to-u-ssite

References Aristotle. (1941). The Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed. Richard McKeon. New York: Random House. Deleuze, Gilles. (1983). Nietzsche and Philosophy. London: Athlone Press. Deleuze, Gilles. (1987). Dialogues. London: Athlone Press. Deleuze, Glles. (1988). Foucault. London: Athlone Press. Deleuze, Gilles. (1990). The Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. (1993). The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. London: Athlone Press. Deleuze, Gilles. (1994). Difference and Repetition. London: Athlone Press. Deleuze, Gilles. (1995). Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. (2000). Proust and Signs. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles. (2004). Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974. New York: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, Gilles. (2006). Two Regimes of Madness. Texts and Interviews 1975–1995. New York: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix. (1988). A Thousand Plateaus. London: Athlone Press. Page 13 of 14

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Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix. (1994). What is Philosophy? London: Verso. Dickens, Charles. (1998). Our Mutual Friend, Ch.3, Bk 3, pp 443–445. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hacking, Ian. (2002). Historical Ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1990). Twilight of the Idols. London: Penguin Books. Plato. (1977). Theatetus/Sophist, Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weizman, Eyal. (2006). ‘Lethal theory'. Frieze, issue 99, May 2006 online at: http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/the_art_of_war/ http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n4

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies James, Dewey, and Mead: On What Must Come Before All Our Inquiries

Contributors: John Shotter Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "James, Dewey, and Mead: On What Must Come Before All Our Inquiries" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n5 Print pages: 71-84 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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James, Dewey, and Mead: On What Must Come Before All Our Inquiries John Shotter The essence of life is its continuously changing character; but our concepts are all discontinuous and fixed …. When we conceptualize, we cut out and fix, and exclude everything but what we have fixed. A concept means a that-and-no-other. Conceptually, time excludes space; motion and rest exclude each other; … presence excludes absence; unity excludes plurality; … whereas in the real concrete sensible flux of life experiences compenetrate each other so that it is not easy to know just what is excluded and what not. (James, 1909/1996, pp. 253–254) Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us./One might also give the name ‘philosophy’ to what is possible before all new discoveries and inventions. (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.126)

Introduction: Before-The-Fact Orientational Understandings The shape of modern thought has been massively influenced by the success of the physical sciences, by the idea that there are ‘à priori', timeless truths out in Nature upon which our practices can be based. But what is slowly coming to the fore in recent times, is the degree to which what is ‘objective’ and what is ‘subjective’ is something established by human subjects, in different ways at different times, not something we can assume to be already in existence. Thus, in the process view I want to explore here, the timeless ‘things’ that in the field of organization studies we have named as ‘organizations', ‘management', ‘leadership', ‘strategy', ‘innovation', ‘values', ‘culture', ‘bureaucracy', and so on, and such like, and tried to study as ‘objective’ things (with their own implied agential powers) already existing but hidden somewhere ‘behind appearances', need to be rethought. They are better talked of as emerging from within material intra-actions (Barad, 2007) occurring out in the world at large, intra-actions unfolding in time within the intra-mingling, flowing strands of activity within we are all inevitably immersed. Indeed, to go further, if Barad is correct, instead of discovering pre-existing things in our inquiries, we continually bring such ‘things’ into existence. So, although we may talk of our (actionable or performative) understandings as coming into existence as a result of our ‘thoughts', ‘ideas', ‘plans', or ‘actionable knowledge’ (Argyris, 2005), i.e., as a result of nameable causal processes, the fact is, such processes can only be seen as having been at work in people's performances after-the-fact of their completion. Thus, what I want to suggest here is not so much that our current ‘theorizing’ in organizational studies is wrong, but that we have it backwards, so to speak: ‘Something else(s)', before-the-fact of their completion, is at work in guiding people in the unfolding, moment-by-moment, course of their actions than the timeless, nameable things whose nature we currently seek to discover in our so-called rational inquiries. It is these ‘something else(s)’ that I want to explore in the works of James, Dewey, and Mead below. For, to an extent, in seeing our more deliberate and conscious capacities as evolving or emerging over time from our spontaneously responsive, living, bodily activities out in relation to our surroundings, they are all what I will call before-the-fact thinkers – an orientation which, because of their emphasis on our pre-conceptual, pre-intellectual, and pre-cognitive experiences, has led to them being largely ignored in recent times. For crucially, such thinking involves our switching our attention away from the assumption of our thinking as a kind of inner, mental ‘calculating’ that can be done by the manipulation of already fixed, representative symbols, to attending to it as a process that begins by our experiencing distinctive movements of feeling unfolding within us as we move around in the world, feelings that work to orient and to direct us, step-by-step in our movements, feelings that elsewhere (Shotter, 2005) I have called action guiding feelings. For, as I see it, we face two major difficulties in conducting our everyday activities, not just one that we call Page 2 of 14

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problem solving. For prior to any kind of intellectual cogitations, we face the task of judging how to relate ourselves to the others and othernesses around us in these particular surroundings (rather than being located just anywhere); we need to orient ourselves, to gain a sense of the possibilities available to us in our surroundings for taking our next steps (Shotter, 2009). We need to assess, for instance, whether a current organizational failure is due to miscommunication or to staff inadequacy. Thus my task in this chapter is to bring to light many of what I will call the before-the-fact orienting accounts of aspects of our lived experience appearing in the writings of William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead; accounts that, I hope, will help all those of us wishing to conduct our inquiries within the context of a process philosophy.

From Timeless ‘Forms’ to Timely ‘Meanings' But before turning in particular to their writings, I want to explore a number of very general aspects of process philosophy itself in an effort to ‘set the scene', so to speak, for clarifying why I have chosen to pick out the particular passages that I have from the writings of James, Dewey, and Mead. Primarily, as I indicated above, the rethinking needed, as I see it, entails assuming that in living our lives we are continually involved in intra-actions occurring among intra-mingling, flowing strands of activity, within which all the others and othernesses around us are also inevitably immersed. Within such a ‘fluid’ worldview, rather than seeing ourselves as external agents wholly in control of the mechanical, causal processes of importance to us, we need to see ourselves as being internally related to still-in-process, flowing ‘worlds’ of intermingling activities, which, in flowing through us, influence us as much, if not more, than we can influence them. Our failure in the past to take account of the fact that we come to a form of consciousness, so to speak, from within already flowing streams of intra-mingling social activities, means that we continually fail to distinguish the thinking that just comes to happen within us (without our being aware of it as an emergent process unfolding in time), as a consequence of being within a particular circumstance, and the de-contextualized thinking that we, as professional adult thinkers do deliberately, and know of ourselves to be doing as a result of becoming a member of a particular professional group (Shotter, 1984). As a consequence, we fail to notice that we almost unconsciously, continually oscillate between living in two worlds: a timeless world of situation-independent, theoretical concepts (ideal forms), and an everyday world, in which everything grows, changes, and develops in/through/over time, in different ways in different situations. This is why this switch away from timeless after-the-fact to time-full before-the-fact inquiries is so important; because over and over again in our research discussions we hear someone in our research groups asking: ‘How can we define or conceptualize this?’ For at the moment, we feel that it is only when we have defined and conceptualized the tension aroused in us by a bewildering or puzzling circumstance as a ‘nameable thing’ in some way, can we think logically and systematically about it, i.e., in a ‘calculational’ manner. Thus, by beginning our thinking by straightaway seeking definitions and conceptualizations, is to ignore the particular situated meanings our experiences, as living beings, already have for us. As Mead (1934/1962) puts it: ‘The meaning of what [someone is] saying is the tendency to respond to it’ (p. 67), and assuming only that what goes on in the heads of single individuals, cognitively, is of importance, can (mis)lead us into ignoring the influences of our larger surroundings at work upon all of us within a research group. For the fact is, only if we share what we might call an embodied structure of expectations or anticipations, i.e., meanings, with all the others around us (Bakhtin, 1986; Garfinkel, 1967)1, can we communicate with them in an unconfusing manner. Although a particular circumstance might puzzle us initially, the fact is, the puzzlement it arouses in us in never of a general kind; it always has its own unique nature (see Dewey, 1938/2008, p. 109, quoted below), and all those of us within it can partake of that nature – think of a group discussing the numbers on a spreadPage 3 of 14

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sheet, or art critics gathered around a painting. Thus what we need to do is not just to achieve a satisfaction of the tensions initially aroused in us, as individuals, but to create ways of verbally articulating them in such a way as to arouse in the others around us particular anticipations as to what next steps they could take that will make it possible for them to coordinate their behaviour in with ours. Assuming, then, that this is our task – to clarify the nature of the different influences at work around us and within us in that can guide us, step-by-step towards the performance of an action before we succeed in doing it – I will now turn to the writings of James, Dewey, and Mead in an effort to illuminate the nature of the social processes within which we are immersed in the living of our lives, and the influences we can, only in concerted efforts with the others around us, exert upon them as the influences of those social activities flow through us.

James and Our ‘Acutely Discriminative Sense' Not only do we need to distinguish between the thinking that we as adult thinkers do deliberately and know of ourselves as doing, and the thinking that just happens within us, we also need to distinguish events that contribute towards learning or extending our first language – events within which we are first, so to speak, ‘shown around', the house of our being – from those events that merely work to articulate our familiarity with it in yet more detail.2 For at first, the words, the utterances of others cannot designate ‘things’ already well known, for the ‘things’ designated would have to be seen as such independently of language, and that is clearly not the case. They thus cannot at first be ‘signs', in the sense of pointing beyond themselves to something else in our surroundings. At first, simply due to our spontaneous responsiveness as living beings to events occurring around us, their expressions must simply do something both to us and in us immediately – they must ‘move’ us.

‘What We Are in’ Rather Than What Is ‘in Us' In other words, we must not ignore aspects of our already existing living relations to our surroundings due simply to our animal natures. As James (1890/1950) put it: ‘It takes … a mind debauched by learning to carry the process of making the natural seem strange, so far as to ask for the why of any instinctive human act. To the metaphysician alone can such questions occur as: Why do we smile, when pleased, and not scowl? … Why does a particular maiden turn our wits so upside-down?’ (vol. 2. p. 387) – but no ultimate grounding can be agreed for answers to such questions. At any one moment in history, our everyday, languaged ways of acting provide the ultimate grounding for our knowledge claims. Thus, instead of seeking a supposed, hidden causal mechanism, as an explanation of why we smile rather than scowl when pleased, if we are to get oriented, to get a grasp of the possible next steps that might follow in our everyday activities from a smile, we need to understand the many different roles a smile might play in our larger social relations with each other – which, as we will see, faces us with a hermeneutical task rather than an explanatory one. Further, just as Wittgenstein (1953) claimed that we are often misled by our ordinary everyday usages of language – ‘a picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably’ (no. 115) – so James also questioned our reliance on common speech: ‘Naming our thought by its own objects, we almost all of us assume that as the objects are, so the thought must be’ (p. 195). The fact is, however, the reference of these terms can be identified only within the instance of discourse within which they occur; they cannot be named in general terms. He called our tendency to do this, ‘the psychologist's fallacy’ (James, 1890/1950, I, pp. 196–197) and warned against our working in terms, not of a direct, bodily acquaintance with our surroundings, but when an ‘object is present to the thought that thinks it by a counterfeit image of itself … the shape in which things are present when only a general notion of them is before the mind’ (p. 197, my italics) – for generalities, inevitably, ignore the fact that we always find Page 4 of 14

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ourselves facing a unique task in a unique situation, the details of which matter to us. A different realm of inquiry is required, one that is clearly oriented towards inquiring into the strange, invisible nature of relational things and the nature of the concrete unities constituting them, a realm within which we inquire into, not only what goes on inside individual people, but also into the nature of the surroundings in which people go on inside of, and the unfolding movements of feelingful experience such surroundings can arouse within us. In the Introduction to his Psychology (Briefer Course), James (1892/1962) indicated the need for this realm of inquiry as follows: ‘Mental facts cannot be properly studied apart from the physical environment of which they take cognizance. The great fault of the older rational psychology was to set up the soul as an absolute spiritual being with certain faculties of its own by which the several activities of remembering, imagining, reasoning, willing, etc., were explained, almost without reference to the peculiarities of the world with which these activities deal. But the richer insight of modern days perceives that our inner faculties are adapted in advance to the features of the world in which we dwell …’ (p. 17) – we are not just in the world, but of it. Earlier, in his The Principles of Psychology (James, 1890/1950), in the course of his notoriously introspective ‘study of the mind from within’ (p. 224), James objected to our inveterate ‘habit of not attending to sensations as subjective facts, but of simply using them as stepping-stones to pass over to the recognition of the realities whose presence they reveal’ (p. 231). And he went on to claim that, phenomenologically, ‘consciousness … does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as “chain” or “train” do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A “river” or a “stream” are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life’ (p. 239, itals in original). And he goes on: ‘As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is [the] different pace of its parts. Like a bird's life, it seems to be made of alternative flights and perchings… Let us call the resting-places the ‘substantive parts', and the places of flight the ‘transitive parts', of the stream of thought… [and] it is very difficult, introspectively, to see the transitive parts for what they really are’ (p. 243). For, to the extent that they are before-the-fact influences on what we will later achieve, they cannot be described in static terms at all. Indeed, in complaining further of the tendency to fix our attention on static images, he suggested that ‘the definite images of traditional psychology form but the very smallest part of our minds as they actually live’ – and went on to point out that it is the ‘free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows around it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it, – or rather that is fused into one with it’ (James, 1890, p. 255, my italics). But when we act as if ‘events’ within the flow can be lifted out from it, as if in a bucket, and be taken off for further study within a laboratory, we fail totally to realize the degree to which they rely for their existence upon their surroundings, upon the intermingling activities continuously flowing though them in both constituting and sustaining them as the beings they are.3 In other words, as we will see, we always have a specific directional sense of ‘what thoughts are next to arise, before they have arisen … [and] when very fresh, our minds carry an immense horizon with them’ (p. 256).

The Role of Our Pre-Conceptual, Pre-Cognitive, Transitional Feelingful Experiences Thus, what becomes apparent then, in all of James's writings, is that although we are continually tempted to Page 5 of 14

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couch the results of our inquiries in terms of describable patterns of objective entities out in the world, it is in our transitional experiences, as we move around within the particular circumstance we happen to be in, that we find the action guiding influences we need in shaping either our utterances, or our actions, or both. Within the traditional vocabulary of the Cartesian-cut, we would tend to say that the moving, transitive parts are more on the subjective, performative side of the cut, while the relatively stable, substantive parts are more on the objective side. But James (1890/1950), like Barad (2003, 2007), also points out that our experiences from within the flow are not at all like bounded entities with clear beginnings and endings, but they are, as he puts it, ‘signs of direction in thought of which we have an acutely discriminative sense, though no definite sensorial image plays any part in it whatsoever … These bare images of logical movement … are psychic transitions, always on the wing, and not to be glimpsed except in flight. Their function is to lead from one set of images to another’ (p. 253). In other words, in its shaped-movement, it happens within us as a prelinguistic ‘standard’ against which to ‘measure', so to speak, possible sequences of words in which to express its nature; and ‘as the words that replace it arrive, it welcomes them successively and calls them right if they agree with it, it rejects them and calls them wrong if they do not’ (p. 253). Later, he wrote that they are ‘feelings of tendency, often so vague that we are unable to name them at all', and he continues: ‘It is, in short, the re-instatement of the vague4 to its proper place in our mental life that I am so anxious to press on the attention’ (p. 254) – for, although on the one hand not just any words can be made to ‘satisfy’ the felt tension aroused in us by a circumstance in which we find ourselves, it is on the other hand open to an indefinite number of possible verbal formulations. Indeed, we will find this as a main point in John Dewey's (1938/2008) contribution to these issues: any bewilderment or confusion we might experience in our everyday life activities is a quite specific confusion; and our task in bringing words to an initially vague or indeterminate circumstance is to do justice in our utterances and actions to the uniquely detailed nature of the situation within which we find ourselves. And we cannot do that by conceptualizing it! Why not? Because, as James (1909/1996) points out: ‘The essence of life is its continuously changing character; but our concepts are all discontinuous and fixed, and the only mode of making them coincide with life is by arbitrarily supposing positions of arrest therein…. When we conceptualize, we cut out and fix, and exclude everything but what we have fixed. A concept means a that-and-no-other. Conceptually, time excludes space; motion and rest exclude each other; approach excludes contact; … this connexion excludes that connexion – and so on indefinitely; whereas in the real concrete sensible flux of life experiences they compenetrate each other so that it is not easy to know just what is excluded and what not’ (pp. 253–254). In other words, the before-the-fact issue here cannot be dealt with by after-the-fact means. As James (1890/1950) pointed out, as we enter into and begin to move around in each new situation, we experience uniquely, distinctive movements of feeling, i.e., felt transitions, of which we have, to repeat, ‘an acutely discriminative sense’ (p. 253), and as we continue our (exploratory) movements, ‘nowhere is there jar [a break in the process], but every later moment continues and corroborates an earlier one. In this continuing and corroborating, taken in no transcendental sense, but denoting definitely felt transitions, lies all that the knowing of a percept by an idea can possibly contain or signify…. Knowledge of sensible realities thus comes to life inside the tissue of experience. It is made; and made by relations that unroll themselves in time…. Whenever such is the sequence of our experiences we may freely say that we had the terminal object “in mind” from the outset, even although at the outset nothing was there in us but a flat piece of substantive experience like any other, with no self-transcendency about it, and no mystery save the mystery of coming into existence and of being gradually followed by other pieces of substantive experience, with conjunctively transitional experiences between’ (James 1912/2003, p. 30). What James is describing here, then, as I see it, is what we would now describe as a dialogical and a hermeneutical experience, the experience of a uniquely novel understanding coming into existence for us Page 6 of 14

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for a first time, in a gradual back-and-forth process between ourselves and our circumstances as we move around in their exploration, and their meaning comes into existence, i.e., emerges, for us in a linguistically articulated fashion. As Gadamer (2000) puts it: ‘Our inquiry has been guided by the basic idea that language is a medium where I and world meet or, rather, manifest their original belonging together … We can now see that this activity of the thing itself, the coming into language of meaning, points to a universal ontological structure, namely to the basic nature of everything toward which understanding can be directed. Being that can be understood is language (p. 474). Or, to put it another way, more than merely reflecting on something already given, it is ‘the coming into language of a totality of meaning’ (p. 474), of a particular hermeneutical unity, that makes our first-time understandings possible. But it is not enough for us to do this as individuals simply within ourselves, we need to create a ‘thought collective’ (Fleck, 1979), a group of practitioners with a shared orientation, who can participate in and partake from a unique structure of particular feelings of expectation guiding them in their utterances of meaningful talk, both in relation to each other, and in relation to their shared circumstances. To do this, we need to create ways of verbally articulating our experience of ‘moving around’ within a still vague and bewildering situation in our attempts at determining its nature that arouse in the others around us anticipations as to a set of possible next steps that make it possible for others to coordinate their behaviour with ours. In making use of James’ (1890) ‘acutely discriminative sense', we need to be able to point out to each other the happening of quite specific ‘thisnesses’ or ‘thatnesses’ – events which, even when they cannot be specifically named, nonetheless possess quite distinctive qualities which can, at least, be attended to (i.e., noticed), and alluded to linguistically as being like something else already well-known among us – only when such a shared readiness for certain before-the-fact experiences exists within a research group, is it possible for members to begin scientific inquiries and to experimentally test after-the-fact predictions derived from their theories. So what is our task in creating such a shared readiness? Crucially, here again, James has an answer: Our task is that of describing, in terms of noticeable similarities and differences between human events what it is that leads us, for instance, to say of something in everyday terms, that it is a ‘function of cognition'. His inquiry here is thus, he says (James, 1909/1979), ‘not an inquiry into the “how it comes”, but into the “what it is” of cognition … “How comes it that common sense has assigned a number of cases in which it is assumed not only to be possible but actual?” And what are the marks used by common sense to distinguish those cases from the rest? In short, our inquiry is a chapter in descriptive psychology, – hardly anything more’ (pp. 1–2) – in short, our concern is not with ‘what causes an event', but with ‘what an event is'. Thus here, James is essentially predating Wittgenstein (1953), who, in his philosophical investigations, remarked that our problems are not solved ‘by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known’ (no. 109), for what we are revealing to ourselves in our descriptive explorations is what – in the details of the event or happening within which we are involved – leads us, or calls us, to use this word rather than that in expressing its nature. Without our embodied, acutely discriminative sense of our relations to our surroundings, spontaneously at work in orienting us before we open our mouths to speak, we would be quite unable to conduct any of our everyday affairs with those around us. Thus here, as we will see, while the after-the-fact use of concepts aimed at explaining our everyday affairs would seem to be misplaced in, there is still a before-the-fact use for them in a descriptive role – their use would be to direct our attention towards crucial features of our everyday circumstances that we might otherwise not notice, features that we are in fact being responsive to, without our being aware of the fact.

Dewey: Beginning Inquiries from within Our Bewilderments Dewey (1938/2008) makes a similar point about how the unique and distinctive nature of our everyday expePage 7 of 14

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riences ‘set the scene', so to speak, for what can become available to us to inquire into: While in our social theories we take ‘a singular object or event for the subject matter of [our] analysis', he says. ‘In actual experience, there is never any such isolated singular object or event; an object or event is always a special part, phase, or aspect, of an environing experienced world – a situation … [Further] there is always a field in which the observation of this or that object or event occurs … made for the sake of finding out what that field is with reference to some active adaptive response to be made in carrying forth a course of behavior … The object or event in question is perceived as part of the environing world, not in and by itself… [but in relation to] a situation [which is experienced as] a whole in virtue of its immediate pervasive quality. [And] when we describe it from its psychological side, we have to say that the situation as a qualitative whole is sensed or felt’ (pp. 72–73) as such a uniquely unitary whole. But further, the pervasively qualitative character of the actual situation we inhabit, then, not only ‘binds all constituents into a whole but is also unique; it constitutes in each situation an individual situation, indivisible and unduplicable’ (p. 74). It is the uniqueness or singularity of this pervasive quality that is of crucial importance to us in our inquiries. For, just as Wittgenstein (1953) points out, that when we try to study the meaning of our words outside of their use within a ‘language-game', we lose precisely what we meant within the place and at the time of saying them, so Dewey (1938/2008) also argues in a similar fashion: ‘Discourse that is not controlled by reference to a situation is not discourse … A universe of experience is a precondition of a universe of discourse. Without its controlling presence, there is no way to determine the relevancy, weight, or coherence of any designated distinction or elation’ (p. 74). In other words, if we are not to confuse the others around us in our talk, we cannot rely simply on a dictionary definition of each word we use; we and they need to share a before-the-fact sense of a situation as a hermeneutical unity, formed not in terms of a set of afterthe-fact generalities, but in terms of a continuously connected set of unmerged particularities. Thus for Dewey, our ‘sensitivity to the quality of a situation as a whole’ (p. 76) is a precondition for us to come to a precise grasp of any problem we face as the problem it is – in short, ‘in ordinary language, a problem must be felt before it can be stated’ (p. 76). And our need to satisfy a pervasive bodily felt tension, a unique sense of ‘things not yet being quite right', is thus at work both in motivating, and in guiding, our inquiries from their beginning to their end. ‘It is', says Dewey (1938/2008), ‘of the very nature of the indeterminate situation which evokes inquiry to be questionable; or, in terms of actuality instead of potentiality, to be uncertain, unsettled, disturbed. The peculiar quality of what pervades the given materials, constituting them as a situation, is not just uncertainty at large; it is a unique doubtfulness which makes that situation to be just and only the situation it is. It is this unique quality that not only evokes the particular inquiry engaged in but that exercises control over its special procedures’ (p. 109, my italics). It is ‘this quality that enables us to keep thinking about one problem without our having constantly to stop to ask ourselves what it is after all that we are thinking about. We are aware of it not by itself but as the background, the thread, and the directive clue in what we do expressly think of. For the latter things are its distinctions and relations’ Dewey (1931/1960). Thus, strangely, just as James (1909/1996) suggests, if this is the case, instead of beginning our inquiries by trying to form systematic theories or conceptual frameworks – which as Dewey sees it are so ‘fixed in advance that the very things which are genuinely decisive in the problem in hand and its solution, are completely overlooked’ (p. 76) – we should begin our inquiries by being prepared to go ‘into’ our perplexities and uncertainties, ‘into’ our feelings of disquiet at what we already know, ‘into’ our confusions and bewilderments. For strangely, it is precisely within these feelings, if we take to trouble to explore them further, that we can begin to find the guidance we need in overcoming our disquiets. If this is the case, what is it, then, primarily, that we are trying to do in our inquiries? For the task we face seems, in fact, to be the reverse of problem solving. Solving problems involves ‘working out’ an unknown quantity by the use of its orderly relations with already well-known ones. But in our daily affairs, before being able to do this, it looks as if we need to proceed, hermeneutically, to form a unitary whole from a sequence of fragmentary experiences. For here, it is as if the ‘solution’ to the problem works to bring the ‘data’ constituting it to light. In short, rather than the solution to a problem, we are seeking to resolve what we at first encounter Page 8 of 14

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as an indeterminate, ambiguous, or bewildering situation by our active inquiries within it – conducted in the course of our living, engaged, attentive movements within it. We can call the kind of inquiry Dewey (1938/2008) outlines, practice-situated or situation-specific research. As he terms it, this kind of ‘inquiry is the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole’ (p. 108). And this is where our descriptive concepts have a crucial role to play, for in guiding what we look for and pay attention to, they can direct and organize our explorations in such a way that we can begin to ‘find our way about’ within them, and thus the guidance we need in overcoming our bewilderments.

George Mead, the Language of Gestures, and Worlds of Meaning As became clear above, as living beings, we are not input-output mechanisms, but creatures of meaning who respond to events, both in ourselves and in our surroundings, not in a cause-and-effect fashion, but in terms of how the differences those events make in our lives matter to us in the present moment. We experience that mattering in terms of a distinctive movement of feeling occurring within us, and we face the task of discerning which aspect of it is due to ourselves – to our ways of moving and is thus subjective – and which aspect just happens to and within us as a result of our being ‘in contact with’ our surroundings as move around within them and is thus objective. Thus, our task as autonomous adult individuals in our movements, is both to ‘know our way about’ within our surroundings, and to know how ‘to go on’ within them in a sure-footed manner when taking our next steps (Wittgenstein, 1953) – as well as being accountable to all the others around us with whom we share our lives, should they challenge us as to the meaning of our actions (Shotter, 1984). Like James and Dewey, Mead (1934/1962) also wants to move events of meaning, and likewise language, out from within the heads of individuals into the social and natural worlds surrounding us. Indeed, he sees meaning as such as not, necessarily even a human phenomenon, but as being as aspect of how all living beings live in a spontaneously responsive relation to their surroundings. As he sees it, ‘language is a part of social behavior … We are reading the meaning of the conduct of other people when perhaps they are not aware of it. There is something that reveals to us what the purpose is – just the glance of an eye, the attitude of the body which leads to the response. The communication set up in this way between individuals may be very imperfect. Conversations in gestures may be carried on which cannot be articulated into articulate speech. This is also true of the lower animals. Dogs approaching each other in a hostile attitude carry on such a language of gesture. They walk around each other, growling and snapping, and waiting for the opportunity to attack. Here is a process out of which language might arise, that is, a certain attitude of one individual that calls out a response in the other, which in turn calls out a different approach and a different response, and so on indefinitely’ (p. 14). Thus, in his view, ‘awareness or consciousness is not necessary to the presence of meaning in the process of social experience…. The mechanism of meaning is … present in the social act before the emergence of consciousness or awareness of meaning occurs. The act or adjustive response of the second organism gives to the gesture of the first organism the meaning which it has’ (pp. 77–78). Indeed, he goes even further in claiming, ‘mind arises through communication by a conversation of gestures in a social process or context of experience – not communication through mind’ (p. 50). As we have assumed above, then, not only are our spontaneous, living, bodily responses to our surroundings important, but also the way in which we can create among ourselves, as members of a social group, shared anticipations of the future of a precise kind, by interweaving words – signs or significant symbols, in Mead's terms – into our socially meaningful activities, thus enabling others to coordinate their behaviour in with ours. About our spontaneously responsive impulses, Mead (1934/1962) notes that ‘[the] material of instinct or imPage 9 of 14

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pulse in the lower animals is highly organized. It represents the adjustment of the animal to a very definite and restricted world. The stimuli to which the animal is sensitive and which lie in its habitat constitute that world and answer to the possible reactions of the animal. The two fit into each other and mutually determine each other … The organization represents not only a balance of attitude and the rhythm of movement but the succession of acts upon each other, the whole unified structure of the life of the form and the species. In any known human community, even of the most primitive type, we find (1) neither such a unified world (2) nor such a unified individual. There is present in the human world a past and an uncertain future, a future which may be influenced by the conduct of the individuals of the group. The individual projects himself into varied possible situations and by implements and social attitudes undertakes to make a different situation exist, which would give expression to different impulses … [Thus] the biologic individual lives in an undifferentiated now; the social reflective individual takes this up into a flow of experience within which stands a fixed past and a more or less uncertain future’ (pp. 350–351, my italics). The socially reflective individual thus exhibits at least two characteristics denied to mere animals: a definite history and a capacity to imagine different futures, with the former making difficulties, as we will see, for the latter. Gestures become signs or significant symbols – i.e., linguistic signs, words – when they begin to arouse in the individuals responding to them, the same specific anticipations as to how the individuals making them, and those responding to them, will act in the future. ‘By serving as prior indications, to the individuals responding to them, of the subsequent behavior of the individuals making them, they make possible the mutual adjustment of the various individual components of the social act to one another’ (note, p. 69); in other words, they make it possible for individuals to relate their individual acts to their other acts, thus to organize them into intelligible sequences, as well as to relate them to the words of others. But more than this, by also ‘calling forth in the individuals making them the same responses implicitly that they call forth explicitly in the individuals to whom they are made, they render possible the rise of self-consciousness in connection with this mutual adjustment’ (note, p. 69); in other words, they make our efforts to communicate deliberately possible. We can utter words to others without expecting them to have to ‘work out’ what we might mean by them; they understand our meanings directly. Even more, replacing the assumption that we can only think in an organized manner if we think of things in a ‘calculational’ manner, i.e., in a logical and systematic way about it, with the (Socratic) idea of thinking as conversing with oneself just as one converses with others. Indeed, as Mead (1934/1962) remarks: ‘That process … of responding to one's self as another responds to it, taking part in one's own conversation with others, being aware of what one is saying and using that awareness of what one is saying to determine what one is going to say thereafter – that is a process with which we are all familiar … We are finding out what we are going to say, what we are going to do, by saying and doing, and in the process we are continually controlling the process itself’ (p. 140). This is important because, in being able to express shared experiences in shared circumstances in words that arouse in all participants shared anticipations as to how, in particular, they should respond to events occurring within those circumstances, allows members of a social group to all act in many diverse ways, but nonetheless to anticipate, at least to a degree, how the others in the group will respond to their actions. Thus, it cannot be emphasized enough, that – just as Dewey notes that our uncertainty in a situation is not a general, but a unique doubtfulness, and James notes that our acutely discriminative sense of the movements of feeling occurring within us work as prelinguistic ‘standards’ against which to ‘measure', so to speak, our appropriate use of words in expressing their nature – so Mead (1932/2002) also worries about our urge, as ‘causal mechanism’ thinkers, to rush too quickly into the formulation of ‘one-size-fits-all’ generalizations without taking the time, hermeneutically, to come to a unique sense of what in fact the situation is that we face: The difficulty that immediately presents itself is that the emergent has no sooner appeared than we set about rationalizing it, that is, we undertake to show that it, or at least the conditions that deterPage 10 of 14

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mine its appearance, can be found in the past that lay behind it. Thus the earlier pasts out of which it emerged as something which did not involve it are taken up into a more comprehensive past that does lead up to it … but … these conditions never determine completely the ‘what it is’ that will happen … [Thus] even within the field of mathematical physics rigorous thinking does not necessarily imply that conditioning of the present by the past carries with it the complete determination of the present by the past. (pp. 46–47) In other words, even in physics, the present moment is always unique, and if we want to treat human situations as the unique situations they are, we must always try to work from within them in all their uniqueness, taking account of, and doing justice to, all their details.

Conclusion Scientific knowledge is embedded in theory and rules … I have tried to argue, however, that this localization of the cognitive content of science is wrong. (Kuhn, 1970, pp. 187–188, my italics) What James, Dewey, and Mead bring our attention, then, is that our living and acting out in the world in relation to all the others and othernesses around us is basic and prior to our making sense both of our doings and of those events that just happen to us. Prior to any theorizing or formulation of principles, we are (or can be) guided in our spontaneous doings by a discriminating awareness of our living relations to our surroundings – indeed, it is perfectly possible for people intelligently to perform all kinds of activities without reference to any propositions dictating how they should be performed. Our spontaneous doings can thus provide a basis for our later more deliberate acts. Indeed, the ‘what it is’ of a particular difficulty we face (and feel) is a particular ‘what it is’ and cannot be captured in abstract generalities; thus, the wordings in which we express the particularities of our felt experiences are crucial; we need to provide the others with us in a situation, with a shared structure of expectations as to ‘what will follow from what’ as the result of a particular kind of doing. What I think is new in all of this, which has perhaps not been given sufficient attention before, is the fact that all three – like Wittgenstein (1953), who, to repeat, was also concerned to get clear ‘what is possible before all new discoveries and inventions’ (no. 126) – are concerned with the whatness-issue. They are attempting to clarify what needs to be pre-sensed or pre-hended (Whitehead, 1925/1967) in a shared fashion among members of a scientific community prior to any of their attempts to do scientific research, before their formulation and/or testing of any theories. For unless the whatness issue is resolved, we literally do not know what we are taking about in our research talk. Kuhn (1970) tried to make a similar point: ‘Effective scientific research scarcely begins before a scientific community thinks it has acquired firm answers to questions like the following: What are the fundamental entities of which the universe is composed? How do these interact with each other and with the senses? What questions may be legitimately be asked about such entities and what techniques employed in seeking solutions? … Normal science … is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like’ (pp. 4–5, my italics). In other words, what was central to Kuhn's whole historical investigation was his noticing that certain ‘landmark’ achievements seemed to provide particular scientific communities with paradigmatic examples (or ‘paradigms’ as he called them) as to what the world into which they are inquiring should look like, and behave like as consequence of their manipulations, and so on. Without such a prior set of expectations, the doing of scientific inquiries would be impossible. Thus, as he saw it, what paradigms provide is ‘embodied in a way of viewing physical situations’ (pp. 190–191) – yet he found himself needing to make this point, ‘the most novel and least understood aspect of this book’ (p. 187), over and over again. We cannot gain these perceptual sensitivities, these Whiteheadian pre-hensions, merely by thinking reflecPage 11 of 14

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tively, or by formulating testable generalizations as to their nature, for we all too easily unconsciously assume such sensitivities when testing our theories. This kind of embodied, prior knowing only comes from, as Kuhn notes, our entering into a back-and-forth form of relationally responsive understanding gained from explorations of crucial, initial concrete exemplars5 – and this is my point here too, along with James, Dewey, and Mead. It is just that, in our rush to define things and to formulate general theories, we have not, so to speak, dwelt in the situations confusing us sufficiently to constitute within ourselves the appropriate hermeneutical unities6– by moving back and forth between the ‘end in view’ motivating our efforts at integration, and the events out in the world realizing such unities – to constitute within ourselves a distinctive grasp of the unique what-ness of the particular situation that we are, in fact, in. Instead, as Rorty (1979) sees it, we have tried ‘to explicate “rationality” and “objectivity” in terms of conditions of accurate representation is a self-deceptive effort to eternalize the normal discourseof the day’ (p. 11), which, as he sees it, has dominated philosophy's self-image since the Greeks. Thus, our task now must be to seek to understand what we experience and perceive only in terms of what we experience and perceive, to understand a circumstance in its own terms, rather than in terms of another, external, eternal, perfect, hidden world, in fact, of our own creation – to explain what is real for us only by what is real for us, and the situated and time-bound only by the situated and time-bound. What I have set out here, then, in trying to clarify the conditions required for the members of a thought collective to coordinate their inquires in an unconfused fashion, is a mere sketch of a possibility, and much more needs to be said and explored. But in setting out the possibility of this new orientation towards our inquiries into our social affairs in this fashion, I am reminded again of how Kuhn (1970) ended his account of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He said: ‘We are all deeply accustomed to seeing science as the one enterprise that draws constantly nearer to some goal set by nature in advance. But need there be any such goal? If we can learn to substitute evolution-from-what-we-do-know for evolution-toward-what-we-wish-to-know, a number of vexing problems may vanish in the process’ (p. 170). And this, of course, is what I am proposing here: that we relinquish the still unfulfilled – and, as I see it, forever unfulfillable – dream of gaining the very general results we desire in our inquiries, and to be content with the limited, partial, and situated results we can in fact obtain – which, in the end, will, I believe, perhaps surprisingly, turn out to be of far greater practical use and value to us.

Notes 1‘The member of society uses background expectancies as a scheme of interpretation … Demonstrably he is responsive to this background, while at the same time he is at a loss to tell us specifically of what the expectancies consist. When we ask him about them he has little or nothing to say’ (Garfinkel, 1967, pp. 36–37). Different people's background expectations continually ‘show up’ in the way in which they each verbalize their experience of a shared event differently. 2It is easy to assume that theoretical talk is quite different from ordinary talk, that it not concerned with our activities as they immediately seem to be, but is to do with people re-describing events which already make one kind of sense to them, as making another kind of sense altogether – as if the task is a matter of translating what we know of only superficially in our first language into one or another second language, each representing a competing account of reality (Kuhn, 1962). Later, however, Kuhn (2002) came to see the issue, not as a matter of translation, but still of first-language learning: ‘When the exhibit of examples is part of the process of learning terms like “motion”, “cell”, or “energy element”, what is acquired is knowledge of language and of the world together. On the one hand, the student learns what these terms mean, what features are relevant to attaching them to nature, what things cannot be said of them on pain of self-contradiction, and so on. On the other hand, the student learns what categories of things populate the world, what their salient features are, and something about the behaviour that is and is not permitted to them. In much of language learning these Page 12 of 14

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two sorts of knowledge – knowledge of words and knowledge of nature – are acquired together, not really two sorts of knowledge at all, but two faces of the single coinage that a language provides’ (p. 31). 3They are, of course, in systems theory terms, ‘open systems.' 4Later, against all those in support of determinism, who claim that all that can exist already exists, and that all change is merely a matter of rearrangements, thus precluding the emergence of novelty, he stated the issue as follows: ‘Indeterminism … admits that possibilities may be in excess of actualities, and that things not yet revealed to our knowledge may in themselves really be ambiguous. Of two alternative futures which we conceive, both may now be really possible; and the one becomes impossible only at the very moment when the other excludes it by becoming real itself’ (James, 1897/1956, pp. 150–151). 5He gives many examples in an effort ‘to make clear what I mean by learning from problems to see situations as like each other, as subjects for the application of the same scientific law or law-sketch…. [And also to make clear] why I refer to the consequential knowledge of nature acquired while learning the similarity relationship and thereafter embodied in a way of viewing physical situations rather than in rules or laws … [This] sort of learning is not acquired by exclusively verbal means. Rather it comes as one is given words together with concrete examples of how they function in use; nature and words are learned together’ (Kuhn, 1970, pp. 190–191, my italics). 6Where the hermeneutical unities we constitute within ourselves here are not at all like the abstract generalities we define in terms of a few distinctive features common to many instances; they are particular unities of distinct particularities, in which all the particularities are interlinked with each other without losing their particularity. In other words, they are organized into a unique structure of particular feelings of expectation that can guide us in our uttering of meaningful talk in relation to the circumstance in question.

References Argyris, C. (2005). Actionable knowledge. In The Oxford Handbook of Organization Theory, edited by H. Tsoukas and K. Christian. New York, Oxford University Press, pp. 423–452. Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), pp. 801–831. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Bakhtin, M.M. (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. by Vern W. McGee. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Dewey, J. (1931/1960) ‘Qualitative Thought' in Philosophy and Civilization, New York: Minton, Balch & Company. Dewey, J. (1938/2008). Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. In Vol.12 of The Later Works, 1925–1953, edited by J. A. Boyston. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press. Fleck, L. (1979). The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Gadamer, H.-G. (2000). Truth and Method, 2nd revised edition , trans. J. Weinsheimer & D.G. Marshall. New York: Continuum. Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. James, W. (1890/1950). Principles of Psychology, vols. 1 & 2. New York: Dover. James, W. (1892/1962). Psychology: Briefer Course. New York: Collier Books. James, W. (1897/1956). The dilemma of determinism. In The Will to Believe and other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Dover, 1917, pp. 145–183. James, W. (1909/1979). The Meaning of Truth. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. James, W. (1909/1996) A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy. Lincoln and London: University of Nabraska Press. Page 13 of 14

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Kuhn, T.S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kuhn, T.S. (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd Edition, Enlarged. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mead, G.H. (1932/2002). The Philosophy of the Present. New York: Prometheus Books. Mead, G.H. (1934/1962). Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rorty, R. (1979). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Oxford: Blackwell, Shotter, J. (1984). Social Accountability and Selfhood. Oxford: Blackwell. Shotter, J. (2005). Inside processes: Transitory understandings, action guiding anticipations, and witness thinking. International Journal of Action Research, 1(1), pp.157–189. Shotter, J. (2009). Preparing for the happening of change. In: Managing in Changing Times: A Guide to the Perplexed Manager, edited by Sid Lowe. London: Sage Publications Ltd, pp. 135–176. Whitehead, A.N. (1925). Science and the Modern World. New York: Free Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n5

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PART II

Process Theory

The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Contradictions, Dialectics, and Paradoxes

Contributors: Moshe Farjoun Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Contradictions, Dialectics, and Paradoxes" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n6 Print pages: 87-105 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Contradictions, Dialectics, and Paradoxes Moshe Farjoun Contradictions – also referred to as tensions, inconsistencies, antinomies, and dualities – permeate and propel organizational life. Organizations often strive to act both globally and locally, to compete and cooperate, to foster reliability but to seek adventure, to develop their members by granting them autonomy but also to constrain their freedoms so they can act in unison. They may give actors reasons to pause, but also spur them to take action; they may be necessary for preserving the social order, but are also required to transform it. Whether they undermine or enable, frustrate or delight, contradictions guarantee that living, organizing, and theorizing are never dull. Not all students of organizations take contradictions for granted or appreciate their import. Models such as rational choice often view organizations as monolithic unitary actors staffed by individuals with fully consistent preferences (Allison and Zelikow, 1999). Other models largely view organizations as cooperative systems (Barnard, 1938) characterized by harmony, fit, simplicity, configuration, and complementarities (Milgrom and Roberts, 1995; Miller, 1996; Porter, 1980; Zucker, 1988). Views of the world premised on entities, stasis, and permanence, models grounded in formal logic, and linear and retrospective accounts of organizational triumphs and disasters (Kahneman, 2011) all tend to overlook contradictions, view them as aberrations or pathologies, or discount their significance. Organizational contradictions come to the foreground as actors navigate and make sense of complexities. They are typically considered when organizations and institutions are viewed as conflict laden (Cohen et al., 1972; Cyert and March, 1963; DiMaggio, 1988; Pondy 1967), multidimensional, nested, temporal, complex, and pluralistic (Kraatz and Block, 2008; Pache and Santos, 2012; Thornton et al., 2012), when organizational environments are viewed as turbulent and characterized by complexity, interdependence, and change, and when individuals are modeled as having multiple selves, capable of holding opposing views (Kahneman, 2011; Mead, 1934). Contradictions become integral to systems of logic that question the notion that everything is ‘identical with itself’ (Ford and Ford, 1994; Novack, 1969) and in worldviews that highlight relations, process, and time and the multiple ways in which history may develop at any point (Benson, 1977; Langley et al., 2013). The concept of organizational contradictions provides a useful point of departure to examine two important strands of process organizational research – dialectics and paradox – and to clarify their commonalities, differences, and complementarities. Such juxtaposition is particularly important given that most process researchers are relatively more familiar with the prevalent paradox literature. As a result, they may view dialectics as only shorthand for mutual relations, confuse it with paradox and contradiction, or focus on surface similarities. While some organizational scholars have drawn on both literatures (Adler et al., 1999; Adler, 2009; Bartunek, 2006; Clegg et al., 2002; Cuhna et al., 2015; Farjoun, 2002; 2010; Ford and Backoff, 1988; Ford and Ford, 1994; Hargrave and Van de Ven, 2006; Morgan, 1997; Poole and Van de Ven, 1989; Seo and Creed, 2002; Seo, Putnam, and Bartunek, 2004), conspicuously absent are attempts to compare and contrast them more systematically. Other than sharing the umbrella concept of contradictions, paradox and dialectics have common historical and philosophical roots. Moreover, both views train organizational analysts and practitioners to think and act in ways that avoid one-sided views, embrace complexity and spur change, learning, and innovation. Therefore, a preliminary basis for comparing these perspectives exists. Yet, any attempt to juxtapose these two perspectives confronts difficulties. First, each perspective contains within itself variants that cannot easily be reconciled. Second, some hybridization between these perspectives has already occurred, mostly through selective incorporation of dialectic ideas into paradox research. Finally, differences in scope, orientation, assumptions, and terminology may make the two perspectives less commensurable (Kuhn, 2012 [1962]). Therefore, from a more pessimistic standpoint, reconciling or synthesizing the two perspectives may be self-defeating. I try to finesse these obstacles by focusing on the central tendencies in each perspective, limiting myself to explicating, comparing, and contrasting their key ideas, and viewing their complementarities as subjects for further Page 2 of 23

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research. The dialectics and paradox views differ in important ways, at least as reflected in their central tendencies. Dialectics, specifically as developed by Hegel, Marx, and Engels, constitutes a broad theoretical perspective on process and change. The wide theoretical sweep of dialectics makes it comparable to broad social science approaches such as functionalism (Van den Berghe, 1963) and pragmatism (Novack, 1975) and other perspectives on change and process such as evolutionary theory (Levins and Lewontin, 1985; Van de Ven and Poole, 1995). Within this largely explanatory and descriptive scheme, contradictions are a key element in accounting for social (and societal) change and development through conflict and transcendence (Bhaskar, 1993) and in explaining the emergence, reproduction, transformation, and dissolution of social orders (Benson, 1977). By contrast, paradox research mostly adopts a more interventionist approach: It focuses on contradictions as problems individuals and social collectives need to manage or harness to improve their well-being and performance (Cameron and Quinn, 1988; Lüscher and Lewis, 2008; Smith and Lewis, 2011). This emphasis brings paradox research closer to other literature such as sense making, conflict resolution, decision making, and creativity. These contrasts have implications for how each perspective conceptualizes contradictions, process and organizations, its normative implications, and the specific habits of thinking it highlights.1 Next, I discuss the concept of contradictions and some of its key variants and provide illustrations. I then present the dialectics and the paradox literature. I follow by considering their key differences and potential complementarities. I conclude with directions for future research.

Varieties of Organizational Contradictions: Paradoxes, Dualities, and Dialectics Contradictions, paradoxes, and dialectics became more distinct subjects of organizational research mainly in the 1970s and 1980s (Benson, 1977; Cameron and Quinn, 1988; Ford and Backoff, 1988; Smith and Berg, 1987). Over the years, organizational researchers have studied contradictions and tensions in goals, values, identities, beliefs, messages, interests, emotions, practices, relationships, and outcomes (Ford and Backoff, 1988; Lewis, 2000). The confluence of knowledge growth, the ascent of large organizations, and the complex and changing nature of their environments, among other factors, have sustained interest in contradictions and led to remarkable growth, systematization, and differentiation in this domain. Contradiction researchers have studied diverse topics such as leadership (Cunha et al., 2015), group dynamics (Murnighan and Conlon, 1991; Smith and Berg, 1987), organizational design (Boumgarden, Nickerson and Zenger, 2012), and business strategy (Lado et al., 1997). Research has also sought to clarify the nature, types, origins, relationships, and evolution of contradictions (Clegg et al., 2002; Jarzabkowski et al., 2013; Lewis, 2000; Smith and Lewis, 2011), the ways individuals in groups and organizations make sense of, frame, and respond to contradictions (Ford and Backoff, 1988; Lüscher and Lewis, 2008), the range of tactics available to resolve contradictions (Kraatz and Block, 2008; Poole and Van de Ven, 1989), and the effects of contradictions and their management on economic, social, and psychological outcomes and at different levels of analysis (Abbott, 2001). Tensions and contradictions have also been used to resolve conflicting findings (Bowman, 1980), reconcile differences within and between theories (Deephouse, 1999; Garud et al., 2007; Lado et al., 2006), improve the process of theorizing (Poole and Van de Ven, 1989; Weick, 1989), and reflect on the nature of organizations and organizing itself (Bakken and Hernes, 2006). It may be quite difficult to imagine contemporary organization theory without essential, and now taken-for-granted, concepts such as ‘creative destruction', ‘disciplined imagination', ‘loose coupling', ‘monopolistic competition', ‘normalization of deviance', and ‘the strength of weak ties'. Broad reviews of the literature appear elsewhere (Ashforth and Reingen, 2014; Clegg et al., 2002; Langley and Sloan, 2012; Lewis, 2000; Seo, Putnam, and Bartunek, 2004). To demonstrate the richness and vibrancy Page 3 of 23

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of this domain, I list in Table 6.1 several contributions from organization studies and allied fields. My choice of these examples is strategic: It illustrates particular points in this chapter and highlights the diversity in the types of contradictions studied, labels used, levels of analysis, and methodologies and key observations.

Table 6.1Organizational contradictions – illustrative studies

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Common definitions of contradictions generally refer to the simultaneous presence of two essential elements that are connected or interrelated yet directly opposed (Cameron and Quinn, 1988; Smith and Lewis, 2011; Werner and Baxter, 1984), or, as dialecticians might call it, a unity of opposites. This definitional net is wide enough to include a variety of tensions and contradictions. Yet it masks important subtleties and differences.2 First, interrelatedness usually means the two elements are not indifferent to one another and are essential for the definition, functioning, or performance of the whole. To survive, organizations must balance the exploitation of existing knowledge with the exploration of new knowledge (Holland, 1975; March, 1991). Similarly, for the social institution of marriage to work well, the opposing needs of security and novelty have to cohabit. The focus on two elements serves as a simplification; organizational contradictions are entangled in webs of overlapping opposites (Baxter and Montgomery, 1996; Blau, 1972; Bourdieu, 1977; Brandenburger and Nalebuff, 2011; De Rond and Bouchikhi, 2004; Luscher and Lewis, 2008). The notion of interrelatedness reflects an anti-dualistic ontological position – particularly integral to practice (Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011) and pragmatism theories (Farjoun, Ansell and Boin, 2015). A dualism such as individual and social, mind and body, presents a clear-cut and decisive distinction with a well-defined boundary separating the elements and no overlap (Jackson, 1999). Moreover, connections between the elements are either nonexistent or modest enough to leave them unchanged, preserving their essential qualities. The absence of middle ground and the mutual exclusive quality of the elements makes dualism often synonymous with opposition, conflict, and zero-sum solutions. Because elements in a dualism are unchanging, they frequently seem to be in conflict, yet their opposition cannot culminate in one defeating the other or both undergoing essential changes – dualistic methods are not dialectical (Jackson, 1999). Second, the strength of opposition between the two elements in organizational contradictions may vary (Jackson, 1999; Seo, Putnam, and Bartunek, 2004). Logical paradoxes, or logical contradictions (Bhaskar, 1993) lie at one end of the spectrum. Among philosophers or logicians, a logical paradox arises when plausible premises entail a conclusion the negation of which is also possible (Choi and Nisbett, 2000; Poole and Van de Ven, 1989; Rescher, 2001; van Heigenoort, 1972). The word ‘paradox’ itself is derived from the Greek para (beyond) and doxa (belief): a paradox is literally a contention or group of contentions that is incredible – beyond belief (Rescher, 2001). The circular or self-negating statement ‘this sentence is false’ constitutes a true contradiction or self-referential loop (Putnam, 1986) because it refers to something that is and is not at the same time. As in other social science instances, organizational contradictions and paradoxes are looser than logical paradoxes: whereas logical paradoxes exist in timeless, abstract thought, social paradoxes concern a real world with temporal and spatial constraints (Lewis, 2000; Poole and Van de Ven, 1989). To logicians, some tensions and inconsistencies may better be viewed as false contradictions; they often depend on faulty assumptions or hidden information and may disappear once these are recognized and modified (Rescher, 2001). For social scientists, particularly for dialecticians, inconsistencies, tensions, and ruptures constitute important types of contradictions (Benson, 1977; Bhaskar, 1993). Some debate whether contradictions are socially constructed or real, subjective or objective (Clegg et al., 2002; Johnston and Selsky, 2006; Levins and Lewontin, 1985). Consistent with the social-construction view, the strength of opposition and the very existence of contradiction depend on the vantage point from which they are examined. What may be viewed as contradictory and antagonistic in one cultural frame may be entirely consistent and coherent in another (Cunha et al., 2015; Johnston and Selsky, 2006). For instance, individuals in the East and the West differ in how they view contradictions (Choi and Nisbett, 2000). This relativist standpoint also means external observers may judge organizational phenomena as contradictory, while organizational members fail to view them as antagonistic and vice versa. As dialecticians highlight, the terms of the contradiction and the degree to which they are opposed can also shift over time. Contradictions can become more intense and more clearly demarcated, and their struggle more fierce. For instance, disagreements in an alliance or a marriage can increase to the point that reconciliation is impossible. Page 5 of 23

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Third, the nature of interrelationship between elements varies. Especially for dialecticians, contradiction often means a union of two or more elements, forces, or processes that develop in incompatible ways and tempos. In this view, contradictions can be simultaneously supporting and undermining, stabilizing and destabilizing, complementing and opposing (Bhaskar, 1993; Hernes, 1976; Levins and Lewontin, 1985; Ollman, 2003). In such interdependence, the antithetical or ‘paradoxical’ aspect is likely to be blunted. In dialectics, contradiction can particularly be associated with inconsistent – functional and dysfunctional – and often unanticipated effects. Efforts to resolve contradictions that entrench their opposition represent contradictory effects (Smith and Lewis, 2011). Scholars increasingly refer to the coexistence of opposing and complementary elements, processes, or effects as a duality (Ashforth and Reingen, 2014; Farjoun, 2010; Michel, 2014; Seo, Putnam, and Bartunek, 2004). As an ontological alternative to dualism – which leaves very little room for reconciliation – duality views the two elements as interdependent and no longer separate or opposed, although they remain conceptually distinct (Jackson, 1999). Viewing contradictions as a duality means the two largely opposing elements may interpenetrate until one includes elements of the other and they are no longer mutually exclusive (Dewey, 1922; Farjoun, 2010; Feldman and Pentland, 2003; Giddens, 1984; Jackson, 1999; Levinthal and Rerup, 2006; Orlikowski, 1992). For example, when viewed as a duality, markets and hierarchies are not simply opposed: organizations have market-like elements such as transfer prices, and markets have organization-like elements such as rules and regulations (Ahrne et al., 2015). This interlocking preserves the double-ness and conceptual distinction between the key elements without fully merging them. Unlike dualism, it also accommodates borderline cases, and allows zero-sum and positive-sum relations to coexist. Complementarity can take other forms (Farjoun, 2010; Poole and Van de Ven, 1989). For example, while they often pose conflicting demands on resources, research and teaching can foster one another through the mutual flow of ideas. Alternatively, these activities can complement each other in one's professional identity or when enriched through a common engagement with practice. Similarly, online and bricks-and-mortar retail strategies can be contradictory in the short run but complementary in the long run.3 In the next two sections, I contextualize contradictions within the broader traditions of dialectics and paradox. I elaborate slightly more on dialectics – the less prevalent and perhaps less appreciated of the two.

The Dialectics Tradition: Contradictions, Development, and Social Change Dialectics is captured in folk wisdom phrases such as ‘the straw that broke the camel's back’ and is manifest in ideas such as how unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance (Popper, 1945). Developed as the art of discussion (Novack, 1975), dialectics is an important tradition within the social sciences, continuously interpreted and revitalized (Bhaskar, 1993; Baxter and Montgomery, 1996; Gramsci, 1971; Levins and Lewontin, 1985; Ollman, 2003).4 Dialectics has also been incorporated within organization studies. After early momentum (Greiner, 1997[1972]; Pettigrew, 1979; Zeitz, 1980), it became more widespread: Researchers gradually recognized its potential to explain change in organizations and institutions (Benson, 1977; Sztompka, 1991), and to inform practice (Langley and Sloan, 2012; Mitroff and Emshoff, 1979; Morgan, 1997).5 While dialectics never coalesced as a distinct research program, its ideas have been applied to a wide range of topics: institutional change (Farjoun, 2002; Hargrave and Van de Ven, 2006; Seo and Creed, 2002), the evolution of strategic alliances (Das and Teng, 2000; De Rond and Bouchikhi, 2004), decision making (Denis et al., 2011), inter-organizational relations (Zeitz, 1980), hiring procedures (Murdoch and Geys, 2014), creativity (Harvey, 2014), globally distributed work teams (Cramton and Hinds, 2014), and the development of disciplines (Abbott, 2001).6 Several scholars have rediscovered dialectics’ original insights and incorporated them into mainstream organizational theory (Adler, 2009; 2012; Sminia and De Rond, 2012; Vidal, Adler and Delbridge, Page 6 of 23

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2015).7 Interpreters vary in what they see as distinct and important in dialectics (Langley and Sloan, 2012; Mason, 1996; Nielsen, 1996).8 To some, dialectic has come to signify a process of conceptual, social, or natural conflict, interconnection and change in which the generation, interpenetration, and clash of oppositions, leading to their transcendence in a fuller or more adequate mode of thought or form of life (or being), play a key role (Bhaskar, 1993).9 To others, conflicts between opposing social forces and groups are a perpetual source of endogenous social change in alternating directions as each new synthesis incorporating elements of both opposites evokes counterforces in an unending pattern of dialectical development (Blau, 1972). Yet others view dialectical analysis as primarily involving a search for fundamental principles that account for the emergence, reproduction, transformation, and dissolution of specific social orders (Benson, 1977). Despite their differences, these interpretations share the view of dialectics as fundamentally committed to the concept of process. To its followers at least, dialectics is not just another strand of contemporary process theory, but lies at its very foundation. Dialectics replaces the notion of ‘thing’ with notions of ‘process’ and ‘relation’ (Ollman, 2003). It views the social world in a continuous state of becoming – social arrangements that seem fixed and permanent are temporary, arbitrary patterns, and any observed social pattern is regarded as one of several possibilities (Benson, 1977). It views social life as a ceaseless interplay of opposing tendencies (Baxter and Montgomery, 1996). In addition to its process, ontology dialectics rests on a particular logical foundation that critiques and extends formal logic (Ford and Ford, 1994; Novack, 1969). Premised on the basic laws of identity, contradiction, and excluded middle, formal logic allows tracing connections and recognizing likenesses amid diversity, permanence amid changes. Therefore, it is essential for classification and organization. While he recognized these merits, Hegel saw formal logic as primarily logic of identity and intransience. Such logic leads to an ‘either-or’ choice (Peng and Nisbett, 1999); it does not really address change or have to explain it as occurring only through replacement or exogenous sources (Ford and Ford, 1994). Hegel's revolutionary idea was that thing A not only equals A, but also equals non-A (Novack, 1969). Thus, instead of eliminating contradiction, Hegel made it a keystone of his conception of reality and his system of logic (McTaggart, 1896; Novack, 1969). This stance allows dialectics to accommodate endogenous change and to deal with contradictory notions such as motion, a state in which an entity both is and is not in the same place in the same time bracket. Marx extended Hegel's theoretical orientation. His theoretical and empirical project tried to account for the structure as well as the dynamics of the entire social system, including both its origin and likely future (Ollman, 2003).10 In an important reconceptualization of Hegel's idealism (Kaufmann, 1965), Marx stressed that the contradictions that produce a dialectical pattern of historical change have their roots in the material conditions of social existence, which can be scientifically studied. Moreover, conflicts between abstract social forces, such as technological and economic ones (productive forces and relations of production), are manifest in conflicts between groups in the society, specifically classes (Adler, 2009; Blau, 1972). This might mean, for example, that the tension between efficiency and safety goals in organizations is more than an intellectual problem-solving exercise and could involve a political confrontation between the interests and identities of managers and safety engineers (Milliken et al., 2005). Within organization studies, two partly overlapping yet distinct sets of interpretations of these dialectical ideas – as a form of institutional analysis and as a distinct logic of change – have been particularly influential. Varying in emphasis and terminology, both interpretations recognize contradictions as the most important element in dialectics and regard them as part of a broader theoretical process perspective. Benson (1977) applied Marx's dialectical materialism to organizational analysis by focusing on four key principles: social construction/production, totality, contradiction, and praxis. In his view, people construct their world through their ongoing interactions and both reproduce and potentially transform established orders. A crucial Page 7 of 23

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type of change is generated from the very tension between ongoing production and previously established social formation, and because social production is carried out in different contexts. Some contradictions are generated within the organization – from divisions, reward, and control structures – and other separation points; others, such as the tension between management and labor, may be generated in the larger society, imposed on the organization and further reproduced by it.11 Some contradictions are integral to a particular order and reproduce it; others are system destructive. While it starts with the whole, dialectical materialism stresses that parts and wholes are not separable but interpenetrate, mutually condition, or mediate each other. The focus on organizations and on the structural, societal, and systemic sources of contradiction (Giddens, 1984; Putnam, 2013), has made Benson's ‘institutional’ interpretation of dialectics particularly amenable to explaining patterns of institutional stability, change, and historical development (Farjoun, 2002; Hargrave et al., 2006; Seo and Creed, 2002). In contrast to Benson's (1977) interpretation, a number of organizational analysts have highlighted dialectics as a way to appreciate flux and transformation (Morgan, 1997) and as a distinct logic of change (Ford and Ford, 1994; Van de Ven and Poole, 1995). Dialectic change contrasts with evolutionary, teleological, and lifecycle models as it requires at least two entities and incorporates a constructive mode of development that leads to novel forms (Van de Ven and Poole, 1995). On the basis of the thought of Marx and Engels, this logic of change features three main dialectical principles: the mutual interpenetration of opposites, the negation of the negation, and quantity and quality. These principles come together when social arrangements generate inner contradictions that defeat the purposes for which they were set up, leading to a continuous pattern of affirmation (thesis), negation (antithesis), and transformation (counter negation, also referred to as synthesis or transcendence). The negation of the negation allows the progressive development of the system to a limit where its inner contradictions can no longer be contained (Morgan, 1997).12 Several scholars have used Kuhn's model of scientific paradigm development to illustrate dialectical change (Hernes, 1976; Levins and Lewontin, 1985). When not accounted for by the existing paradigm, the gradual accumulation of puzzles, anomalies, and questions encountered in the conduct of ‘normal science’ may eventually lead to a new paradigm in which they fit better. Dialectical social change is thus viewed as a particular transformation in which some social processes (or actions) can be described as simultaneously generative and destructive (Hernes, 1976). The historical rise of Apple's operating system provides another example of such transformation. Historically having a small network of users and developers, it was considered highly reliable. As the company grew, its operating system attracted more users and application developers. The latter included creators of software viruses. An unintended consequence of growing popularity was that reliability was undermined.13 Table 6.2 summarizes key dialectic principles as interpreted within organization studies. Table 6.2 The dialectic tradition – summary of key ideas as interpreted within organization studies Central Themes

Development through conflict. A process of conceptual, social or natural conflict, interconnection, and change. Explanation of how social orders, emerge, reproduce, transform, and dissolve.

Logic

Critique and extension of formal logic. Contradiction as a keystone to a system of logic that allows dialectics to highlight endogenous change.

Theoretical Scope

Study both the structure and dynamics of modern society.

Ontology

Primacy of process and relations.

Dialectics as a Page 8 of 23

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Form of Institutional Analysis* Key Principles: a) Social construction/production

People construct their worlds through their ongoing interactions; they both reproduce and potentially transform established orders.

b) Totality

Seemingly separate elements in the world cannot be studied in isolation. Parts and wholes interpenetrate, mutually condition, or mediate each other. Systems and processes are made of overlapping opposites.

c) Contradiction

Ruptures, inconsistencies, and incompatibilities in the fabric of social life. Radical breaks with the social order arise because of contradictions in the fabric of social life. Some contradictions are integral to a particular order and reproduce it; others are system destructive.

d) Praxis

The free and creative reconstruction of social arrangements on the basis of reasoned analysis of both the limits and potentials of present social forms. Mediates between contradictions and social change. Reflects individuals’ (and collectives') ability for transcendence (for example, overcoming limitations). Without this agency, which includes awareness, interests, and power to act, endogenous social change will not occur or will operate blindly.

Dialectics as Distinct Logic of Change** Key Alternatives

Evolutionary, teleological, and life-cycle change models. Related to but distinct from key alternatives such as evolutionary and punctuated equilibrium model.

Distinct Features

Sudden reversals, unanticipated outcomes, endogenous change, novel forms, both incremental and radical change, spiral development, tentative equilibrium, and emergence.

Key Principles: a) Mutual interpenetration of opposites

Every actual thing involves a coexistence of opposed elements. The two elements that are in contradiction cannot be dissolved onto one another, but only overcome by the creation of a synthesis that is not reducible to either of its constituent elements.

b) The negation of the negation

Explains how change may become developmental (and spiral) in the sense that each negation rejects a previous form, yet also retains something from that form.

c) Quantity and Cumulative change may lead to a qualitative transformation or ‘totality shift’ whereby one quality form of social organization gives way to another. * Benson (1977) ** Ford and Ford (1994), Morgan, (1997), Van de Ven and Poole (1995)

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The Paradox Tradition: Contradictions, Problem Solving, and Performance Paradox has always played some role in organizational theorizing. However, interest in paradox as a distinctive perspective and a research program is of more recent origin (Cameron and Quinn, 1988; Lewis and Smith, 2014; Smith and Lewis, 2011).14 As Poole and Van de Ven (1989:563) observed: ‘In general parlance many writers use the term [paradox] loosely, as an informal umbrella for interesting and thought-provoking contradictions of all sorts. In this sense, a paradox is something which grabs our attention, a puzzle needing a solution'. Consistent with this problem-solving orientation, studies within the paradox program of research have been particularly associated with questions such as: What kinds of contradictions and paradoxes are out there? How do organizations and their members manage and potentially resolve contradictions? How can paradox help in the process of theorizing? How do different responses affect performance outcomes? Paradox research has greatly enhanced our understanding of these themes. I will discuss some of them below. Paradoxical tensions may appear in different forms. One typology identifies three interrelated types of tensions: self-referential loops such as the liar's paradox or the notion of ‘double-binds’ (Bateson, 1972) constitute a logical paradox, mixed messages denote inconsistencies reinforced by language and communication, and system contradictions are tensions objectified in goals, rewards, culture, and other aspects of complex systems (Lewis, 2000; Putnam, 1986).15 An alternative categorization identifies learning, organizing, belonging, and performing paradoxes (Jarzabkowski et al., 2013; Lewis, 2000; Smith and Lewis, 2011). Paradoxes of learning stem from the tension between the old and the new (such as in exploitation and exploration). Paradoxes of organizing locate the sources of tensions and contradictions in organizations and organizing itself, particularly since these notions are premised on categories and distinctions (Ford and Ford, 1994). Paradoxes of belonging represent tensions associated with part–whole relationships such as memberships in multiple professions and organizations. Lastly, paradoxes of performing concern ambiguities about whether outcomes are successes or failures (Jay, 2013). Research on individuals and groups has identified several socio-psychological responses to such paradoxes. At one end of the spectrum are defensive reactions (such as splitting, projection, repression, regression, reaction formation, and ambivalence) that initially reduce individuals’ anxiety and discomfort but eventually maintain and reinforce the polarization of the two opposing elements (Lewis, 2000; Seo, Putnam, and Bartunek, 2004; Smith and Lewis, 2011). For instance, the psychological mechanism of projection signifies the transfer of conflicting attributes or feelings, often to a scapegoat or repository of bad feelings (Ashforth and Reingen, 2014). As individuals make sense of contradictions, they can also resort to other, more active and productive responses such as acceptance, confrontation, and transcendence, which explore tensions and thereby tap the creative potential of paradox to enable change in beliefs and practices (Jarzabkowski et al., 2013; Lewis, 2000). Acceptance is about learning to live with paradox (Murnighan and Conlon, 1991). Confronting paradox calls for discussion of the tensions to find a more accommodating understanding or behavior (Smith and Berg, 1987). Finally, inspired by dialectics, transcendence draws on critical reflection to come up with a way to reframe the tensions and view their complementarity and duality.16 Responses may affect – reinforce or change – the focal tensions (Jarzabkowski et al., 2013). For instance, Lewis (2000) and Smith and Lewis (2011) have suggested individuals’ defensive reactions might reinforce existing contradictions. In a related typology, Poole and Van de Ven (1989) have identified four broad approaches for working with paradoxes to develop new theory. In (1) opposition (acceptance), one accepts and uses the paradox constructively without resolving it. The other three seek to resolve the paradox. In (2) spatial separation, one moves the elements of the paradox to separate locations or levels (micro and macro, business unit and corporate). In (3) a temporal separation (sometimes referred as oscillation), one attempts to resolve the paradox by taking time into account: for instance, recognizing how one element creates the conditions for the other. In (4), a synthesis (transcendence), one advances a new conception or perspective. Unlike the other responses, synthesis has a true potential to dissolve or supersede the opposition. Giddens’ (1984) ‘duality of structure’ Page 10 of 23

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illustrates the last category, because by introducing the new conception, it transcends the dualism of structure and action. This typology has been generalized to other paradoxical contexts, such as Toyota's car manufacturing system (Adler et al., 1999). Despite these attempts to categorize responses, few people agree on whether paradoxes can be truly resolved (Clegg et al., 2002; Poole and Van de Ven, 1989) – particularly when a contradiction is framed in a specific sense and limited to a particular time and location. Believers suggest most paradoxes are short-lived; thus, attempts to solve them are not futile. In this view, some solved paradoxes stop being paradoxes and become orthodoxies, and therefore less interesting (Sorensen, 2003). Skeptics take the view that paradoxes, particularly true contradictions, cannot be resolved, but only reappear in different guises. Closer to this position is the view that paradoxes can long persist (Abbott, 2001). An example is the perennial tension between the relevance of scholarship for social problems and the autonomy of scholarship (Augier and March, 2007). Bourdieu (1977) argued that dualisms tend to endure because they are inscribed in social reality, are rallying points for forces organized around antagonistic divisions in a field, and find support in pedagogy. Rather than siding with one of these positions, our prior discussion suggests weaker forms of contradictions, such as those based on faulty assumptions, hidden information, and different forms of complementarities, allow more room for genuine resolution. For instance, viewing a contradiction as a dualism often leads to an ‘either/or’ solution or one based on separating or partitioning its two elements (O'Reilly and Tushman, 2008). By contrast, a duality is often associated with creative and imaginative solutions that transcend the polarization of the focal elements (Adler et al., 2009). A truly creative solution brings consistency to otherwise inconsistent pieces of information; attacking its weakest links can eliminate the contradiction (Rescher, 2001). As indicated in Table 6.1, studies have also focused on how the resolution and management of paradoxes can affect various performance outcomes and at different levels of analysis. A major assumption in this line of research is that synthetic or integrative solutions are associated with higher performance.17 In addition to economic outcomes such as competitive advantage and financial performance, paradox research has considered how the resolution of paradoxes can enhance creativity and innovation (Brown and Eisenhardt, 1997; Kamoche and Cunha, 2003; Miron-Spektor et al., 2011; Wilf, 2012). Presenting the paradox literature as converging on particular questions helps underscore its central tendencies. However, like dialectics, paradox research is not homogenous. Important research is undertaken outside the prevalent research program: Researchers have studied distinctive organizational paradoxes such as the uniqueness paradox (Martin et al., 1983) and the paradox of (n)ever changing world (Birnholtz et al., 2007); others have studied theory-specific tensions and contradictions. For instance, Holm (1995) addressed the paradox of embedded agency within institutional theory. Noteworthy are variations within the paradox research program, particularly as they reveal different affinities and potential influences of dialectics. Poole and Van de Ven (1989) and Adler et al. (1999) highlighted the dialectic notions of transcendence and duality. By contrast, Smith and Lewis (2011) appear to focus on the coordination, acceptance, and management of contradictions more than on their genuine resolution. Yet their study resonates with the dialectic approach in highlighting vicious and virtuous circles and in considering how responses to paradoxes can affect their development.

Paradox and Dialectics: From Differences to Complementarities As we have seen, at least as reflected in their central tendencies, the differences between dialectics and paradox are significant. Dialectics constitutes a broad process perspective and has a more explanatory bent; its focus is more macro, holistic, historical, structural, social, cultural, and political; it highlights social structures, conflict, development, and historical change. By contrast, often dealing with improving the well-being and performance of individuals and groups, paradox research has a more interventionist and normative oriPage 11 of 23

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entation. This literature considers a broad range of tensions and contradictions and ways of addressing them and tends to be more agential, micro, psychological, and cognitive. While some of these differences are not easy to bridge, they leave room for potential complementarities. Table 6.3 summarizes key differences between the two perspectives and lists selected areas of complementarities. Table 6.3The dialectics and paradox perspectives – key differences and potential complementarities Key Differences as Revealed in Central Tendencies Dialectics

Paradox

General Orientation

Explanatory. Focus on change and development through conflict and the emergence, persistence, and development of social structures.

Interventionist. Focus on well-being and performance, the variety of contradictions and ways of managing them.

Scope

A comprehensive process perspective.

A distinct research program. Problem-solving focus.

Level of analysis highlighted

Macro, social, societal

Micro, individuals, groups

Other tendencies

Structural, holistic, historical, political

Agential, psychological, cognitive

Potential Complementarities

Contradictions

Temporal, shifting, and dynamic. Grounded in A broad menu of sources of contradistinct logic. Mainly structural. Highlights dictions, coping mechanisms, and synthesis as a main way to resolve contradicresponses to contradictions tions

Process theorizing

A macro perspective on process and change enabling multilevel linkages.

Organizations

Both reproduced and transformed through Stress on organizations as plural contradictions. Potential for new organizationand multifaceted systems. al forms. Diffusing conventional boundaries.

Interventions

Less determinate. Considers reactions to interventions. Attention to underprivileged stakeholders.

Analyzes the efficacy of different responses to contradictions. Managerial focus.

Thinking habits

Narrative and contrarian thinking.

Integrative thinking. Confronting tensions simultaneously as enhancing long-term performance.

Micro level processes. Providing content to dialectics notion of ‘praxis'.

A bifocal application of the dialectics and paradox perspectives may be worthwhile in the following five areas: contradictions, process theorizing, organizations, interventions, and thinking habits.

Contradictions Page 12 of 23

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Grounded in its system of logic, the dialectic concept of contradiction tends to be more temporal, shifting, and dynamic than typically conceived in paradox research (see Jarzabkowski et al., 2013, for a recent exception). This quality, which reflects dialectics’ relational and process ontology, is manifest in several ways. First, while both perspectives see contradiction as self-negation, dialectics extends this notion to self-negating processesand effects (both enabling and undermining). For example, whereas paradox research may focus on the structural mechanisms managers use to address the tension between individuals’ autonomy and organizational coordination, dialectics may attend to how processes such as empowerment aimed to increase individuals’ autonomy may inadvertently undermine organizational coordination. Thus, dialectical contradiction stresses ‘becoming’ more than ‘being'. Second, the dialectical notion of contradiction stresses the incompatible development of different elements, institutions, and systems over time as a source of contradiction, for example, in the way copyright laws fail to keep pace with technological change. Third, the terms of the contradiction and the degree to which they oppose one another can shift over time. Paradox research may contribute a broad menu of sources and responses to contradictions. Other than its developmental origins, the main source of contradiction in dialectics is structural, systemic, and institutional (Putnam, 2013). Paradox research considers a broader range of contradictions (such as learning, organizing, belonging, and performing paradoxes). Furthermore, the dialectic tradition mainly highlights synthesis or transcendence as a key means by which contradictions are resolved over time.18 Paradox research has identified a wider set of responses to contradictions, socio-psychological as well as managerial.

Process Theorizing Paradox and dialectics focus on different and complementary aspects of process theorizing. Dialectics provides a broad-brush macro perspective on process and social relations. This framework situates organizational contradictions within a broad historical context, endows them with rich philosophical and ontological underpinnings, and highlights their role as a unique model of social change. An additional strength of dialectics is how it deals with multilevel phenomena. By viewing parts and wholes as mutually constituting, dialectics’ relational perspective provides a mechanism for connecting levels of analysis and making them less clearly demarcated. The notion of duality helps reject rigid conventional boundaries within and between organizational units, across organizational levels and between organizations and their environments; it invites organizational analysts to consider how organizational phenomena may display a ‘self-similar’ or fractal quality across levels and time (Abbott, 2001; Farjoun and Levin, 2011). The paradox perspective can augment dialectics’ process perspective through its focus on the micro processes of sensing, responding, and managing contradictions. This emphasis can particularly inform the relatively undertheorized mechanisms within the concept of praxis. As a result, the problem-solving orientation of paradox research can particularly strengthen dialectics’ micro foundations.

Organizations Paradox research has greatly contributed to our understanding of organizations as plural and multifaceted systems and as staging arenas for tensions and conflicts (Pettigrew and Fenton, 2000; Pondy, 1992; Weick, 1979). This pluralism is also reflected in the multiple metaphors and interpretive schemes by which complex organizations can be analyzed (Morgan, 1997). While paradox research is particularly useful in highlighting existing tensions and contradictions in organizations, dialectics links contradictions more closely to organizational persistence and transformation (Benson, Page 13 of 23

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1977).19 In the same way that capitalism was said to carry in its womb the seeds of socialism, organizations can be viewed as incubators for a variety of impending developments (Sztompka, 1991). These can range from breakups and spinoffs, innovations, disasters, routines, and individuals migrating to other organizations, and new organizational forms and institutions created through synthesis of existing elements and forms.20

Interventions Paradox research, the more interventionist perspective, informs practice by highlighting the efficacy of different interventions and the conditions in which they are most likely to succeed. Often directed to organizational performance as a key variable of interest, this focus of paradox research is aligned with managers’ search for ‘what works’ (Cameron and Quinn, 1988; Smith and Lewis, 2011). Dialectics offers a more critical and pluralistic view of organizational interventions. De Rond and Bouchikhi (2004) view the dialectical process as indeterminate in that it does not lead to something better or worse.21 Moreover, dialectics alerts practitioners that every intervention is likely to be counteracted and may lead to unintended consequences and boomerang effects (MacKay and Chia, 2012). Finally, less concerned with shareholder value and with other performance indicators highlighted in paradox research, dialectics invites us to consider other and often less privileged stakeholders (Adler, 2009).

Thinking Habits As in other contradiction-friendly views, the habits of mind associated with paradox and dialectics offer relief from linear, simplistic, and stagnant thinking. At their best, they foster empathy and dialogue, open up new angles and options, and keep people honest. These virtues have led some to link the habits of thought associated with paradox and dialectics with the notion of wisdom. In the spirit of Ecclesiastes, wise individuals are said to be able to embrace contradictions in life and draw insights from them as well as develop heuristics about when and in what circumstances to focus on one side of the opposites (Staudinger and Glück, 2011; Sternberg, 2006). This quality of wisdom can also be found in organizations: ‘smart’ ones are said to welcome rather than reduce complexity (Tsoukas and Hatch, 2001; Weick and Roberts, 1993). Each of these perspectives, however, may point to different thinking habits. Lewis (2000) and Smith and Lewis (2011), for example, have associated paradoxical thinking with integrative thinking or the ability to transcend paradox as reflected in reconsidering underlying assumptions, reframing, and second-order learning. They argue that leaders must confront tensions simultaneously to achieve sustainable high performance. While they share this anti-dualistic sentiment, dialecticians are likely to highlight other and potentially complementary thinking habits. Dialecticians think narratively: They consider not only how one thing can be integrated with another but how one thing can lead to another, particularly to its opposite. The notion ‘those who are silent now will be victims in the next round’ is likely to cross a dialectician's mind. Dialectic thinking may also resemble the way lawyers and entrepreneurs think. Like legal thinking, dialectic thinking is interactive: It is likely to anticipate others’ responses, consider recursive effects, and take into account the unintended. Dialectic thinking shares with entrepreneurial thought a contrarian quality: It is likely to challenge the ‘wisdom of crowds’ and to spot ‘silver linings’ where others see only clouds.

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Future Directions Other than these areas of complementarities, I see the following future directions as particularly promising.

Restoring Mystery As it grows, contradiction research may become prematurely institutionalized. To restore the original meaning of paradox as ‘beyond belief', this domain needs to retrieve the sense of mystery and awe associated with newly identified contradictions and the ingenious ways they are resolved, in theory and practice. For instance, as Martin et al. (1983) originally uncovered, claims for uniqueness of organizational cultures are paradoxically supported by generic stories. Klarner and Raisch (2012) have recently studied how different rhythms of stability and change can affect organizational performance over time. To support this research direction, existing typologies need to remain open-ended and allow room for important and less explored oppositions such as substance and appearance and idealism and pragmatism.

Contradictions as Relational Systems Contradictions regularly appear as parts of broader ecologies or systems (Baxter and Montgomery, 1996; Brandenburger and Nalebuff, 2011; Luscher and Lewis, 2008). This regularity can be an important generative means for problem solving, theory construction, and creativity. A simple illustration is the overused yet productive two by two matrixes. As illustrated by Astley and Van de Ven (1983), once the axes are chosen to maximize contrasts or to create ‘strong classifications’ (Weick, 1989), one can use the different dyadic contrasts between cells (horizontal, vertical, and diagonal) to create synthetic and novel ideas. Exploring other questions such as how actors suppress one set of relational contradictions to help resolve another may bring contradiction research closer to social and economic networks research.

Dialectics as a Model of Change Van de Ven and Poole (1995) made an important contribution when they contrasted dialectic change with other models of change. However, while it is a useful starting point, their discussion of dialectics cannot do justice to the richness of this perspective or provide enough detail to contrast it with other models of change such as punctuated equilibrium. Particularly given the centrality of evolutionary theory in contemporary organizational research, it may be important to contrast it thoroughly with dialectic ideas (Hodgson, 2006; Levins and Lewontin, 1985). For instance, how do these two models of change differ or complement in their micro foundations, views on progress and adaptation, and explanations of how novelty is generated?

Inconsistency and Consistency Combined In this chapter's introduction, I drew a sharp contrast between contradiction-friendly models and other theoretical perspectives that highlight fit and consistency. Ironically, this dualism may run against the spirit of both dialectics and paradox perspectives. Viewing organizations as exhibiting both consistency and inconsistency opens up a range of interesting issues to explore. For instance, a major assumption in strategy research is that to succeed, organizations need to exhibit internal fit and complementarities (Milgrom and Roberts, 1995; Porter, 1980). Yet, this position needs to be reconciled with other views of contradictions as important for adaptation and development. Thinking about the interplay of habits and routines (retention) and contradictions (variation) raises an additional question: How do organizations develop routine, and potentially creative, ways to handle contradictions? Page 15 of 23

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Contradictions are likely to remain at the forefront of organizational and process research. A full appreciation of the differences and complementarities between the paradox and dialectics views, their interplay with other strands of process research, and their place in a changing and complex reality may be impossible to achieve, but the very pursuit may lead research on organizational contradictions to new heights.

Notes 1By its nature, the focus on central tendencies cannot fully accommodate important nuances: for instance, dialectics has been used to study problem solving (Harvey, 2014) and paradox has been viewed as promoting individuals’ growth and development (Watzlawick, Weakland and Fisch, 1974). Nevertheless, appreciating the commitments and modalities of dialectics and paradox can clarify where future exchange can take place. 2See Evans and Doz (1992), Baxter and Montgomery (1996), and Ashforth and Reingen (2014) for different lists of qualities associated with contradictions. Research has also suggested the persistence of contradictions and tensions as one of their defining attributes (Smith and Lewis, 2011). This attribute may be better regarded as an empirical question than a defining quality. 3Some scholars define ‘dualities’ as simultaneously paired qualities or tensions (Ashforth and Reingen, 2014; Graetz and Smith, 2008; Johnston and Selsky, 2006, Smith and Lewis, 2011). This definition differs from the one used by Giddens and others, and thus may lead to some confusion. 4While I consulted some of these more modern interpretations, I mainly focus on dialectics as developed in the writings of Hegel, Marx, and Engels. This focus also means that I avoided discussing other dialectic traditions, such as illustrated in the work of Freud. 5For more detailed bibliography of original sources and interpretations readers, can refer to sources such as Morgan (1997) and Adler (2009). 6Langley and Sloan (2012) provide a comprehensive literature review. 7This illustrative list likely underestimates the continuous influence of dialectics within organizational theory. A number of early traditions within organizational theory, such as Pragmatism (Dewey, 1922), institutional theory (Selznick, 1949), and the Columbia school (Haveman, 2009) have selectively borrowed from dialectics and propagated its ideas. Leading organizational scholars well known for uncovering contradictions in human life have used dialectical arguments in their theorizing (Hannan and Freeman, 1984; March, 1994; Stinchcombe, 2001; Hedberg, Bystrom and Starbuck, 1976; Weick, 1989). Dialectic ideas have also influenced the development of tools such as scenario analysis, decision-making techniques, and system dynamics models and reincarnated in system and complexity theories. As evident in recent interest in institutional logics (Thornton, Ocasio and Lounsbury 2012), practice theory (Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011), and routine dynamics (Feldman and Pentland, 2003), dialectics is alive and deeply interwoven within organization studies even when its more influential and original ideas are not mentioned specifically. 8Although I refer to them interchangeably throughout the text, ‘dialectics’ usually refers to a theoretical tradition and ‘dialectic’ to the process or mechanism by which it brings about change. In social science, dialectics came to mean any aspect of social processes having to do with paradox, contradiction, development through conflict, mutual interaction, unintended consequences, and the like (Mason, 1996; Schneider, 1971; Zeitz, 1980). 9Hegel's teleological view of progress has been criticized by others. Nevertheless, this notion is integral to his Page 16 of 23

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theoretical scheme. 10The wide sweep of Marx's analysis is illustrated in the range of issues he theorized about: from globalization, technology, and culture to competition, bureaucracy and class struggle, and individuals’ creativity and skills (Adler, 2009). 11This theme is elaborated in neo-institutional theory and in institutional logics research (Thornton, Ocasio and Lounsbury 2012). 12The resolution of contradiction can be temporary or partial or permanent and total. An economic crisis represents the first kind. Marx refers to crises as ‘essential outbursts … of the immanent contradictions’ the preexisting equilibrium has broken down, and a new one composed of recognizable similar elements, usually with the addition of some new elements, is in the process of replacing it. A permanent and total resolution occurs when the elements in contradiction undergo qualitative change, transforming all their relations to one another as well as the larger system of which they are part. An economic crisis that gives rise to a political and social revolution is an example of this (Ollman, 2003). 13Hargadon and Douglas’ (2001) study of Edison's introduction of electricity shows how he skillfully exploited existing institutions in the process of displacing them. Similarly, organizations working on rehabilitation, vaccination, or crime prevention may not be needed if they fully attain their objectives. 14A defining mark of this development is the fact that research on paradox became more self-conscious and mobilized: increasingly, paradox researchers refer to similar studies and share common issues and concerns in ways reminiscent of other interest groups and research programs such as routine dynamics and institutional logics. 15Double bind: A psychological impasse created when contradictory demands are made of an individual, such as a child or an employee, so that no matter which directive is followed, the response will be construed as incorrect. 16See Seo, Putnam and Bartunck (2004) for a related discussion of ways of managing dualities. 17For a more balanced view of this question, refer to Gulati and Puranam (2009). 18Dialectics recognizes the possibility that, rather than leading to a synthesis, the conflict between the two sides becomes so intense that they cannot continue to exist. The result is the destruction of one (or both), which ends the contradiction, but produces new contradictions. 19Adler (2009) summarizes several other implications of dialectics to organizations. 20An interesting application of the dialectical approach to organizations has been provided by Hernes (1976) with regard to Coleman's notion of ‘corporate actor'. As Hernes observed, historically, the creation of organizations could not been accommodated in a legal system that dealt with individuals only. This tension led to a conceptual innovation that assigned organizational actors with certain legal rights and obligations previously related to individuals only and thus encompassed both humans and organizations. Subsequent conceptual developments in organization theory continue this dialectical pattern. In a later development, Weick (1979) reacted to the then dominant view of ‘organization’ (noun) as a sovereign actor by introducing the process notion of ‘organizing’ (verb). As the latter became popular, it triggered calls for restoring the notion of organization as an actor (Whetten, 2006). Most recently, Bakken and Hernes (2006) continued this dialectic by calling to synthesize the ‘organization’ and ‘organizing’ views. 21See Baxter and Montgomery (1996) for further discussion of teleological versus indeterminate views of dialectical change. Page 17 of 23

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies The Practice Approach: For a Praxeology of Organisational and Management Studies

Contributors: Davide Nicolini & Pedro Monteiro Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "The Practice Approach: For a Praxeology of Organisational and Management Studies" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n7 Print pages: 110-126 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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The Practice Approach: For a Praxeology of Organisational and Management Studies Davide NicoliniPedro Monteiro Practice theory, practice-based studies, practice approach, or practice lens denote a family of orientations that take orderly materially mediated doing and sayings (‘practices') and their aggregations as central for the understanding of organisational and social phenomena. Authors who embrace this orientation suggest that matters such as social order, knowledge, institutions, identity, power, inequalities, or change result from and transpire through practices and their aggregations. Examples of social practices include driving, taking pictures, cooking, consuming, teaching a class, online trading, strategising in corporate meetings, and performing heart surgery. Practice approaches are a primary way to study organisation processually. This is because all coherent practice approaches subscribe to the view that social and organisational life stem from and transpire through the real-time accomplishments of ordinary activities. The practice approach is rooted in a number of traditions including Marxism, the work of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and the North American pragmatist tradition, which put concrete human activity – with blood, sweat, tears and all – at the centre of the study of the production, reproduction, and change of social phenomena. In a famous example, Pierre Bourdieu, used to note that to understand crucial aspects of French society we need look into ordinary settings such as kitchens and dining rooms rather than high places or abstract spheres populated with structures, functions, and the like (Bourdieu, 1984; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). The texture of French society is in fact reproduced daily through ordinary activities and conversations such as ‘Have you been respectful to your teachers?’ and ‘This is not the proper way to sit at the table: sit up straight!’ Similarly, one of the greatest recent social changes in North American history was triggered in the back of an old bus by a small number of courageous women and men who refused to leave their seats and in so doing interrupted the reproduction of segregation – in practice (Parks & Reed, 2000). Thus, coherent practice approaches posit that phenomena of various complexities are not made of transcendental elements such as forces, logics, or mental models. When it comes to the social world, it is practising all the way down1. In this chapter, we present the main tenets of the practice approach. In the first section, we explain the central elements that characterise practices and address the main misunderstandings usually associated with the approach in the following one. In the third part, we showcase four research strategies to carry out practicebased studies, and in the epilogue we briefly discuss our position on theorising through a practice lens.

What Are Practices? One of the challenges of discussing the practice approach is its lack of epistemological unity. Practice theories constitute, in fact, a fairly broad family connected by a web of historical and conceptual similarities. Each has its own definition of practice and therefore praxeologise their object of inquiry in different ways (see Table 7.1 for a collection of definitions of social practice). There are however numerous family resemblances that allow us to speak of a practice approach. Among others, scholars agree that: Table 7.1Definitions of practice Author

Definition of Practice

‘I will use the term to highlight four features of human activity. Practice is (1) situational; (2) Catherine strategic; (3) embedded in a misrecognition of what it is in fact doing; and (4) able to reproduce Bell or reconfigure a vision of the order of power in the world, or what I will call ‘redemptive hegemony'’ (Bell, 1992, p. 81) Pierre Bourdieu

‘Practice = (Habitus X Capital) + Field’ (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 101)

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‘The microbe-like operations proliferating within technocratic structure and deflecting their funcMichel de tioning by means of a multitude of ‘tactics’ articulated in the details of everyday life’ (De Certeau Certeau, 1998, p. xi) Harold Garfinkel

‘Contingent ongoing accomplishments’ (Garfinkel, 1967, p. 11)

Anthony Giddens

‘Regularized types of acts’ (Giddens, 1984, p. 75) 'The basic domain of study of the social sciences, according to the theory of structuration, is neither the experience of the individual actor, nor the existence of any form of social totality but social practices ordered across space and time’ (p. 1989)

Aleksei Leont'ev

‘Activity is the non-additive, molar unit for the material, corporeal subject. In a narrower sense (i.e., on the psychological level) is the unit of life that is mediated by mental reflection. The real function of this unit is to orient the subject in the world of objects. In other words, activity is not a reaction or aggregate of reactions, but a system with its own structure, its own internal transformations, and its own development’ (Leontiev, 1981, p. 46)

‘Any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, Alasdair with the result that human powers to achieve excellence and human conceptions of the ends MacIntyre and goods involved, are systematically extended. Tic-tac-toe is not an example of a practice in this sense, nor is throwing a football with skill but the game of football is, and so is chess’ (MacIntyre, 1981, p. 175)

Sherry Ortner

‘Modern practice theory seeks to explain the relationship(s) that obtain between human action, on the one hand, and some global entity which we may call ‘the system,’ on the other. Questions concerning these relationships may go in either direction – the impact of the system on practice, and the impact of practice on the system. (Ortner, 1984, p. 148) … routines and scenarios are predicated upon, and embody within themselves, the fundamental notions of temporal, spatial, and social ordering that underlie and organise the system as a whole. In enacting these routines, actors not only continue to be shaped by the underlying organisational principles involved but continually re-endorse those principles in the world of public observation and discourse’ (Ortner, 1984, p. 154)

Andreas Reckwitz

‘A routinized type of behavior which consists of several elements, interconnected to one other: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge. A practice … forms so to speak a ‘block’ whose existence necessarily depends on the existence and specific interconnectedness of these elements, and which cannot be reduced to any one of these single elements’ (Reckwitz, 2002, pp. 49–50)

‘A practice is a temporally evolving, open-ended set of doings and sayings linked by practical Theodore understandings, rules, teleo-affective structures, and general understandings (…) the organizaSchatzki tion of a practice describes the practice's frontiers: A doing or saying belongs to a given practice if it expresses components of that practice's organization’ (Schatzki, 2002, p. 87) Charles Taylor

‘The meanings and norms implicit in these practices are not just in the minds of the actors but are out there in the practices themselves, practices which cannot be conceived as set of individual actions, but which are essentially modes of social relations, mutual actions’ (Taylor, 1971, p. 27)

Lev Vygotsky

‘Artifact-mediated and object-oriented action’ (Vygotsky, 1980, p. 40)

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1. Practices are molar phenomena that hold a number of sub-components – usually smaller units of activity. For example, the academic practice of publishing is made of, gives sense to, and organises (in the sense of establishing sequences and relations between) a number of other activities that may not count as practices. Different authors give these smaller units various names. From the smaller to the bigger, Schatzki names them ‘doings and sayings’ (e.g., pressing keys on a keyboard), ‘tasks’ (e.g., searching for a quotation on the Internet), and ‘projects’ (e.g., writing an article). Cultural historical activity theory scholars distinguish between ‘operations, action and activity’ (Kuutti, 1996). More recently, González, Nardi, & Mark (2009) introduced the further level of ‘ensembles', defined as sets of actions thematically connected, oriented towards a particular purpose, and framed within a particular object-related activity. 2. Practices and their sub-elements only acquire sense when organised around an end or object. Jumping on a table is an activity that does not make sense as part of the practice of ‘attending a class’ although is perfectly sensible as part of the practice of ‘singing Austrian folk dances’ (where singers jump on tables and perform their piece keeping the tempo by shaking whips!). By the same token, even ‘individual’ activities like brushing our teeth in the morning already make sense because the practice itself carries (and is organised around) an implicit end. In a sense, most of the time practices flow towards their end and we follow practices, as we participate in them, blindly. This does not mean that we act as automatons, turning off our brains. Rather, it means we carry out our lives in ways different from what is usually imagined by functionalists – who posit that people ‘deliberate internally’ before they act. Practice scholars captured this dimension in specific ways. Schatzki suggests that all practices are guided by a teleo-affective dimension (Schatzki, 2002). Cultural historical activity theory scholars talk about the object of a practice, suggesting however that such object is partly given, partly negotiated with others, and partly beyond our control – especially when the practice involves a transformation, as most work activities do (Engeström, 1987). Practices are inherently associated with a performative understanding of reality (Latour, 2005). Although we might speak of practices as discrete, substantial entities (turning them into discursive ‘objects'), in the end we are still talking about activities, not things. For example, while practices can be identified and named (practitioners do this all the time, and talk about ‘teaching a class’ but of ‘giving a speech'). Asking where the bounds teaching lie is like asking what the boundary of a language or any dynamic phenomena is. There are no clearly defined bounds because the answers are necessarily open-ended. Hence, questioning, ‘When does teaching end?’ or ‘When is teaching no longer teaching?’ is an empirical question, not one that can be answered using a list of attributes (more on this in the section ‘The Genealogic Approach'.). 3. Practices exist in configurations, which authors refer to as knots, networks, nexuses, assemblages, and textures (Czarniawska, 2007; Gherardi, 2006; Latour, 2005; Nicolini, 2009a; 2012). They are joined by happening in the same time and place or by being bound together in harmonious or conflicting relationships. For example, teaching depends on the alignment of other practices that in effect are not directly part of it – such as enrolling students, opening the school, and keeping it clean, all practices in their own right. In this sense, we never encounter practices in isolation, and to think of a specific practice we must foreground it by bracketing its relationships. This ramified ‘hinterland’ becomes particularly visible where there is a breakdown or where situations change. If electricity production practices are interrupted, the effects ripple through the connections, affecting the practice of teaching a class by making the room dark and the slide projector unusable. 4. Practices have a collective and normative nature. Besides spanning connections with other practices, they are also associated with a given constituency, which in turn keeps the practice alive by (re)producing it (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Such reference group provides the milieu to socialise newcomers and pass competencies to the next generation while Page 4 of 18

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6.

7.

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constituting the forum where what counts as acceptable is debated and decided. Thus, practices and their normativity are apprehended together. As practices are learnt and performed, the mutual accountability among practitioners establish a sense of right and wrong (so that not ‘everything goes’ in practice!) and restrictions (what is acceptable and what constitutes overstepping the mark). As Rouse notes, actors share a practice ‘If their actions are appropriately regarded as answerable to norms of correct and incorrect practice’ (Rouse, 2001, p. 190). This means that the normativity of practices is not found in the ability to follow general rules but in the mutual (and personal) scrutiny of its constituency. Far from being just descriptive devices that summarise what people do, practices are sanctioned ‘real-life mechanisms’ that select appropriate conducts and acceptable attributions of intelligibility. Accordingly, we not only tend to follow practices blindly but practices inexorably create worlds: not ‘everything goes’ in practice. Practices are inherently material in nature. Consider online trading, for example. Like all practices, it unfolds amid and through a specific material arrangement that is often mission-critical: without computers, there would be no calculations on a trading floor (Beunza & Stark, 2004). Practices thus bring to the fore the critical and active role of material things in all social affairs (Orlikowski, 2010). In line with this focus on the material side of social life, most practice theories give prominence to habituated or educated bodies. As we have seen above, practices are often inscribed in bodies through learning and repeated injunctions (e.g., seating straight at table). This means that we do not really follow practices, rather we absorb them and are absorbed in them, producing a sense of ‘What comes next’ based on our participation (Gherardi, 2006; Gherardi, Nicolini, & Odella, 1998). For practice theory, we think with our bodies, and in a real sense we are the practice. There are always partial inconsistencies and tensions within the components of a practice and among different practices. Conflicts may arise from the misalignment of the elements of a practice; from the competition between old and new ways of doing things; or from the introduction of novelty, such as new technologies or rules. The resolution of clashes often triggers the expansion of the practice, the development of different ways of doing things, the introduction of new artefacts or shifts of meaning (Engeström, 1987; Nicolini, 2007). It may also trigger the importation of new elements from other practices, the dissolution of traditional alliances between practices, and the establishment of new ones. These dynamics keep practices in constant movement. All practices have a history and are historically situated. First, practices are not events as they entail an element of duration and perpetuation. This is obtained mostly through reiterated performances (which is different from identical ‘repetition') and the socialisation of newcomers (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Artefacts (which inscribe programmes of action and memories held by those who make up the social constituency of the practice) also perpetuate practices in time and allow for lags in reproduction without them being lost. In this way, the social, conventionalised, normative, and durable nature of practices means practices sustain one another and we can say that practices constitute regimes of activity – in the dual sense of constituting regulated ordered ways of doing and sayings and unfolding processes that flow in time governed by specific conditions. The social and material nature of practices also makes them inherently situated in a particular moment in time, space, and history. Cooking, teaching a class, and performing heart surgery necessarily ‘depend’ on the combination of ingredients which go into them as well as the conditions within which the practice unfolds. In this sense, all practices are different each time round – they are inherently local and accomplished each time for the first time. The puzzle for social scientists is that of explaining the apparent similarities of practices in space and time rather than their differences. For the same reason, the past does not determine the future accomplishment of practices as any accomplishment is both context perpetuating (confirms the existing regime) and context renewing (it sets up The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies

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new conditions). 9. The indeterminacy of practices allows scope for initiative, creativity, and biographies. Performing a practice always requires adapting to new circumstances, as its accomplishment is neither mindless repetition nor complete invention. Yet individual performances take place and are intelligible against the ‘more or less stable background of other practices’ (Rouse, 2007, p. 505). Hence, the existence of a practice does not equate to the action of an individual but is part of regimes of activity (see above). While homo economicus is conceived as a (semi) rational decision maker and homo sociologicus is depicted as a norm-following, role-performing individual, homo practicus is conceived as a carrier of practices, a body/mind who ‘carries', but also ‘carries out', practices (Reckwitz, 2002, p. 256). 10. Practices and their assemblages empower certain courses of action (and those positioned to take them) over others. In this sense, no one can ever step aside from the circuits of power just as they cannot step out of the texture of practices – which is synonymous to social life (Schatzki, 2002). However, given their indeterminacy and dynamic nature, practices also create openings for resistance and change as when actors reflect and ask themselves ‘What does it make sense to do in this situation?’ Practice approaches thus carve out a specific space for collective and individual agency and agents – although the world is highly unequal as access to such agency (which means ‘power’ by any other name) is unevenly distributed. The foregoing tenets constitute the main characteristics of practices. Together, they show that practices are meaning-making, order-producing, and reality-shaping activities. That is, orderly sets of materially mediated doings and sayings aimed at identifiable ends. We call such regimes of activity practices when they have a history, a constituency, and normative dimension. With a ‘real’ purchase in the regulated manufacturing of reality, practices contrast with hidden forces other social theories talk about. Despite (or by virtue of) constituting the everyday background amid and through which social life unfolds, they do not have a self-evident nature. Practices need to be thematised and turned into discursive objects in order to be examined as entities both by practitioners and/or social scientists (i.e., a specific practice such as teaching). Since representations always foreground certain elements and hide others, representing practice is a theoretical and political project. The idea that practices can be simply observed and neutrally chronicled is to subscribe to specific ideological projects (willingly or otherwise) and/or scant sophistication. It follows that as we scrutinise practices, we must attend to two activities simultaneously: (1) the practices we aim to investigate; (2) the practices through which we attempt to re-present them (i.e., our representational activities and vocabulary). This holds both for practitioners and social scientists. The differences between the two are that while practitioners usually thematise contentious aspects of practices (e.g., broken rules; shifts of meanings; recalcitrant tools), social scientists strive for panoramic descriptions – an expectation that in turn stems from the current practices of their scholar community.

What the Practice-Based Approach Is Not A good way to clarify a concept or a theory is to contrast it with alternative views and explain what the concept or theory does not mean. Here we contrast the practice approach with three alternative views with which it is sometimes confused: (1) the idea that to study practice means simply to report what people say or do; (2) the related idea that practices equal to actions carried out by individuals (influenced by a given structure); and (3) the idea that practice is the instantiation of something else so that to study practice is to reveal the hidden forces, mechanism, or logics that lie behind it.

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Practice Is More than What People Do All practice approaches give prominence to situated, observable, and meaningful social occurrences performed linguistically, through bodily movements and with the contribution of material artefacts. However, their focus is on the regimes of doings and sayings (the activity or practice at hand) rather than merely what people do and say (Geiger, 2009; Whittington, 2011). Thus, the basic unit of analysis of practice-oriented scholars is systems of activities (Engeström, 1987), organised sets of doings and sayings (Schatzki, 2002), discourses and discursive formations (Foucault, 1977), or the resources and procedures that produce mutually intelligible scenes and coursea of action (Atkinson & Heritage, 1984). Take, for example, the case of Alpine skiing (see Boxes 7.1 and 7.2). A focus on skiers and ‘what they do’ would in fact explain skiing in terms of personal motives, competences, rules, or a combination of the above. However, for the practice approach, while in agreement with the importance of familiarising yourself with skiing (possibly spending a day on the slopes and putting on the skis yourself), also asks the researcher to consider a number of other things besides the cognitions and behaviours of skiers going down the slope. What people do and say on the slopes is only the point of departure for exploring the well-oiled net of activities, people, and materials that taken together make up skiing and allow it to happen. Or as Bourdieu would put it, the conditions of possibility for skiing (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). To study the practice of skiing entails examining how and under which material and historical conditions all these element cohere, what tensions they harbour, what sort of practice of skiing results from their combination, and hence what ‘going to ski’ and ‘knowing how to ski’ means in any specific situation. In turn, ‘skiing as done in this particular place and time’ can be used as an ingredient to explain a variety of other things, including regional economic development, human sociality (ski clubs and association and their role in society), middle-class ways of ‘doing family,’ all the way to the reproduction or contestation of gender stereotypes (is it appropriate for women to ski?). What skiers do is indeed central to this large dynamic construction given that if skiers do not show up, the whole construction collapses. Equally, regional economic developing is strictly linked to what counts as good skiing and what people do on the slopes. The new way of skiing (carving) and the associated new types of skis require wide pistes. This has put older skiing stations (with their steep narrow pistes, which suited the old ways of skiing) out of business. While understanding what people do is critical to the practice approach, studying practice (as in ‘skiing') is much more than merely chronicling people doing things. Spending a day on the slopes doing interviews and watching people ski is thus only a small part of what studying the social practice of skiing entails (Nicolini, 2009b).

Practice Is Not Synonymous with Individual Action or Heroic Agency Because of the attention the practice approach pays to real-time activity, practice studies are at times mistakenly equated to, or associated with, the traditional sociology of action à la Parsons or more contemporary variants, as those stemming from evolutionary and behavioural economics (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979; Nelson & Sidney, 1982). On the contrary, practice approaches are fundamentally different from these orientations, criticised for being based on methodological individualist premises. In short, all practice approaches agree that taking well-formed individuals as the basic unit of social and organisational analysis leads to a variety of theoretical and empirical conundrums. The same applies if we assume that phenomena can be explained in terms of (more or less rational) individual choices or (more or less successful) efforts to instantiate pre-existing rules, plans of action, or mental schemes (for an in-depth discussion, see Schatzki, 1996, 2002). To avoid such conundrums, all practice approaches take organised activities (practices) as the basic unit of analysis – conceiving individuals as carriers and performers of practices. The assumption is that actions, decisions, and agency (what to do next, if anything) only acquire meaning as part of a practice and its temPage 7 of 18

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poral and historical unfolding. Returning to the example above, practice approaches suggest that it makes little sense to speak of skiers as independent from or existing prior to the practice of skiing. Skiing and skiers emerge together, and talking about one without the other makes little sense. In a world without snow (but also without skis or without transportation), there would be no skiing and therefore no skiers. The same applies to other typical dimensions in the analysis of social affairs such as agency (the fact that skiers decide to turn up on a slope only makes sense and is materially possible within the alignment of practices and conditions described above); meaning (looking at a person walking up the slope does not makes sense, until we realise she is checking for signs of possible impending avalanches), and intentions (what to do next on a slope depends on the practice you are carrying out – in other situations, people rarely throw themselves down an extremely steep and dangerous mountain). The methodological lesson is that rather than searching for the reasons of (organisational or social) behaviour inside people, practice approaches urge one to look for relations, how regimes of actions are knotted together, and what this implies in terms of agency, meaning, and empowerment. Rather than focusing on discrete actions, motivations, and individual rational decisions, practice approaches foreground flow and sequence, the learning process that allow newcomers to attune to the shared understanding of a community of practitioners and the dispositions and practical wisdom that comes with being part of an ongoing regime of activity. Instead of explaining regularity in terms of mental habits or externalised routines, practice approaches – including those authors who take a practice view of routines such as Feldman and Pentland (2003) – one should ask how: (1) habituation is obtained and sustained; (2) individuals participate in the perpetuation or interruption of regular behaviour; and (3) routinised courses of actions are knotted and kept together by other routinised actions or objects (or a combination of the two). From a practice perspective, attributing agency and authorship is always a political project that creates heroes out of relations and institutes asymmetries – for example, between soldiers and generals, great men and their wives, humans and animals, and human and nonhumans. In this sense, practice theory takes seriously Berthold Brecht's observation that although history is narrated as the results of the actions of great leaders, it is in fact made by assemblages of ordinary things: Who built Thebes of the seven gates? In the books you will read the names of kings. Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock? […] The young Alexander conquered India. Was he alone? Caesar defeated the Gauls. Did he not even have a cook with him? Bertold Brecht (1959)

Practices Are Not the Instantiation of Metaphysical Entities Finally, practice approaches oppose the idea that ordinary actions are the instantiation of something else, so that to understand practices we need to search for the hidden forces that preside over them. Practice-based Page 8 of 18

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approaches are therefore opposed to the idea that the aim of organisation and social theory is to identify/ reconstruct mechanisms or forces that ‘lie behind’ the world, regardless of how such imagined elements are called (e.g., structural mechanisms, institutional logics, norms and value systems, group mental models, collective unconscious, ostensive features, etc.). When applied coherently, this means rejecting ideas such as a distinction between praxis and practice (with the latter being an instantiation of the former) and theories that explain social processes in terms of (hidden) ‘logics'. The idea of some ‘thing’ as ‘the praxis of skiing’ instantiated by humans according to their context as they produce the ‘the practice of skiing’ is untenable – and, frankly, an obscure form of metaphysics imported into social sciences. Even worse, assuming such ‘praxis’ (or logics or structural mechanisms) exists by influencing actors (behind their back), leaves us with the classic problem of the cultural dope, strongly fought against by practice theorists such as Garfinkel, this time only rebranded as ‘praxis dopes’ (Garfinkel, 1967). Practice theories thus wholeheartedly embrace Wittgenstein's principle that ‘nothing is hidden, everything is in plain view’ and just because we may struggle to explain things in terms of what is said and done, we do not need to start searching for hidden causes that ‘elude us’ (Wittgenstein, 1958, §435–6). Going back to the previous example, to understand skiing, we need to unravel the thick network of relations that links the ‘here and now’ of one skier with the ‘here and now’ of other skiers and with the ‘there and then’ of other practices that take place in distant spaces and times. Tracing these associations does not lead us to the world of metaphysical elements (e.g., the praxis of skiing or the institutional logic of skiing) but rather to the many places where new ways of skiing are imagined, enacted, and conventionalised: cafes and clubs where devoted skiers meet and discuss new ideas on how to do things differently; skiing schools where teachers think of safer or more ‘elegant’ ways of going down the pistes; meetings of marketing executives who think how to promote new ways of skiing so that they can sell the necessary equipment; conventions of skiing enthusiasts where famous skiers (sponsored by said marketers) promote the ‘great new idea of going down the piste backwards’ that others will pick up and share on the web. There are no hidden forces at work. Expressions such as the ‘new way of skiing’ do not refer to mysterious entities that exert pressure on individuals. They are simply a convenient way to refer to the dense network of relationships, machinations, and efforts that brings about a new way of skiing. This in turn leads to review the idea of levels of reality in two ways, reflecting different perspectives under the practice approach. Practice scholars insist that what is usually called ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ is made of the same stuff and that this distinction should be repurposed as one of ‘large’ and ‘small’ phenomena (Schatzki, 2011). Both the skiing industry and skiers on the pistes transpire through bundles of activities made up of humans, artefacts, and discourses. Yet, while we can directly observe a skiing race, the same is not true for the resort system in the Alps. This is not because the skiing industry is made of some transcendental elements (e.g., institutional logics or social forces), rather it is due to its complex, vast, ramified reality, beyond the reach of single study (Schatzki, 2011). Hence, when faced with trans-local (‘macro') phenomena, we need to trace interconnections and follow the steps that lead to certain outcomes over others. In the case of the sky industry, this might mean attending events in which the leadership and business representatives of skiing resorts congregate, exploring the history of how certain standards and procedures in resort management emerged and even shadowing individuals who interact with multiple skiing organisations, such as consultants in the industry. On the other hand, theorists associated with an ethno-methodological tradition propose turning the idea of ‘macro’ on its head (Llewellyn and Spence, 2009). What is more ‘macro’ (in the sense of being part of the life of millions of individuals across the globe) than the ordinary act of exchanging money, making a phone call, or having a meeting? Hence, a study of the ski industry would probably focus on highly common practices central to the industry such as hotel check-in and check-out or the preparation to go down the slope. What both positions agree is that the coherent application of the practice lens leads to a view of social and Page 9 of 18

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organisational phenomena in terms of a flat and relational ontology in which the ‘macro’ always boil down to concrete practices (Emirbayer, 1997; Latour, 2005).

Four Research Strategies for Organisation and Management Studies To summarise from the two sections above, practice approaches constitute a family of procedures for praxeologising social and organisational phenomena. When used coherently, they populate the social world (and the analytical products of social scientists) with orderly sets of materially mediated doing and sayings (‘practices') rather than, for example, action systems, classes, logics, structures, etc. However, the principles outlined above are only the beginning. The practice perspective, reduced to pure theory, would in fact be contradictory. For this approach, the value of a theory can only be ascertained on the basis of the concrete, practical consequences it brings to bear in the act of inquiry and what difference it makes (James, 1907). The fact that at the time of writing this chapter several authors prefer to focus on the issue of ‘what practice theory is’ rather than using the approach to study social phenomena is simply a consequence of the state of the organisational studies field and a reflection of the contemporary idea of a presumed hierarchy of knowledge between pure data and theory. By putting a premium on abstract concepts, this traditional distinction generates a diffusion of ‘scholastic approaches’ marked by the aspiration of social scientists to become (metaphysical) social theorists as well as the endless search for more and more hidden causes and invisible mechanisms only gifted scholars might unveil. Thus, the issue is how we can put the practice lens to work in terms of research design and methods. Elsewhere, we have referred to the practice approach as packages of theory, method, and narrative style (Nicolini, 2012, chapter 8). Four of these packages, that is, four ways of addressing the task of praxeologising organisational and management issues seem prevalent in current research. They are the situational approach (addressing the local accomplishment, production, and reproduction of practices); the genealogic approach (which investigates the natural life of practices); the configurational approach (which explores how practices are knotted together into configurations, examining the trans-situated nature of practices); and the dialectical approach (which focuses on how tension, contradictions, and power imbalances produced by practices keep them in constant flux).

The Situational Approach A first way to put the practice perspective to work is to focus on the concerted accomplishment of practices within orderly scenes of action such as meetings (Boden, 1994; Jarzabkowski and Seidl, 2008), shop floors (Ahrens and Mollona, 2007), restaurants (Bouty and Gomez, 2013), control rooms (Heath and Luff, 1992), hospital wards (Mol, 2002), or classes (Scollon, 2004). Orderly scenes of actions are occasions where regimes of activity manifest themselves, meet, intersect, collide, and work together more or less successfully. By scrutinising these sites, we can document how practices are actually accomplished, extended in time, and reiterated through doings, saying, bodily skills, and the mediation of artefacts, objects, and spaces. In rare and fortunate instances, we can also observe how practices are disrupted and even interrupted. Imagine we are observing the practice of teaching a class. We would then focus on such things as: How does ‘doing a class’ unfold in real time? What doings and sayings go into making a class? What difference does changing types of doings and saying or introducing new technologies make? What do teachers and students see as the meaning and end of the activity? Are their understandings aligned? What materials are involved? In which way do they concur to actively shape the scene of action? Which idea of practice is inscribed in the artefacts present in the scene (think ‘sitting at desks’ versus ‘sitting around a table')? What bodily and discurPage 10 of 18

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sive competencies are used? When are these competencies learnt? The key in all these (research) questions is that the focus is not on how people perform the practice but rather the performance itself. Direct observation of scenes of action is the preferred method of inquiry to study practices situationally – which is not to say that this is the only way to study practice in general. This is for two main reasons. First, practices look very different when observed in the present or recounted in the past (Bourdieu, 1977). Secondly, practitioners tend to take for granted critical aspects of their activity (Suchman, 1995). If we ask practitioners to describe their practice, they customarily omit the work features they consider basic. Thus, witnessing scenes of action as they happen is critical to studying the accomplishment of practices: Post hoc narrations inherently yield impoverished, highly interpreted, and often subject-centred accounts. Studies that do not entail some direct access to the sites where practices unfold risk missing important aspects of them (although, as we discussed above, the study of practices should not be mechanically equated with the mere documentation of what is going on at a particular site). One of the challenges of studying practices situationally is that when we witness a scene of action, we are exposed to a variety of actions, projects, and ensembles of tasks belonging to several distinct practices rather than a single one. Think of a train station, a hospital emergency room, or a corporate office. Several practices happen at the same time. Scenes of action are thus nexuses where several accomplishments intersect and through which several practices are re-produced at the same time (Scollon, 2004). The challenge for empirical researchers is to find out which practices are relevant or happening in a situation before they proceed to study them in detail.

The Genealogic Approach While studying practice situationally remains central, other scholars embrace a different strategy. Rather than deconstructing scenes of actions, their strategy is to focus on the development of discrete practices: how concerted accomplishments become a regime, how it is perpetuated and changed, and why it disappears. In short, they take the natural life of practices instead of their accomplishment as the object of inquiry. The processes whereby practices are performed remain central, but the processual aspects (i.e., the situated ongoing accomplishment) are bracketed. This approach enables us to examine how (individual) practices emerge, evolve, recruit participants, compete for resources, merge, or disappear without having to posit that direct human intentionality is guiding the process. For example, Shove, Pantzar, and Watson (2012) have conducted a number of studies on the dynamics of practices related to the consumption of commodities, sport, and lifestyle (see also Warde, 2005). To do so, they developed a (lean) version of practice theory based on the work of Reckwitz (2002), which assumes that practice emerges from/is constituted by the association of meaning, skills, and tools. The study of practices thus becomes the empirical study of how these elements are associated, and with whom and under what conditions they become a practice. In the case of teaching, this combinatory tactic would allow us to study practice origin and variation stemming from changes in its elements. For example, we could investigate when and how was the modern practice of doing a class assembled by asking: On what elements of other practices did it build upon? How did this way of doing recruit participants? How were they convinced to stick to it? What other ways of doing class were weeded out? By the same token, the approach allows us to focus on how teaching might evolve, compete, or form alliances with other practices. For example, we could examine how teaching in a classroom differs from the rise of online teaching, or even how open courses such as massive open online courses (MOOCs) compete with traditional ones. Page 11 of 18

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One of the main challenges of the genealogical strategy is circumscribing the object of inquiry. In short, the need to decide what is the practice under scrutiny and to construct it as an epistemic object. In this effort, we are helped by the fact that practitioners also customarily name and examine practices in objectified terms (e.g., skiers often talk disparagingly about snowboarders). Unfortunately, the step from the construction of practices as epistemic objects to reifying them as a ‘thing with boundaries’ is very short. Questions such as ‘What is practice?’ and ‘What are its limits?’ soon emerge, mostly because we are so bad at dealing with performances (instead of entities). Studying the dynamic of individual social practices thus requires that we remain aware that (a) we are studying the re-production of performances, not the construction of ‘things'; and (b) what constitutes the boundary of a practice (i.e., understanding when a practice becomes something else) is an empirical not a theoretical question. When a democratic vote ceases to be democratic, when teaching is not teaching but becomes just imparting a curriculum are issues that people fight for in the street (or moan about in their offices), not something for academics to decide.

The Configurational Approach Studying how concerted accomplishments and performances are connected and hang together to form constellations or larger assemblages is a third possibility. This requires surfacing spatial-temporal connections and observing their effects. All practices are in fact necessarily situated (their accomplishment always takes place within specifiable situations) and trans-situated – practices take place within specifiable historic, discursive, and material situations (for a discussion, see Holland and Lave (2009); Schmidt and Volbers (2011)). This is why practice-based approaches agree that human affairs can be understood from the world in which they come into being. For example, teaching only exists within a matrix of several other practices (from publishing textbooks to enrolling students). The idea of trans-situatedness brings to the fore the wider texture of which the phenomenon is part and directs us to observe it as part of something that, at the same time, is more extended and articulated. In this, it questions the traditional idea that the context is some kind of passive background: the relation between the accomplishment of a practice and its context resembles the relationship between a city and its hinterland – rather than that of an object and its container (Law, 2004). Thus, studying the configurations of practices requires one to empirically localise complex and global formations which are simultaneously taking place at different sites. For example, if we were to research teaching from this approach, we would pay attention to what other activities are related to the practice of teaching a class (cleaning, administration, catering) and the nature of such associations. Are they simply happening in the same place (teaching and catering)? Have they been orchestrated (teaching and working hours of parents)? Are they interdependent? What type of work or activity or material objects keeps them together (managing)? How was such an association established? In this, we embrace the prescription of post-human practice perspectives to follow intermediaries – actors, artefacts, texts, etc. (see Nicolini, 2009a) – and shed light on how multi-sited objects and phenomena are continuously and multi-locally generated (Marcus, 1995). This way, we can processually explore seemingly stable features of the social world we live in, from large industrial bureaucracies to markets. From a practice perspective, these sacrosanct phenomena are conceived as the result of vast action nets kept together by the unremitting work of both human and non-human entities (Czarniawska, 2004).

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A final and somewhat less frequently used strategy is to inquire into the dialectic of practices, i.e., the co-evolution, conflict, and interference of two or more practices. One of the reasons why this strategy is uncommon is because it very much depends on all the three strategies above. Yet, paradoxically, this way of looking at practices may also yield some of the most valuable findings as it addresses issues on which the interests of academics and practitioners coincide. This is very visible in the cultural historical activity tradition (Engeström, Miettinen, and Punamäki, 1999), with its focus on the study of contradictions and how they are solved. This perspective is in fact predicated on analysing practices, surfacing tensions and contradictions, and offering their findings to the practitioners themselves – based on the assumption that reflecting on re-presentations of practices often triggers generative and expansive (learning) processes. In the case of teaching, we could focus on who is empowered and disempowered by the particular configuration of practices. We would then ask questions such as: What types of students are favoured by a certain way of doing classes? What subject positions and forms of agency are made available by this particular configuration of practices? Who is empowered – does the person in front of the desks control the discussion? What alternative forms of agencies (teaching) and subject positions (teacher) would emerge from alternative configurations? Focusing on conflict and interference is also important because it represents a promising way to interrogate practices and their associations in terms of the effects that they produce (thus addressing the issue of power that is otherwise notably absent). For example, we know that empowerment, scope for agency, and voice are effects of practices and how they are associated. Thus, beyond the issue of ‘how practices hang together', there are many issues on the effects this association has on those who dwell within such nexuses and assemblages. Are these practices aligned in the same direction? Are they good at the purpose they were set up to serve? What type of practical ‘identity’ of those involved do they prefigure? Is such practical identity (what the people involved do) aligned with their desired identity (what they think they should do)? Although challenging, some of the most promising ways forward for practice theory rest on investigating the contrast between the emergent versus the intended object of a practice, exploring different time horizons to generate different understandings and investigating change as the result of contradictions between elements of practices and their accumulation. These approaches represent alternative ways to praxeologise organisation and management themes. In line with the eclecticism that characterises the approach, they cover the main strategies employed by practice students. Given the complex and multidimensional nature of social phenomena, each one unveils specific aspects of practices that fit particular research questions.

Epilogue: Can There Be a Theory of Practice? In this chapter, we introduced the practice approach in terms of a family of theoretical and methodological sensitivities and procedures to praxeologise social and organisational phenomena. Our argument is that when used coherently, the practice lens presents us with a view of the world where local scenes of action and broader social phenomena emerge from and transpire through complex textures of interconnected and concrete practices. Thus, it constitutes a primary form of processual thinking in organisation studies and social theory at large. This is because they consider organisational phenomena as dynamic, unfolding, and situated occurrences rather than as faits accomplis (Langley and Tsoukas, 2010). However, practice-based approaches add to the traditional processual view (stemming from the tradition of Bergson and Whitehead) by being especially sensitive to artefacts, the body, and the historical and social conditions within which processes take place. Practice is always in time and space, and this in turn requires relentless attention to how material economic elements, power relations, and the production of meaning and Page 13 of 18

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differences constantly play upon one another (Hart, 2002, p. 297). One remaining question is what sort of theory is produced by the practice approach, given that at the outset we suggested that it is not a single ‘theory'? We can start by observing that the goal of practice-based studies is not producing and refining one or more theories of practice, at least not where theory is understood as a system of general propositions (Abend, 2008). Rather, the approach signals a set of ontological and methodological commitments. While it is possible (and analytically valuable) to identify the constitutive elements of practices (see the first section ‘What Are Practices?'), these should be conceived as handles for empirical research. Practice-based studies do not investigate practices as abstract entities but rather it ‘praxeologises’ phenomena, turning the study of decision making into the study of decision-making practices or the study of strategy into the study of strategy-making practices. The list would be as long as the topics in organisation and management scholarship. This means that it makes little sense to speak of theorising practice as if there was a common equivalent among phenomena as diverse as supply management and marketing. Reducing intricate processes to principles often leaves us with propositions that are as broad reaching as they are inconsequential (e.g., organisations are permeated by political conflicts; see Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011, for a discussion). Even worse, such propositions may constrain analytical work by introducing normative checklists, which run counter the abductive nature of the practice approach (Blumer, 1954). The results of practice-based research are not presumed to be transcendental principles behind practices. As Bourdieu reminded us, this misguided enterprise populates the world with the results of our thinking granting them causal powers (Bourdieu, 1977, 1990). This happens, for example, when we attribute the capacity of managers to handle multiple requests in a firm to disembedded concepts such as cognitive abilities, mental schemes, or professional values. We forget, in fact, that cognitive abilities and mental schemes are our own creations, so that while they can help to understand what is going on, they cannot causally explain real-world phenomena. Thus, the strength of the practice approach resides in grounding explanations in what is empirically observable, patiently tracing back phenomena to arrangements of concrete elements that produce the state of affairs under investigation – instead of analytically hiding in vague notions or mechanisms. Thus, embracing a practice-based sensitivity (as well other processual ways of thinking) requires qualifying the nature and role of theory. This entails navigating between the Scylla of populating the world with abstract ‘scholastic’ concepts and the Charybdis of suggesting a naive approach where we can dispose of theory altogether and let facts (and practices) speak for themselves. The risk is that without theory we may ‘collect empirical regularities … without understanding the fundamental whys and hows’ (Lounsbury and Beckman, 2014, p. 3). Theory, in the practice approach, is less a direct description of the social world and more a device to grasp and represent it. It should be considered mainly as a heuristic package to plot the social world via an infra-language – instead of a meta-language from which to subsume all phenomena (Latour, 1988). Theorising in turn must be conceived as the effort to expand our understanding based on the accumulation of local specificities rather than the creation of abstract categories (Becker, 2014). As Heuts and Mol (2013) nicely put it, ‘crafting a rich theoretical repertoire … does not work by laying out solid abstracting generalisations but rather by adding together ever shifting cases and learning from their specificities’ (p. 127). Theorising proceeds in the search of non-general principles that as much as surprising lessons (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2007; Alvesson and Sandberg, 2011). The potential reward is not only more interesting and effective ways to understand and describe the world, but also new ways of connecting research with practice (Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011). Rich representations of practices are promising tools for practitioner reflection. By bringing into language ordinary and concrete practices, thick representations of activities may in fact help practitioners to see through conventional ways of doing and saying. These may help them to explore the world of possibilities beyond what is currently the accepted norm (enacting a new practice is, of course, a different matter) and generate Page 14 of 18

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opportunities for abductive learning. To the extent that practices are mostly absorbed through tips, hints, and exemplars, the best we can do to support practitioners refine their practice is to offer them rich examples they can use. Such examples enable practitioners to interrogate their own activity and explore new ways of doing, saying, and being (Eikeland and Nicolini, 2011).

Skiing as a Personal Action Skiers decide to go skiing. They go skiing. They go up the mountain and ski down the slope. They have skills – either they stay upright or fall over. They follow rules – or break them. We can interview them, film them. We can try to create a catalogue of the ways people behave on the slopes and use this list (and related tree of codes) to describe skiing (skiing is about going down, turning and stopping). We can even produce a numbered list of the practices that go into skiing (e.g., skiing comprises nine main practices). If you have never been skiing, you may marvel at the categorised description of the different ways of skiing. The text banks on the exotic nature of the topic, the unfamiliarity of the readers or a bit of both. If you are a good skier, however, you would probably find all this a bit odd and ask yourself what all the fuss is about. What, you might wonder, do we learn that we did not know before? In such case, you will be likely to say ‘So what?'

Skiing as a Social Practice Focusing on skiing as a socially organised activity entails that there is much more to the eyes than just what skiers do. For example, to understand skiing as a social practice requires that we also consider skis and poles (different skis require different competencies); the slopes (different slopes perform very different skiers owing to the challenges they pose); the lifts that take you at the top of the mountain (and those who run them); the technical jargon used by skiers (if you are a beginner you want to know what a ‘black run’ means as you should avoid them at all cost). To understand modern skiing and what people do on the slopes, we also need to take the skiing community into account, its composition, and internal differentiation (Sunday skiers, racers, downhill, cross-country skiers); the dynamics between them (e.g., the ongoing rift between skiers and snowboarders and how this affects the division of spaces in a ski resort); how you learn to ski (Who give you access to the practice in the first place? What sort of social groups does skiing generate?); the evolution of different genres of skiing, their rules and aesthetic criteria (what counts as skiing and what not); and how such criteria have co-evolved with the materials needed to ski (which also requires consideration of the makers of ski equipment). Critically, a focus on the social practice of skiing would foreground that what people do and say on the pistes depends on and intersects with a number of ‘organisational’ practices such as running the ski lifts, preparing the pistes, and smoothing them up (so that out-of-shape high-income earners can have fun without being too fit); checking for avalanches; catering (in Europe, going to ski often implies the consumption of specific foods and beverages); renting equipment; transporting goods and people; weather forecasting, etc.

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Note 1We are paraphrasing Geertz's story about an Englishman who, having been told by an Indian man that the world rested on a platform, which rested on the back of an elephant, which in turn rested on the back of a turtle, was asked what the turtle rested on. ‘Another turtle', was the response. ‘And that turtle?’ rebuked the Englishman ‘Aha, Sahib', said the Indian, ‘after that it is turtles all the way down’ (Geertz, 1973). Geertz himself probably ‘borrowed’ the story from William James’ who likely borrowed from someone else.

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Gherardi, S. (2006). Organizational Knowledge: The Texture of Workplace Learning. Oxford: Blackwell Pub. Gherardi, S., Nicolini, D., & Odella, F. (1998). Toward a social understanding of how people learn in organizations: The notion of situated curriculum. Management Learning, 29(3), 273–297. Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays: New York: Basic books. Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press. González, V. M., Nardi, B., & Mark, G. (2009). Ensembles: understanding the instantiation of activities. Information Technology & People, 22(2), 109–131. Hart, G. P. (2002). Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press. Heath, C., & Luff, P. (1992). Collaboration and control: Crisis management and multimedia technology in London Underground Line Control Rooms. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 1(1–2), 69–94. Heuts, F., & Mol, A.-M. (2013). What is a good tomato? A case of valuing in practice. Valuation Studies, 1(2), 125–146. Holland, D., & Lave, J. (2009). Social practice theory and the historical production of persons. Actio: An International Journal of Human Activity Theory, 2 (1), 1–15. James, W. (1907). Pragmatism: New York: Penguin Books. Jarzabkowski, P., & Seidl, D. (2008). The role of meetings in the social practice of strategy. Organization Studies, 29(11), 1391–1426. Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica: Journal of the Econometric Society, 47, 263–291. Kuutti, K. (1996). Activity theory as a potential framework for human-computer interaction research. In B. A. Nardi (Ed.), Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 17–44). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Langley, A., & Tsoukas, H. (2010). Introducing Perspectives on Process Organization Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, B. (1988). The politics of explanation: An alternative. Knowledge and Reflexivity: New Frontiers in the Sociology of Knowledge, 155–176. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social – An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. New York: Cambridge University Press. Law, J. (2004). After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge. Leontjev, A. N. (1981). Problems of the Development of the Mind. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Llewellyn, N., & Spence, L. (2009). Practice as a members’ phenomenon. Organization Studies, 30(12), 1419–1439. Lounsbury, M., & Beckman, C. M. (2015). Celebrating organization theory. Journal of Management Studies, 52(2), 288–308. MacIntyre, A. (1981). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory ( 1st ed. ). London: Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd. Marcus, G. (1995). Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95–117. Mol, A. (2002). The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nelson, R., & Sidney, G. (1982). An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change. Cambridge: Belknap. Nicolini, D. (2007). Stretching out and expanding work practices in time and space: The case of telemedicine. Human Relations, 60(6), 889–920. Nicolini, D. (2009a). Zooming in and out: Studying practices by switching theoretical lenses and trailing connections. Organization Studies, 30(12), 1391–1418. Nicolini, D. (2009b). Zooming in and zooming out: A package of method and theory to study work practices. In S. Ybema, D. Yanow, H. Wels & F. Kamsteeg (Eds.), Organizational Ethnography: Studying the Complexities of Everyday Life. London: Sage, 120–138. Nicolini, D. (2012). Practice Theory, Work, and Organization: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press Page 17 of 18

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Complexity Theory and Process Organization Studies

Contributors: Philip Anderson & Alan D. Meyer Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Complexity Theory and Process Organization Studies" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n8 Print pages: 127-143 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Complexity Theory and Process Organization Studies Philip AndersonAlan D. Meyer

Introduction: Linking Process Theory with Complexity Theory Complexity theory can contribute to process organizational studies (PROS) in two important ways: First, complexity theory can help PROS researchers construct better models of organizing processes. A subset of the organizing processes we observe generates emergent and self-organizing outcomes. Complexity theory advances process researchers’ efforts to specify causal models for this subset. It does this by offering a menu of novel concepts and mechanisms: agents with schemata, self-organizing networks sustained by importing energy, coevolution to the edge of chaos, and system evolution based upon recombination (Anderson, 1999a: 216). Moreover, complexity theory equips researchers with techniques such as agent-based simulation and abductive reasoning that help them evaluate process models and test them empirically. Second, complexity theory can help PROS researchers design and conduct better process research studies. Assumptions of equilibrium seeking and linearity undergird mainstream social scientific theories, research designs, and analytical techniques (Meyer, Gaba, and Colwell, 2005). These assumptions can mislead PROS researchers by inducing them to abstract away nonlinear interactions in order to achieve analytical tractability, invoking the mindset that Andrew Abbot (2001) terms ‘General Linear Reality.’ Complexity theory offers a research philosophy that invites scholars to approach their own research designs as evolutionary experiments wherein methods and designs are allowed to ‘evolve’ throughout the pursuit of a study, as new insights about the mechanisms actually generating complex processes come swimming into view. In fact, we assert that undertaking a high-quality process organizational research study casts the PROS researcher into the role of an agent in a complex adaptive system. Process research is an inherently nonlinear self-organizing process that ‘begins in comparative disorder, shifts and changes through time, and typically winds up with conclusions that were not expected at the beginning’ (Agar, 2004: 18). Tsoukas and Hatch (2001) offer a complementary perspective, urging researchers to move beyond the ‘logico-scientific mode’ to adopt a ‘narrative mode’ in thinking about complexity. Complexity theory is a loose umbrella term for a vast literature that has been ably reviewed at length elsewhere (c.f., Anderson, 1999a; Maguire et al., 2006; Miller and Page, 2007; Tsoukas and Dooley, 2011). Consequently, this chapter will not focus on providing a snapshot of the state of complexity theory at the time this handbook was published. Our endeavor is to illuminate when and why the generative mechanism or generic story underpinning a process theory might spring from the actions of a complex system. We will focus first on explaining what markers might suggest to a process theorist that an explanation drawing on complexity theory is warranted. We will then describe in general terms, how complex systems operate to produce patterns in event sequences. Next, we will highlight the key elements that theorists should consider when developing process explanations that draw upon complexity theory. We will then discuss how such explanations may best be tested, and close with a summary of key gaps and promising future directions for process theories based on the complexity perspective.

When and Why Should a PROS Scholar Turn to Complexity Theory? When a scholar is developing a process theory, one possibility to consider is that a pattern in an event sequence emerges from the way actions connect, disconnect, and reconnect to each other (Czarniawska, 2010). Complexity theory is a way of explaining how patterns of change unfold in this way. It is not a monolithic theory per se as much as a perspective on theorizing about how certain types of systems produce particular types of patterns in event sequences. To develop hypotheses about how patterned event sequences produce outcomes, investigators typically turn Page 2 of 16

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to abduction, or as it is often called, ‘inference to the best explanation’ (Lipton, 2004). Abduction is a process of inquiry that begins with a surprising observation, and seeks to build an explanation for it (Van Maanen et al., 2007; Locke et al., 2008; Shepard and Sutcliffe, 2011). What process best explains the observation of a surprising fact? Barton and Haslett (2007) note that in studies of dynamical systems (which move through a state space from one period to the next), what makes an individual event a ‘surprising fact’ is the realization that it forms part of a pattern of events. In a simple, predictable system, a single equation can capture the behavior of many elements. Complex systems are not predictable in this way because interactions among elements are nonlinear: their outcomes cannot be generated by a linear combination of independent components. Outputs are not proportional to inputs – small changes can produce large effects and vice versa. As Meyer, Gaba, and Colwell (2005) note, such systems often change through jolts, step functions, or tipping points. In contrast, a systems theory model is a set of feedback loops connecting variables. In an important subset of complex systems, causal relationships connect elements of the system, e.g., actors, actions, or decisions. In these complex adaptive systems, at any level of analysis, regular patterns (order) are the product of the interactions among units at the next lower level of aggregation. Such systems are adaptive in the sense that the units’ individual and collective behavior change and self-organize. Consequently, while standard causal models identify significant regularities and the variables that seem to drive them, complex adaptive system (CAS) models explain these regularities as outcomes emerging from a process of interaction among lowerlevel elements (Morel and Ramanujam, 1999).

Essential Markers of Systems Whose Processes Arise from a Complex System When a process theorist is searching for an inference to the best explanation, what attributes should persuade him or her to adopt a complex systems viewpoint? Several markers distinguish the observable outputs of event sequences that are generated by complex systems. By looking for them, investigators can decide whether complexity theory provides the most useful way to understand the mechanism or generic story underpinning a process theory. 1. Is self-organization evident? Complex systems evolve toward order instead of disorder, but there is no apparent central controller or authority generating the order. When we observe that an event sequence is patterned (even if the pattern changes constantly and is difficult to grasp), we develop theories to explain how this perceived order arose. If simple rationalizations such as motives, incentives, or obedience do not explain the order, we observe in some collectives, it may be that order has emerged naturally from lower-level interactions within a complex system. We say that such systems self-organize, but this is not a synonym for self-management or empowerment. The elements of a complex system constrain and are constrained by the actions of other elements. 2. Are numerous interacting components partly connected? A process that seems to be generated through the interaction of several components that are partially interconnected is a good candidate for modeling as a complex system. Systems with a very small number of elements seldom generate outcomes that go beyond aggregating the contributions of each element. When there are no interconnections among elements, a system produces additive, linear results. When every element is interconnected with every other element, ripple effects predominate to such an extent that system outputs tend to be random or chaotic. Order emerges from systems with many elements that are densely but not fully connected with one another. 3. Are collective structures emergent? If novel and unexpected structures appear at the collective level that are different in kind (not just magnitude) from individual-level structures, Page 3 of 16

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then complexity may be implicated. Such structures are emergent in the sense that they are inherently properties of a collectivity, not of the individuals who comprise it (Blau, 1964). The emergent structures of a collectivity at any level have new properties of their own. They are not merely lower-level properties scaled up. Emergence is a hallmark of complex systems, and it is the coming into being of a qualitatively new order (Lichtenstein, Dooley and Lumpkin, 2006). 4. Is organizing away from equilibrium apparent? The complex system stays far from equilibrium. It changes constantly in nonrandom ways, but never settles into a stable state. This implies that the system never finds a globally optimal performance state, which would be a Nash equilibrium. Instead, the system evolves through ‘punctuated emergences,’ different epochs or states that are qualitatively different (e.g., the three eras of Branson, Missouri's evolution observed by Chiles, Meyer, and Hench, 2004). 5. Are changes distributed according to power laws? The non-equilibrium state that a complex system settles into is called ‘self-organized criticality’ (Bak, 1996). When a series of small events impinge on the system, the resulting changes in system output follow an inverse power law. The size of a change is inversely proportional to its frequency according to the function 1/fa, where a < 2. Power-law relations of this form are a signature of selforganized systems. This is why small causes can have large effects and vice versa. The presence of a power-law relationship implies the system is characterized by the time series dynamic termed ‘pink noise’ (Dooley and Van de Ven, 1999). Low frequencies dominate and high frequencies are rare, yet outliers are much more common than they are in normal distributions. Consequently, relegating them to a normalized ‘error term’ is statistically unsound (Boisot and McKelvey, 2010). Extreme outcomes are inherent and consequential in the dynamics of the complex system. 6. Are path dependencies ‘sensitive’ to initial conditions? In a state of self-organized criticality, the complex system exhibits path dependence – where its elements can go next depends on the state they now occupy and how they got there. Although many noncomplex systems are also path dependent, the consequentiality of event sequences is one reason why complex systems align well with process theorizing. Another result of self-organized criticality is that the system and its elements are highly sensitive to initial conditions. Two entities with similar initial states can follow very different paths over time, ending up in states that are quite far apart. 7. Does following simple rules construct complex structures? Although the behavior of a system can become quite complex due to nonlinearity and power-law patterns of change, the behavior of individual elements often remains quite simple. In complex systems, simplicity at one level can produce emergent complexity one level higher. 8. Is system diversity increasing? The complex system tends to produce outcomes that become more diverse over time. For example, across the three epochs they observed in Branson, Chiles, Meyer, and Hench reported a secular increase in diversity, both in the population of theaters they studied and the broader community of organizations. When scrutiny of a process reveals these characteristics, it is useful to explore whether and how well the operation of a complex system might explain the observed pattern of events. It is important to look for these markers, because it is all too easy to view ideas like emergence and self-organization as metaphors for everything. Many processes do not exhibit the features we have described, and trying to force-fit a complex-systems explanation to them because complexity theory is ‘new science’ would lead the theorist astray.

The Logic of Complex Systems If complex systems can be identified by a small set of characteristic signatures, what explains how those Page 4 of 16

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features emerge? What happens in complex systems to produce these outcomes? What kinds of generative mechanisms or generic stories would be appropriate for a process theory that springs from the insight that complexity may account for a pattern of events? The ordinary equilibrium of a system is typically static. The second law of thermodynamics implies that most systems come to rest in a stable state that takes the minimum possible amount of energy to sustain. A hot cup of coffee cools to room temperature for this reason; similarly, crystalline lattices remain locked together for eons because it requires no energy to sustain their bonds, while it would require energy to break them. A Nash equilibrium persists because it would be costly for any party to adopt a different course of action. Complex systems transcend this state of stability because energy is injected into them. Either internal or external fluctuations stress the stable arrangement to the point of a phase transition. Equilibrium is disrupted to such an extent that it cannot be reconstructed, and eventually a new form of behavior emerges, aligned with the deep structure of the system (Macintosh and McLean, 1999). As Chiles, Meyer, and Hench (2004) note, once the set of musical theaters clustered in Branson, Missouri passed into a state away from equilibrium, a cascade of new orders appeared in a series of three punctuated emergences over the course of a century. Each transformed the regional system into something qualitatively different. Once fluctuations surpass the first critical value of imposed energy, the new organized (but non-equilibrium) state that emerges is called a dissipative structure (Prigogine and Stengers, 1984). Such a structure continues to import energy from its environment, dissipating that energy in order to sustain itself above the ‘edge of order,’ the threshold value that keeps it from subsiding back into equilibrium (Andriani and McKelvey, 2009). The term ‘energy’ is an abstraction; in physical systems, energy is often heat, but in social systems, it can be any source of ongoing fluctuation that keeps perturbing the system. Boisot and Child (1999) suggest that information flowing into social systems can keep them above the edge of order, while Lichtenstein (2000) sees new activities, events, or resources as the source of fluctuations. If we think of the flow of energy into a dissipative structure as a series of stimuli to which the system must respond, the number or variety of stimuli can eventually exceed the system's capacity or repertoire of responses. This creates ‘adaptive tension’ (McKelvey, 2001), pushing the system past the edge of order, and leading to a phase transition. One might logically presume that the more energy is injected into a system, the more vigorous the system's response – but this is untrue. Past a second critical value, termed the ‘edge of chaos,’ injecting more energy into a complex system leads to disorder and chaos. Rudolph and Repenning (2002), for example, use system dynamic modeling to subject a simulated organization to an ongoing stream of interruptions that accumulate to jeopardize the system's continued operation. In their model, the system underwent a phase transition from a self-regulating regime to one that is fragile, oscillating between extremes of high and low performance. Even though each individual interruption was minor, eventually their accumulation passed the edge of chaos, the point at which no more interruptions could be absorbed, so the system collapsed. The edge of order and the edge of chaos demark the boundaries within which a complex system produces constant novelty and change through punctuated emergence. Within this zone, complex systems normally settle into the state of self-organized criticality described earlier, where outcomes and changes both follow an inverse power law, rendering extreme events a predictable part of the process. Stuart Kauffman suggests that systems poised at the edge of chaos enjoy a selective advantage because they periodically reinvent themselves. In this way, they discover exceptionally attractive zones of performance that incremental search alone would never reach. But because extreme shifts are rare, systems near the edge of chaos can explore in the vicinity of peaks of performance instead of drifting or being jolted away from them. Chiles, Meyer, and Hench weave these ideas into a process explanation of how order emerges at a collective level without a central controller. Their depiction affords a high-level template for process theorists who wish to explain how a sequence of events acquires a pattern: (1) First, spontaneous fluctuations drive a system that was in equilibrium through a phase transition into a qualitatively new state. (2) Second, the fluctuations Page 5 of 16

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entering the system from the environment are amplified, creating even more adaptive tension that keeps the system above the threshold of order. This amplification occurs because some feedback loops in a typical system are positive. Examples include the Matthew effect (Merton, 1956) and positive externalities (Arthur, 1990). As a result, a subset of the vast number of states a system might occupy become much more attractive than others, so a new order emerges around one of them, despite the myriad of other possible nonlinear outcomes. Outcomes that emerge over time from an accumulation of tiny random initiating events have been called frozen accidents (Gell-Mann 2002). (3) Third, the new order is stabilized around a deep structure that persists despite waves of punctuated emergence. Path dependence and the patterns that emerge from repeated interlocking interactions within the system reflect structuration (Giddens, 1986), wherein enduring structures constrain agency so as to reproduce those structures. (4) Fourth, the system is prevented from descending into senescence through the recombination of existing resources. For instance, the stability engendered by structuration processes might leave a system vulnerable to the accumulation of interruptions described by Rudolph and Repenning (2002). Such a system could reach a point where adaptive tension exceeds the second critical value, when the variety of responses demanded by environmental stimuli surpasses the variety of responses the system is capable of generating (McKelvey, 2001). The reason this does not happen inevitably is that the existing elements of a system may be rearranged and reconstructed, increasing the variety of responses the system is capable of generating. Martin and Eisenhardt (2010), for example, found that organizational initiatives involving multiple subunits achieve higher performance when they are implemented by reconfigured teams that have relatively few ties to the collaborating units. This recombination of elements from different units creates opportunities for new teams to develop novel ways of operating.

CASs CASs have become especially prominent because they have been the subject of the decades-long research program of the Santa Fe Institute. Such systems are defined as nested hierarchies whose elements are agents, each maximizing its fitness (performance leading to survival) in a boundedly rational way. The simultaneous and parallel actions of multiple agents whose influence on one another flows through a partially connected network leads to the emergence of self-organized criticality. CASs have the virtue for process theorists of focusing attention on what mental model or story underpins each agent's behavior. Thus, CAS models are well suited for theorists trying to explain emergent outcomes by linking meaning to actions. A complex adaptive system consists of agents who possess schemata, internal models of actions or choices and their consequences that change as a result of experience (Holland, 1995). Both agents and their schemata co-evolve, meaning that a change in the distribution of schemata types shifts the distribution of agent types and vice versa. Schemata can be depicted as simple rules that agents follow, although the richness of each agent's schema is one element of the way an investigator chooses to depict a CAS. Agents are adaptive if they seek to act to increase their payoffs. Each agent's payoff depends on the actions of other agents to whom it is linked. The interactive nature of actions and payoffs for interconnected agents leads them to walk what Sewell Wright first termed a ‘fitness landscape.’ If we consider a subset of agents whose fates are strongly connected within the group and weakly connected outside the group, then the landscape consists of a number of niches, or local neighborhoods. Each agent walking the landscape within a niche deforms that landscape for itself and the other agents. Because outcomes for each interconnected agent depend on the actions or choices or states of the other agents in its niche, the landscape is unpredictable. Payoffs are unstable from period to period because they depend on a complex of behaviors, not the behavior of any one agent. This makes the landscape rugged, filled with performance peaks and valleys that are more or less steep, symmetrical, and stable depending on how many agents are connected and how nonlinear their impact on one another is. The peaks in the landscape are uncorrelated from one period to the next. When the number of agents is large Page 6 of 16

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and agents are connected to many other agents, performance differences shrink – the choices of any one agent matter little to its outcomes, which approach a random walk. When agents are completely independent, on the other hand, their behavior is nearly deterministic, because once they find a success formula, they have little reason to abandon it. A system of completely independent agents would settle into a Nash equilibrium once every agent has discovered its optimum payoff. Agents in complex adaptive systems are not limited to trial-and-error behavior. Their actions are guided by schemata, simplified representations of regularities observed in the environment. A schema is a blueprint that encodes the consequences that the agent anticipates from an action, choice, or state. When an agent can observe actions and outcomes across more areas of a shifting coupled landscape than it currently occupies, the agent can learn vicariously, enabling schemata to evolve more rapidly than agents can. An agent can possess multiple schemata – alternative explanations of how different actions will be linked to different outcomes given the state of the landscape. Schemata compete with one another: successful agents preferentially invoke schemata associated with higher fitness, their own or those of other agents. Schemata that promote successful agents’ success survive and propagate, perhaps imperfectly replicated, to other agents (Maguire et al., 2006). Conceptualizing complex systems as nested hierarchies of actors equipped with mental models aligns well with constructivist views of how processes unfold. For example, Tsoukas and Chia (2002) regard change as the reweaving of actors’ webs of beliefs and habituated actions resulting from new experiences. They reason that change is inherent in human action because actors constantly make sense of the world and try to act coherently in it. Organization emerges from efforts to order action around particular meanings and rules, which may be internalized and shared intersubjectively. Although agents’ schemata may be simplified to mindless rule following, their schemata may also be made much richer, ‘tuning’ process theories rooted in the CAS perspective to match the degree the theorist believes the construction of meaning drives the patterns of event sequences s/he wishes to explain. Self-similarity is one hallmark of complex adaptive systems: the same generative mechanisms operate at different levels of a nested hierarchy. We have already observed that when the elements of a complex system are too densely connected, the system tips past the edge of chaos into disorder. Similarly, schemata are most consequential when their elements are incompletely linked. If everything affects everything else, a schema has no predictive power. If a schema devolves to one or two rules that cover every situation, it has power only in stable, routine settings. Bingham and Eisenhardt (2011) used a comparative case study to investigate what firms learn as they gain process experience. They concluded that firms learn portfolios of heuristics. A common rule structure is applied to a range of problems defined as similar (in their example, which country a firm should enter). Examining the dynamics of these portfolios, they concluded that firms engage in ‘simplification cycling,’ first adding and then pruning heuristics to maintain a productive balance between excessive simplicity and excessive complexity. Burgelman and Grove (2007) assert that although rule-abiding strategic actions are additive and linear, rulechanging strategic actions produce nonlinear strategic dynamics. Schemata interact when one actor's rulechanging actions materially alter the landscape for others, making the outcomes of strategic actions difficult for all to predict. However, because a few dominant schemata dictate the vast majority of behavior (Choi et al., 2001), rule changing is uncommon (likely occurring according to the inverse power law so ubiquitous in complex systems). In this sense, populations of interacting agents are understood to be organized by a few simple rules. Where agents are embedded in a decision hierarchy, controls can greatly limit the behavioral options available to them.

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Using Complexity Theory to Develop Process Theory Explanations The logic of complex systems is independent of any particular modeling strategy. Miller and Page (2007) ably review the most popular computational methods for representing complex systems’ dynamics. Although this handbook chapter is not focused on methodology or modeling techniques, the proliferation of simulationbased studies among organizational scholars in the recent past has expanded our understanding of the considerations that should inform a process theory explanation of event patterns that draws upon the complexity perspective. Accordingly, we outline eight key factors a theorist should consider when constructing a process theory.

What Fluctuations Inject Energy into the System? What is the source of stimuli the system is not configured to manage? Fluctuations delivering a higher variety of stimuli than a system's repertoire of responses can handle keeps complex systems far from equilibrium. Consequently, process models should specify what enters the system to inject energy and create adaptive tension. New agents or schemata may emerge endogenously, but can also be injected into the system from outside, just as excess rents attract new entrants in classical economics. External jolts can change payoffs, redraw competitive boundaries, and break or reconstitute ties. An environmental shift may render certain types of agents nonviable. For example, an exogenous regulator may declare certain behaviors or configurations illegal or may favor or disfavor particular payoffs, as in the case of changed tax laws.

Who Are the Agents? Complex systems can be composed of many types of elements. Scholars have modeled their components as individuals or subunits, tasks or activities, organizational capabilities or design features, and decisions or choices, to name just a few examples. Process theorists must be explicit about which agents comprise the systems they model. Positing interactions between entities that have no plausible way to affect each other's outcomes will lead to incoherent models. Furthermore, if the complex system is modeled as a nested hierarchy, the theorist should be explicit about which levels of analysis are included and how they interconnect. McKelvey (1999b) recommends thinking of a social entity as arising from thousands of small behavioral process events, each governed by a microagent. Such a depiction is consistent with the ontological stance adopted by Tsoukas and Chia (2002) in viewing change as a constant and entities as event containers.

What Are the Agents’ Schemata? In striving to show how simple rules can generate complex behavior, many studies have treated agents as nothing more than containers for strings of 0/1 decisions. However, Anderson (1999a) suggested that agents can be modeled as learners drawing inferences, rather than automatons following simple if/then rules. Accordingly, process theorists should ask whether and how agents develop and act upon simplified representations of their environments, and how these representations are updated through experience. How and from whom the agents learn should constitute key elements of the process theory. Various learning models have been proposed at different levels of analysis. When they incorporate vicarious learning, outcomes depend on whose experience the agent can observe and how accurately s/he comprehends the models, actions, and payoffs of those being observed. A concrete example of how one might include schemata in modeling a complex process is offered by Gavetti and Levinthal's (2000) study using Kauffman's nK model. They propose that cognitive representations of a Page 8 of 16

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fitness landscape simplify the actual landscape, with actors attending to fewer than the N dimensions in the actual model. In the simplified landscape, each point is assigned the average fitness value of the underlying space. This allows the agent to evaluate alternative moves before executing them, and implement only those alternatives that the simplified model predicts will lead to improved performance. When and how do agents update their schemata? How are schemata introduced or eliminated from a pool available to agents, and how might they be copied or recombined? To what extent are decisions controlled by others? How is a complex landscape reduced to a more comprehensible set of categories? Answers to these questions shape the outcomes of learning processes. A model can abstract these concerns in pursuit of parsimony, as long as the investigator understands the domain of the process s/he is studying well enough to explain why such choices are theoretically appropriate.

How Are the Elements of the System Interconnected? In modeling a complex system, specifying its connectivity is crucial. Rivkin and Siggelkow (2007) model connectivity as an influence matrix arraying decisions in the rows and columns whose cells contain the value 1 if one decision influences the other, and 0 otherwise. Their study demonstrates that the structure of this matrix can be highly consequential. They examine ten theoretically meaningful patterns of interconnections (e.g., preferential attachment, strict hierarchy, decomposable modularity, etc.) and show that the resulting landscape depends on the connection architecture, not just the system's total number of connections. Their overall finding is that the ‘ruggedness’ of the landscape, that is, the number of local peaks, declines with the number of uninfluential decisions and rises with the number of uninfluenced decisions. Interconnections can be modeled in many ways, not merely as linkages among decisions. Recent advances in social network analyses of organizations provide a rich array of tools and models for understanding how agents can be connected. This work is enriching our understanding of how the nature of an exchange between nodes along an edge affects a network's behavior. Ties can also represent couplings between design features, actions, and so on. Understanding a process well allows the investigator to explain the logic of what is connected to what and how ties are made, broken, and reconstituted. In some models, agent schemata evaluate which ties have proved productive and fruitless. Furthermore, the space of tags that actors use in order to form, sustain, or discard ties can itself be modeled as one of the layers of a system. For example, Boal and Schultz (2007) develop a theory proposing that leaders can boost complex systems’ productivity attaching new tags to ties or altering the meaning of existing tags.

How Are Agents Organized? Research is accumulating on investigations into how organization design influences outcomes in complex systems. For example, Levinthal and Posen (2007) impose an architecture on a standard parallel search model that divides the problems an organization must solve are into two subproblems. The organization can tackle both subproblems together or assign each to one subentity. In the latter case, subentities can search for solutions simultaneously or sequentially (finding a peak for one subproblem before considering the other). Firms that divide the labor but search sequentially improve more rapidly and become more fit when short-term performance pressures predominate, but prove less fit in the long run. Rivkin and Siggelkow (2003) investigate a setup that is similar in spirit. Two managers have responsibility for mutually exclusive subsets of a decision problem. Each may focus exclusively upon how his/her decisions affect the local landscape associated with his/her subset, or may also consider how his/her choices affect the other's domain. Furthermore, hierarchy is introduced because their joint supervisor examines proposals from both subordinates and can set broad or narrow limits on the number of proposals considered. The system's Page 9 of 16

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architecture has a major impact on the outcomes of search processes. Continuing their exploration of hierarchical effects, Siggelkow and Rivkin (2009) use an agent-based model to show that increased exploration at lower levels can reduce overall exploration in the system as a whole. These authors go on to show (2009) that in coupled search designs, where performance depends on low-level operational choices that are shaped by infrequent high-level design choices, firms with ostensibly superior designs may not achieve superior performance. Observing that two firms have similar fitness at one point in time does not mean their designs will be equally effective over time – the architecture of choice governs system outcomes. The implication for process scholars is that dividing an agent's choices into a number of layers, with or without hierarchy, can dramatically influence one's understanding of the complex pattern that emerges. Agents coconstruct complex organizational designs by following simple rules, and understanding how elements of the system are differentiated and integrated is key to developing sound process theory.

What Are the Payoff Functions for Each Agent? A vast literature spanning economics, management, and social psychology examines how a central controller can establish incentives that induce desired behavior, mitigate principal–agent problems, align units with competing priorities, and so on. However, in a complex system, there is no central controller. Nevertheless, a crucial element of CASs is that agents periodically receive payoffs based on the state they occupy relative to that of other agents with whom they are connected. The term ‘payoff’ is quite general, and can include not only material rewards but satisfaction, prestige, or any other desiderata. An agent's realized payoff depends not only on its own state but also on the state of other actors. Factors associated with higher and lower payoffs are learned and encoded in schemata. The depiction of payoffs in a process model is consequential. Osborn and Hunt (2007) note that complexity researchers often fail to specify whether performance is short term, medium term, or long term. Furthermore, increasing a payoff function's dimensionality can generate adaptive tension. When a new performance dimension is imposed upon agents in a complex system, the variety of stimuli exceeds the variety of responses until the agents adjust. Studies of multigoal or multicriteria decision making demonstrate that the more performance dimensions are imposed, the more difficult it becomes for agents to understand how their actions generate outcomes. Adaptive tension can also be introduced by shifting agents’ attention from one performance dimension to another, which has the effect of changing the topography of the landscape. Effectively, this is what Rivkin and Siggelkow (2003) achieved by making subunit decision makers pay more or less attention to other agents. Winter, Cattani, and Dorsch (2007) demonstrate how thinking creatively about payoffs can lead to novel insights about processes. Using an original alternative to nK models rooted in Fourier analysis, they introduce the possibility that a firm may have a preferred direction of search. Their ‘preferred direction’ construct can stand in for a broad array of considerations (e.g., social responsibility, prestige, or cultural values). Varying the weight applied to the preferred direction term between 0 and 1, they conclude that intermediate weightings produce superior fitness (that is, survival) on rugged landscapes with many peaks. This is equivalent to saying that introducing considerations other than maximizing survivability can help agents escape local peaks.

What Delays Are There between Cause and Effect? Models of complex systems have rarely taken delays into account. Usually, all agents transition from one state to another every period, and their realized payoffs depend on the contemporaneous states of interconnected elements. Process theorists should examine carefully whether this assumption is realistic for the systems they study. Lags between actions and payoffs should have disruptive effects similar to those observed in dynamical systems, as would delays in observing the updated states of other actors with whom an agent is Page 10 of 16

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interdependent. For instance, in the famous ‘beer game,’ a simulation of multiple agents’ efforts to coordinate flows along a supply chain, lags between decisions and feedback have ‘a bullwhip effect’ in which agents’ locally rational choices about coordination actually worsen shortages and overstocks.

How Do Agents Imitate One Another? We have already noted that agents can learn vicariously and update their schemata accordingly. In many models of complex systems, agents can copy all or part of other agents’ cognitive or behavioral repertoires. McKelvey (1999a), for example, approaches evolution in an nK model as an adaptive walk where agents survey neighboring agents and randomly copy the neighbor that is more fit. Ethiraj and Levinthal (2004) introduce recombination into a model in conjunction with Darwinian selection of firms. In their setup, agents do not copy the entire configuration displayed by more fit agents, but instead copy randomly chosen modules drawn from others’ configurations. The higher the performance of another agent, the greater the likelihood that one of that agent's modules will be copied. Porter and Siggelkow (2008) assert that replicating entire clusters of interrelated activities should be more difficult than copying individual activities. This builds on Rivkin's (2001) insight that firms face a ‘replication dilemma.’ On the one hand, once a firm discovers a bundle of elements that lands it on an attractive fitness peak, ambiguity about the bundle's precise constituents creates an isolating mechanism, making it difficult for others to emulate the bundle and herd onto the same peak. On the other hand, this ambiguity can make it difficult for the originating firm to recreate its own high-performance solution when facing a new situation. Genetic algorithms are perhaps the most common way scholars have modeled recombination of elements. The important point is not what model a process theorist uses, but how to take the potential for copying and recombination into account. If a process theory excludes this path to improving performance without sound theoretical grounds, we may materially misunderstand how and why an event sequence becomes organized into a particular pattern. In summary, scholars who see complexity theory as an attractive way to model a process do not need to follow a recipe or adopt a particular methodology. Rather, they should first achieve an in-depth understanding of the focal system, and then address the foregoing eight questions. Understanding in advance what key factors typically affect a model of a complex system prepares one to make observations that capture the features that have been shown to drive complex system outcomes.

Testing Process Theory Explanations McKelvey (1999b) points out that in the absence of experimental testing, complexity applications to organization science remain metaphorical. Approaches to ascertaining the explanatory power of process theories rooted in complex systems range from rich single-case studies to highly sophisticated mathematical modeling. Complexity theory is a way of understanding how ordered patterns emerge in collectivities, not a particular methodological approach. That said, simulations have been used to test predictions about complex systems far more often than they are typically employed in other branches of organization science. Davis, Eisenhardt, and Bingham (2007) review the most popular simulation techniques (only some of which are applicable to complex systems) and provide guidelines for developing theory from simulations. Certain simulation techniques invariably produce well-known patterns (e.g., in nK models, intermediate values of K always generate rugged landscapes on which performance improvement follows a power law). This is why, as a prelude to model building, a theorist should qualify a process under consideration as a complex system by evaluating its correspondence to the seven ‘complexity markers’ outlined above, and go on to investigate the eight ‘key factors’ we have recomPage 11 of 16

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mended. It would be a cardinal error to observe a process and ‘explain’ it by employing a simulation that is known to reliably generate the explanandum. Three ways of thinking about how to test process theories that rest on the logic of complex systems can help scholars overcome the opposing traps of using complexity as a metaphor without any model at all, or using modeling as a way of fitting theory to data. First, models of complex systems can be used as ‘what-if’ tools to generate novel insights, in ways that are analogous to grounded theory. For example, drawing upon Kauffman's (1995) notion of emergent ‘order for free,’ Hunt, Osborn, and Boal (2009) suggest that instead of relying solely on direction or motivation, leaders can channel the emergent behavior of complex systems to produce unforeseeable successes. They advocate leading indirectly by tuning the fitness landscape so the system produces viable outcomes that cannot be envisioned in advance. Anderson (1999b) describes seven levers that leaders can use to guide productive self-organization in a complex system. The basic idea is to model the system (qualitatively or quantitatively), change an important element of the model, observe what happens, then investigate this prediction empirically. Second, investigators can build a model of a system, populate it with real empirical inputs, and see whether the outcomes predicted by the model accord with observed emergent outcomes. In today's digital world, it has never been easier to gather rich, real-time data on what agents in a system actually think, do, and perceive their payoffs to be. Furthermore, the technology for gathering and analyzing network data about who is actually tied to whom and in what ways has advanced by leaps and bounds. Scholars can build several equally plausible models that predict different outcomes, populate them with real empirical data, and see which models are best aligned with the emergent outputs a system actually produces. Although this is not a true ‘critical test,’ the more a model survives empirical challenges to its predictions, the more confidence we may have in it. Third, with simple modifications, most simulation models of complex systems can easily be turned into interactive games. This allows scholars to develop and test theory via ‘wargaming.’ By putting real people into simulated situations whose structures match those of a complex system, we can experimentally examine what humans actually do, what ties they form, what payoffs they perceive, and so on. This approach can work well for exploratory studies that seek to understand agent behaviors, and can also be used to test predictions about how agents will behave.

Gaps and Future Directions As Niels Bohr famously remarked, ‘prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.’ Accordingly, we shall write this section by thinking in the future perfect tense – a ‘process whereby we cognitively cast ourselves into the future, look back upon events as if they had already occurred, and interpret their meaning accordingly’ (Gioia, 2006:1718). So casting our thinking five years ahead, let us suppose it is 2020, and complexity theory has become the default scaffold for generating insights about complicated organizational processes. What do we expect process researchers to have done and accomplished? Our future perfect speculations fall into three categories: (1) mindsets for complex processes – shifts in ontological assumptions about reality and epistemological assumptions about knowing, (2) theories and constructs for complex processes – novel theoretical frameworks and constructs inspired by complexity theory, and (3) research methods for building models of complex processes – new heuristics for designing research, and building and testing causal models. Mindsets for complex processes. In 2020, process scholars have moved beyond the restrictive assumptions about time, linearity, and equilibrium that pervaded organizational theories and research methodologies back Page 12 of 16

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in 2015. With respect to time, process research has adopted a richer, multifaceted sense of temporality. Scholars now understand that while order is important, it is not enough to just take chronological sequences into account. Rhythm, pace, oscillation, and time-varying causation are understood as elements in models of complex systems. Similarly, process organizational research has largely escaped the gravitational field evoked by what Andrew Abbott (2001) termed ‘General Linear Reality’ – the mindset wherein statistical assumptions originally made to render research questions tractable for Newtonian mathematics are recast as ontological assumptions about how the social world works. Process researchers continue to view many organizing processes as amenable to linear modeling, but there is now widespread recognition that other processes call for nonlinear models undergirded by complexity theory. Theories and constructs for complex processes. In 2020, a number of process scholars are using the eight ‘markers’ that this chapter proposed as litmus tests in identifying empirical phenomena that arise from complex processes: self-organization, partly interconnected components, emergent collective structures, organizing away from equilibrium, power law distributions of change, sensitive dependence on initial conditions, complex structures springing from simple rules, and secular increases in system diversity. When these markers come back positive, many researchers go on to address the ‘critical questions’ that Anderson and Meyer posed, addressing the nature of fluctuations within the system under examination, the identity of its agents, their schemata, systemic interconnections, agents’ organization, their payoff functions, lags between causes and effects, and how agents imitate other agents. Asking and answering these questions equips process researchers with the components they need to build models informed by complexity theory. Research methods for building models of complex processes. By 2020, process research methods have gelled around a new and distinctive set of heuristics. A triggering event was the realization that methods based upon the general linear model are inadequate because doing process organizational research, in and of itself, constitutes a nonlinear, self-organizing process. Anthropologist Michael Agar (2004: 19) drew an insightful parallel between the ethnographer and the agent in a complex adaptive system, noting that in terms of algorithmic complexity (an established index of systemic complexity), any ethnography (or process study) will be more complex than any study done using traditional social science methods. Agar wrote that ‘“methodology,” as understood in linear social science … is all about neatly compressed algorithms that work to generate data and analysis, whatever the problem, whatever the context.’ In years past, graduate students learned to select theories, posit hypotheses, design and validate surveys, distinguish independent from dependent and moderating variables, develop sampling frames, control for non-theorized confounds, and so forth. As Agar put it (2004: 18), they were taught to ‘take a research problem, plug in the algorithmic modules in the right sequence, and bingo, it's a study.' Process researchers continue to learn and apply these traditional algorithms in 2020, but they realize if you find yourself grappling with complex empirical processes, until you are actually doing your study you will not know which algorithms to apply, in what combination, at what level of analysis. Meyer and his colleagues (2005: 471) noted that ‘rigid research designs become a liability when studying systems that are far from equilibrium,’ and recommended viewing designs as ‘experimental prototypes,’ where choices among research methods are ‘temporary rather than permanent, correctable rather than correct, and discoverable rather than known.' A growing ‘historical cognizance’ (Kipping and Üsdiken, 2014) has accelerated PROS scholars’ assimilation of discontinuous shocks and phase shifts into their process theories. This cognizance extended the field's innate appreciation of temporality in the chronological sense (where ‘time’ runs on some universal clock) to reach a deeper understanding of how phase shifts punctuate chronological time to create historical periods, eras, or epochs that can be inhabited by disparate causal regimes. Specifically, as a complex system transitions between epochs, causal mechanisms may strengthen, weaken, disappear, or even reverse. PROS scholars have recognized that historical accounts and analyses of social systems can provide data and offer rich sources of generic narratives that could be responsible for pushing a complex system above the edge of order, ushering in a phase transition. Page 13 of 16

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In 2020, PROS scholars have developed heuristics for dealing with discontinuous shocks. For instance, when researchers suspect phase change may be afoot, a new process research algorithm instructs them to: (1) Get out into the field immediately, because shocks’ initial impacts and agents immediate responses constitute ephemeral but often crucial data. (2) Raise your focal level of analysis by one unit (e.g., from individuals to groups, or from organizations to fields) because phase changes can be triggered by abrupt breaks in the continuity of political, regulatory, institutional, or technological contexts. (3) But at the same time, lower your focal level of analysis by one unit (e.g., from firms to top managers, or from subunits to individual members) because agents following simple local rules can interact to reconfigure macro structures. (4) Narrow your observational scope by using theoretical sampling to identify archetypical systems and agents (because your attention is limited, and observing archetypes brings generative mechanisms into sharper focus). (5) If your research design was inspired by the general linear model, shift your focus from explaining variance to apprehending process. In conclusion, we see the future development of PROS and complexity theory as thoroughly entangled. PROS and complexity theory need each other. If you are an organizational scholar who takes complexity theory seriously and you want to apply it to social life, then PROS is an eminently sensible approach to doing empirical research. And if you are a process researcher and you want to understand emergent organizing, unless you pack complexity theory in your conceptual toolkit, you may find it difficult to go beyond spinning splendid narrative descriptions. You will need complexity theory if you want to go from telling stories to specifying causal models.

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Symbolic Interactionism

Contributors: Dionysios D. Dionysiou Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Symbolic Interactionism" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n9 Print pages: 144-158 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Symbolic Interactionism Dionysios D. Dionysiou The doctrine of emergence asks us to believe that the present is always in some sense novel, abrupt, something which is not completely determined by the past out of which it arose. (Mead, 1932: 16) Human social interaction is more like a cauldron than a stamping machine, more in the nature of a dynamic, ongoing development than a static repetition. It represents human life in process. (Blumer, 2004: 37)

Introduction Symbolic interactionism (SI) is a distinctively American perspective with roots in the philosophy of pragmatism (Fine, 1993; Sandstrom et al., 2001), which emerged as a reaction to overdeterministic pictures of reality promoted by rationalist and mechanistic philosophies (Shalin, 1986). As Blumer (1969: 1) notes, a number of influential American scholars contributed to the intellectual foundations of the perspective, including George Herbert Mead, John Dewey, W. I. Thomas, Robert E. Park, William James, Charles Horton Cooley, Florian Znaniecki, James Mark Baldwin, Robert Redfield, and Louis Wirth, all of whom shared a common general standpoint of human group life. However, SI derived largely from interpretations of the teachings of George Herbert Mead, who sought to translate pragmatism into a theory and method for the social sciences (Sandstrom et al., 2001). Mead, next to Dewey, is recognized as the thinker who contributed most to the development of pragmatism (Reck, 1963), and it is through his work that the relevance of pragmatism to sociology and social psychology became apparent (Joas and Knobl, 2009). Although there is no unanimity regarding the precise implications of Mead's work, as Fine (1993: 63) notes, the primary source of SI and the interpretation of Mead, for most interactionists, was the writings and teachings of Herbert Blumer, a student of Mead at the University of Chicago, who named the perspective almost 80 years ago (Blumer, 1937). This has started to change over the past two decades, as Mead has been rediscovered by many scholars who either seek to interpret his complex and evocative work or to apply it in diverse areas of interest (e.g., Dionysiou and Tsoukas, 2013; Joas, 1997; Emirbayer and Miche, 1998; Simpson, 2009, 2014). Because Mead's work has been foundational to SI (Blumer, 1969) and because Mead, above all others, established the symbolic character of interaction (Stryker, 1980), I discuss briefly some of the key elements of his work that are important to understand and appreciate SI's influence and contribution to process philosophy and studies. For a more detailed exposition on his thought, there are sources that interested readers may find useful (e.g., Joas, 1997; Miller, 1973; Reck, 1963). Mead's contribution and influence is significant and extends much beyond the field of SI; in fact, some scholars argue that his work and its impact is underappreciated and that ‘there is still much to be mined’ (Simpson, 2014). Although SI is by no means integrated as a perspective and not all symbolic interactionists have been influenced directly by his thought (Fine, 1993), I suggest that SI at its core is a processual, relational, temporal, and utterly anti-dualistic perspective of human conduct. Then I turn to Blumer, the main expositor of Mead's thought and continue with a discussion of SI's major contributions to process studies. Although the influence of SI has been significant in many areas among which the self and identity theory, the sociology of occupations and professions, the study of deviant behavior, social organization and coordination, emotions and emotion work (see Joas and Knobl, 2009 and Sandstrom et al., 2001), due to space limitations I focus predominately on its major contributions to the study of social organization and the ‘problem’ of linking agency and structure. I conclude with a discussion of the main criticisms that SI has received and current trends in the perspective.

Mead as a Process Philosopher Page 2 of 15

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Process thinking permeates Mead's work as his starting point to explain the emergence of individual mind, self, and consciousness is ongoing social conduct. Drawing on Darwin's evolutionary theory, Mead focuses on the ongoing social act which involves at the same time the human as a biological organism, the conscious self, as well as the larger social process. In evolutionary terms, he is particularly interested in the development of human intelligence as a factor differentiating the human from lower-level animals. He views intelligence as a continuous process of ‘adjustment to one another of the acts of different human individuals within the human social process’ (1934: 75), which takes place largely through communication. In the early stages of the evolutionary process, communication takes the form of a conversation of gestures, and in its later stages and at its highest and most complex stage of development, the form of significant symbols (gestures which possess common meaning) or language.1 What distinguishes the human being from other living forms is its capacity to act reflectively, to identify ‘this as leading to that’ and to use symbols to indicate the implication to others and oneself in order to make possible the control of conduct with reference to it (Mead, 1934: 120). The meaning of these symbols is created through interactions in the context of a social, cooperative act, which for Mead is the ‘unit of existence’ in human experience (Mead, 1938: 66). He maintained that ‘the behavior of an individual can be understood only in terms of the behavior of the whole social group of which he is a member’ (p. 6). In this way, Mead laid the foundation of a process theory of identity formation, and by embracing an intersubjective perspective, he broke with the prevailing idea of his time that social psychology could be based on the individual subject (Joas and Knobl, 2009). The process of exercising intelligence becomes possible through the mechanism of the central nervous system, which enables the individual to become an object to himself or herself, and thereby develop a self, and with a self, a mind. Mead's analysis of the emergence of self exemplifies a process-relational approach to the study of human conduct. The self is not present at birth as a result of biological development but emerges, evolves, and is maintained through processes of social interaction. The self-object emerges from interaction in the context of cooperative activity, as the individual takes the roles or attitudes of others – that is, by placing oneself in the position of others and viewing or acting toward oneself from that position (Mead, 1934: 141). ‘Taking the role of the other’ refers to anticipating others’ behaviors, something that enables social organization and coordination and the alignment of individual actions (Blumer, 1969; Joas, 1997). To the extent this happens, others’ behaviors with respect to the larger social process in which they are commonly involved as a group ‘are brought within the individual's field of direct experience and are included as elements in the structure or constitution of his self’ (Mead, 1934: 158). Addressing oneself from the standpoint of the overall organized social process or processes, is to assume the role of the ‘generalized other’ and approach oneself from the position of an abstract ‘they’ who stand in some form of organized relationship to him or her (Blumer, 2004: 61). In the form of the generalized other, ‘the social process or community enters as a determining factor into the individual's thinking’ (Mead, 1934: 155) and a form of social control becomes possible, which depends ‘upon the degree to which the individuals in society are able to assume the attitudes of the others who are involved with them in common endeavor’ (1925: 275). Moreover, through the same process society arises, that is, ‘only in so far as the individual acts not only in his own perspective but also in the perspective of others, especially in the common perspective of a group […] and its affairs become the object of scientific inquiry’ (1926: 78). Role-taking takes place predominantly through the use of language, because of the unique characteristic of the vocal gesture to affect the individual who makes it just as much as it affects the individual to whom it is directed. The result of this is that ‘the individual who speaks, in some sense takes the attitude of the other whom he addresses’ (Mead, 1936: 379). As an illustration of this process, Mead says that we are all familiar with this in giving directions to another person to do something. When we do so, we find ourselves affected by the directions we give and we are ready to follow them ourselves. The self-structure of the individual self is dialectical, involving a continuous interplay of the ‘I’ (the spontaPage 3 of 15

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neous, creative element of the self) and the ‘me’ (the habitual, socialized self). The ‘I’ is over against the ‘me’ when the individual gives a novel response to the social situation he or she faces, contributing to the establishment of yet another dialectical relationship, that between the individual and the group or society, which opens up the possibility for change in society: We are not simply bound by the community. We are engaged in a conversation in which what we say is listened to by the community […] That is the way, of course, in which society gets ahead, by just such interactions as those in which some person thinks a thing out. We are continually changing our social system in some respects, and we are able to do that intelligently because we can think. (1934: 168) The change to society, says Mead, ‘may be slight, but it is unquestioned’ (1938: 89). For Mead therefore, individual and society (or agency and structure) are mutually determined: the individual ‘constitutes society as genuinely society constitutes the individual’ (Mead 1935: 70). The process of communication and participation in a common social process not only gives rise to one's self but is also constitutive of his or her mind. Mind, or thinking, is ‘an inner conversation’ going on within the self, and refers to the ‘internalization in our experience of the external conversations of gestures which we carry on with other individuals’ (Mead, 1934: 47); the gestures thus internalized are ‘significant symbols,’ because they have a common meaning for all individuals in a given group or society. Reflective intelligence is a characteristic of mind, by means of which the individual organizes and interprets his or her experience, and indicates to others and himself or herself what is important to their common situation. Reflective intelligence also serves an important function in the process of adjustment to problematic situations that impede the smooth progression toward the result of the act. In these cases, reflective intelligence refers to the ability to solve problems of present behavior in terms of its possible future consequences as implicated on the basis of past experience – the ability, that is, to solve problems of present behavior in the light of, or by reference to, both the past and the future; it involves both memory and foresight. (1934: 100) This quote makes evident two key elements in Mead's thought; first, as a pragmatist, Mead views mind, thinking, and cognition at large located within and in the service of human conduct. Cognition is essentially ‘reconstructive,’ enabling the individual to adjust to his or her environment, an adjustment which at the same time reconstitutes the environment (Mead 1932: 3–4). Whereas natural evolution operates through the production of variations and selection from these variations, the intelligent human individual and society has turned this trial-and-error method into a conscious, deliberate one: ‘the scientific method, as such, is, after all, only the evolutionary process grown self-conscious’ (1936: 365). Second, for Mead, the act has duration and is temporal; it ‘stretches beyond the stimulus to the response’ and has a past reference and a future reference (1938: 65). Reality, he posits, exists in a present which is marked by its ‘becoming and disappearing … [t]he world is a world of events’ (1932: 1). Events always have a character of uniqueness and novelty, an element of emergence, otherwise we would not be able to experience either time or continuity. The emergent, novel event is experienced as something that is problematic or uncertain which blocks ongoing action, because our tendencies to respond to it in habitual ways are inhibited. The break must be repaired and continuity restored, so that action that has been inhibited by novel circumstances may be continued. This is the point where mind emerges to direct intelligent conduct with reference to what is uncertain or problematic; human intelligence brings both past and future into the process of readjustment, building up ‘its future out of its past’ (1938: 124). The past arises in memory, and its function is to restore the breached continuity. Essentially, we reconstruct the past from the standpoint of the new problem to discover new continuities in what has emerged, and this ‘serves us until the rising novelty of tomorrow necessitates a new history which interprets the new future. All that emerges has continuity, but not until it does so emerge’ (1929: 241). Once the past has been reconstructed, the emergent ceases to be emergent, and it follows from Page 4 of 15

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the reconstructed past which has replaced the previous past. Essentially, therefore, the past is as hypothetical as the future; ‘the immutable and incorruptible heavens exist only in rhetoric’ (p. 241). Mead refers to this process of adjustment as the principle of ‘sociality.’ It refers to the stage ‘betwixt and between’ (1932: 47) the old world or system that existed before the emergent arose and the new one after reconstruction has taken place, during which ‘the novel event is in both the old order and the new which its advent heralds’ (p. 49). The appearance of mind is the highest expression or ‘culmination’ of the sociality that is found throughout the universe as ‘the organism, by occupying the attitudes of others, can occupy its own attitude in the role of the other’ (p. 86). The intention of this brief exposition to Mead's key areas of thought is to make clear its influence to SI as a process perspective. As discussed above, all key concepts in his work (e.g., self, mind, act, interaction, society) are defined in process terms and are implicated in mutually constitutive, dialectical relations within the broader social processes and nature, the latter being defined in terms of evolution, of becoming, involving continuous adjustment and reconstruction. One of his most important objectives had been to promote an objective social psychology by arguing that ‘the social and psychological process is but an instance of what takes place in nature, if nature is an evolution’ (1926: 84). In pursuing this objective, he transcended many of the dualisms that still prevail in contemporary philosophy and science, such as those between agency and structure, organism and environment, cognition and action, mind and nature, stability and change. In what follows, I turn to the work within SI that has been mostly informed by Mead's work, with a particular focus on social organization and the link between agency and structure. I start with Herbert Blumer and continue with the negotiated order perspective (Strauss et al., 1963, 1964; Strauss, 1978) and the paradigm of ‘mesostructure’ (Maines, 1982).

SI as a Process Perspective: The Contribution of Herbert Blumer Herbert Blumer is widely considered the most important disseminator of Mead's ideas (Fine, 1993; Joas and Knobl, 2009). A sociologist at Chicago and later at the University of California at Berkley, Blumer taught Mead's famous course on social psychology at Chicago University right after Mead's death (Strauss, 1977). Blumer with his colleague Everett Hughes helped create the so-called ‘Second Chicago School’ (Fine, 1995) which included, among others, leading interactionists like Howard Becker, Ervin Goffman, Gregory Stone, Anselm Strauss, and Ralph Turner, who further developed the SI perspective in the 1940s and early 1950s (Sandstrom et al., 2001). It was during that time, and especially during the 1960s, that SI grew within sociology as a perspective in direct opposition with the prevailing structural-functionalist school of Parsons (Joas and Knobl, 2009). According to Blumer (1969: 2–3), both psychology and sociology at that time offered overly deterministic explanations of human conduct by treating it as the product of psychological (e.g., stimuli, attitudes, conscious or unconscious motivations, etc.) and/or structural (e.g., social position, status demands, social roles, cultural norms and values) factors, respectively. This is unfortunate, Blumer objected, because [m]eaning is either taken for granted and thus pushed aside as unimportant or it is regarded as a mere neutral link between the factors responsible for human behavior and this behavior as the product of such factors (1969: 2). Blumer in his book Symbolic Interaction (1969) formulated the basic premises of the SI perspective, which are generally shared by most scholars who identify with the perspective (Fine, 1993; Sandstrom et al., 2001): The first premise is that human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings those things have for them. […] The second premise is that the meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with one's fellows. The third premise is that these meanings Page 5 of 15

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are handled in, and modified through, an interpretive process used by the person in dealing with the things he [or she] encounters. (Blumer 1969: 2) As Joas and Knobl (2009: 132) note, these simple principles had had a large number of far-reaching theoretical consequences for the views of human conduct prevailing at the time. According to the first principle, material objects and social objects like rules, norms, or values acquire meaning from human beings within a specific context of action; a tree may have a different meaning for a botanist, a lumberman, a poet, and a home gardener. Similarly, the president of the United States may have a different meaning for a devoted member of his or her political party than for a member of the opposition (Blumer, 1969: 11). Objects, therefore, do not determine human behavior as actors interpret them in the context of their specific situation. The second and third premises suggest that meanings are not ‘intrinsic to the objective makeup’ (Blumer, 1969: 3) of objects, but they derive from interactions between people; intersubjective contexts play therefore a major role, and meanings are much more open to change through interaction than previously thought. Blumer, following Mead, acknowledges that much human interaction is nonsymbolic, as we frequently respond immediately and unreflectively to each other; nevertheless, the characteristic mode of human interaction is symbolic, because we seek to understand the meaning of each other's actions. SI therefore, places interaction at central stage by emphasizing that ‘interaction is a process that forms human conduct instead of being merely a means or a setting for the expression or release of human conduct’ (Blumer, 1969: 8 italics in the original). The point of departure, therefore, is always interaction, not the individual actor, and Blumer uses the term ‘joint action’ in place of Mead's ‘social act’ to emphasize that the fitting together of the separate individual lines of action constitutes the larger collective forms of action. Joint actions or social acts are the ‘distinguishing characteristic’ and ‘fundamental unit of society’ (1969: 70). Having introduced the concept of joint action, Blumer draws several important implications for the study of human interaction and collective forms of action: 1. Because society lies in an ongoing process of fitting individual lines of action, it must be understood in terms of the action that comprises it, not in terms of a posited structure of relations. SI sees society not as a system, whether in the form of a static, moving, or whatever kind of equilibrium, but as a vast number of occurring joint actions, many closely linked, many not linked at all, many prefigured and repetitious, others being curved out in new directions, and all being pursued to serve the purposes of the participants and not the requirements of a system (Blumer, 1969: 75). Blumer, by calling attention to action, living, and ongoing activity orients us away from the typical sociological notions of society as structure, as the mechanical exchange between formal roles or positions, and prompts us to focus on the level of what people actually do (Hall, 1972: 40). 2. To understand society in terms of the action that comprises it, emphasis must be placed not upon the individual participants’ lines of action, but upon ‘the joint action into which the separate lines of action fit and merge’ (p. 71). Each joint action, being built over time by the fitting together of individual acts, must be seen as having a career or a history and is therefore contingent on what happens during its formation. 3. This career is generally orderly and repetitive owing to the common definitions made by participants, definitions which guide them in fitting their actions together; still, this career must be seen as inherently uncertain; Blumer (1969: 71–2) discusses a number of different possibilities to argue that, ‘uncertainty, contingency, and transformation are part and parcel of the process of joint action. To assume that the diversified joint actions which comprise a human society are set to follow fixed and established channels is a sheer gratuitous assumption’ (p. 72). By emphasizing the symbolic, emergent, and uncertain character of human interaction, Blumer noted that neither Mead nor himself denied the existence and influence of structure in human society; in fact, he called such a position ‘ridiculous’ and explained that structural influences like roles, norms, values and the like, are important only as they enter into the process of interpretation and definition out of which joint Page 6 of 15

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actions are formed. The manner and extent to which they enter may vary greatly from situation to situation, depending on what people take into account and how they assess what they take account of. (Blumer, 1966: 543) Collective action and societal structure are, therefore, emergent accomplishments, built up from the process of fitting together of individual lines of action, which ‘may take place for any number of reasons, depending on the situations calling for joint action’ (1966: 544); they have ‘to be dug out by ascertaining what is taking place at the points where individual component acts are being linked together’ (Blumer, 2004: 99). Largescale phenomena like social movements (Blumer, 1946) or industrialization (Blumer, 1990) can be viewed as being built up from great numbers of interconnected or joint acts; Blumer's perspective therefore, unites ‘macro’ and ‘micro,’ although he never used these terms (Morrione, 2004: xiv). Blumer, acknowledges clearly the so-called ‘top-down’ influence of structure on interaction, but he warns us not to take it for granted, but to investigate how it enters into the process of aligning individual actions; he was adamant that joint action outcomes are uncertain because they may not be initiated; once initiated they may be interrupted, abandoned, or transformed, or participants may not reach common definitions; or new situations may lead to breakdown, confusion, and exploration (1969: 71–72). Although the status of Blumer as an interpreter of Mead has been highly debatable (e.g., see Blumer, 1980, 2004; Joas, 1997; McPhail and Rexroat, 1979; Morrione, 2004; Puddephatt, 2009; Simpson, 2009; Wood and Wardell, 1983), his contribution to disseminating Mead's work to a broader scholarly audience and identifying symbolic interaction as ‘the essential process through which all social phenomena (including structures) are created, maintained and changed’ (Morrione, 2004: xi), has been significant. His efforts to develop a methodology for the social sciences that pays attention to the distinctly human process of interpretation and individuals’ ongoing reflective adjustment to the world, as well as to the interaction process as ‘potentially an open and flexible affair, carrying with it the conditions, the occasions, and the means of its own revision and redirection’ (Blumer, 2004: 36), had been a very much needed corrective to the prevailing at his time rationalistic and deterministic accounts of human conduct and society. Moreover, by emphasizing that ‘the study of action would have to be made from the position of the actor’ (1969: 73) and promoting the use of ‘sensitizing concepts’ (p. 149) that capture the meanings held by actors, he helped establishing SI as a perspective with particular contribution in the generation of empirical knowledge by field research and the disciplinary tradition that informed the development of grounded theory (Locke, 2001).

Symbolic Interaction and Social Organization: Social Order as Negotiated Order One of the key concerns of symbolic interactionists has been how social order (or social organization or structure) is created, maintained, and changed (Fine, 1993; Hall, 1987; Maines, 1977; Strauss et al., 1963). Mead, for instance, defined the problem of society as follows: How can you present order and structure in society and yet bring about the changes that need to take place, are taking place? How can you bring those changes about in orderly fashion and yet preserve order? To bring about change is seemingly to destroy the given order, and yet society does and must change. That is the problem, to incorporate the methods of change into the order of society itself. (Mead, 1936: 361–2) As discussed above, Blumer (1966, 1969), following Mead, viewed society as a social process of action than structure. He also considered social change as a ‘continuous indigenous process in human group life’ (1966: 544), as ‘acting units’ (individuals, groups, or larger collectives) do not act toward culture or structure but they form joint actions on the basis of their interpretation of concrete situations. In this way, he contributed to establishing a fluid and dynamic image of joint action and society at large, an image in which stability and change are inextricable parts of social group life. However, it was the concept of negotiated order that allowed Page 7 of 15

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a deeper consideration of the relationship between action and structure, between situated activity and broader encompassing social structures and historical contexts (Hall, 1987; Joas and Knobl, 2009). The concept of negotiated order (Strauss et al., 1963; 1964) emerged from studies of psychiatric hospitals and has dominated the SI approach to organizations and social organization at large (Fine, 1984; Maines, 1982). Fine (1984) identifies as a precursor to this concept Mead's (1934) treatment of society and his discussion of the linkage between past and present (Mead 1929, 1932, 1938), while Day and Day (1977) locate its more immediate origins in research done in the area of occupations and professions by Chicago sociologists, with Everett C. Hughes being the early catalyst of these studies.2 The negotiated order paradigm deals with a central interactionist concern, that of the link and balance between agency and structure and the creation of social order. As Fine (1993: 70) remarks, the goal is the ‘Goffmanian’ one of developing an understanding of the ‘interaction order’ that takes into account both order and interaction, by seeking not only the possible definitions, but also those that are likely and the consequences for those who ignore the definitions. Strauss et al. (1963, 1964) established the general framework of the negotiated order perspective on the basis of empirical studies of psychiatric hospitals and introduced the term to conceptualize the ordered flux they observed in a way that is not structurally determined (Maines, 1982). Strauss et al. (1963: 150–153) visualized the hospital as a ‘professionalized locale,’ where people from different professions including practicsing psychiatrists and psychiatric residents, psychologists, occupational therapists, nurses, and social workers come together to achieve their respective purposes. These professionals have received different training, occupy a different hierarchical position in a hospital, and play a different role in the division of labor. Beyond these differences, professionals within the same profession typically differ in terms of their theoretical (or ideological) positions toward important issues like etiology or treatment. Ideology and hierarchical position introduce significant variability in who worked closely with whom and how, and which practices were more likely to be utilized than others. All above factors, including staff turnover, contributed to the fact that the only thing held in common by all personnel was a vague goal, which served as a general mandate – ‘to return patients to the outside world in better shape’ (p. 154). The hospital's rules and regulations that governed the actions of professionals were far from being explicit or clearly binding, mainly due to the element of medical uncertainty: each patient is in some sense unique, and his or her treatment must be suited to his or her precise therapeutic needs. As the authors realized within the first few days of observation, … rules are much less like commands, and much more like general understandings: not even their punishments are spelled out; and mostly they can be stretched, negotiated, argued, as well as ignored or applied at convenient moments […] In addition, rules here as elsewhere fail to be universal prescriptions: they always require judgment concerning their applicability to the specific case. Does it apply here? To whom? In what degree? For how long? With what sanctions? The personnel cannot give universal answers; they can only point to past analogous instances… (p. 153) Clearly then, when the personnel confronted a specific patient, differences of opinion and conflicts were likely, which could not be resolved by the straightforward application of the hospital's rules, as Weber's rational-bureaucratic school would suggest. It follows then, that ‘when action is not ruled it must be agreed upon’ (p. 156). What Strauss et al. (1963) effectively demonstrate, therefore, is that the bases of concerted action or social order must be ‘worked at’ continuously and they argued about the ‘importance of negotiation – the processes of give and take, of diplomacy, of bargaining – which characterizes organizational life’ (p. 148). Images of formal organizations tend to underplay or leave implicit these interactional processes (p. 168), and as a result, they overemphasize the stable features of organizations and downplay processes of internal change. Changes are forced upon the hospital not only from the outside but also by unanticipated consequences of internal policies and negotiations that take place within the hospital: ‘In short, negotiations breed further negotiations’ (p. 156). Strauss et al. emphasize that ‘negotiation – whether characterized as “agreement”, “understanding,” “contract,” or by some other term – has a temporal aspect’ (p. 163), and is always subject to review and revision. This suggests that the hospital can be usefully pictured as ‘a place where numerous agreements are continually being terminated or forgotten but also as continually being established, reviewed, revoked, Page 8 of 15

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revised. Hence at any moment those that are in effect are considerably different from those that were or will be’ (p. 164). Processes of negotiation therefore are important both for explaining concerted, coordinated activity – and for the realignment of relationships (Maines, 1979). As Hall (1972: 43) notes, this model extends Blumer's (1966, 1969) processual and dynamic view of society by specifying the character of ‘problematic’ things that require interpretation and definition by participants (e.g., values, goals, rules, roles, authority hierarchies, resource distributions, etc.), and the most common way through which these get resolved: bargaining and negotiation. The negotiated order perspective sparked a number of influential empirical and conceptual studies (for reviews of work in this area, see Fine, 1984; Maines, 1977, 1982; Strauss, 1978), which tried to embed interactions in larger structures and/or suggest an image of organizations and societies as ongoing systems of negotiation. Hall suggests that the model of society that derives from the negotiated order is one characterized by a complex network of competing groups and individuals acting to control, maintain, or improve their social conditions as defined by their self-interests. The realization of these interests, material and ideal, are the outcomes of negotiated situations, encounters, and relationships. (1972: 45) Strauss (1978) in his book Negotiations offers an elaboration and specification of the perspective and utilizes three concepts to analyze negotiated orders: negotiation, negotiation context, and structural context. The first one refers to actual negotiation processes and tactics used by participants; the second refers to features of the context that directly affect negotiations and their course; and the third refers to broader, more encompassing contexts in which negotiations occur. In this view, influence can go both ways, and negotiation contexts can be usefully seen as mediating negotiation processes and structural contexts. As Maines (1982: 270–1) suggests, the greatest contribution of Strauss (1978) thinking ‘is in linking negotiations and their contexts to social orders,’ thus triggering significant work (e.g., Busch, 1980; Kling and Gerson, 1978; Maurin, 1980; O'Toole and O'Toole, 1981) which has treated issues of power, structure, historical processes, and resource utilization as aspects of negotiated orders. Overall, the negotiated order perspective offers a compelling framework for conducting process studies of large-scale (organizational, institutional) phenomena grounded at the level of interaction within organizations. The perspective, consistent with SI's adherence to a process-oriented approach, regards structure as being in process (Maines, 1977), examines how structures are constructed (Fine, 1984), and recognizes that historical contexts and organizational structures condition interaction processes. As Hall (1987) notes, Mead's dialectical view, encompassing process and structure, determinacy and indeterminacy, lies at the core of the perspective, which is ‘markedly processual and dynamic, yet grounded in the political realities of social life’ (p. 7). Nevertheless, the negotiated order perspective represents only one line of research in a growing body of work within SI that studies social organization and structure, which Maines (1982) refers to as ‘in search of mesostructure'.

Symbolic Interaction and Social Organization: Current Trends and Future Potential A traditional criticism of SI has been that as a micro-sociological perspective, it suffers from an ‘astructural bias’ (Reynolds and Reynolds, 1973; Meltzer et al., 1975), lacking interest in structure and power (Hall, 1987; Maines, 1977; Sandstrom et al., 2001). It is partly true that symbolic interactionists following the pragmatist intellectual tradition focused more on the power of personal agency than structure, but as discussed above, the balance between agency and structure has been a major concern for the SI approach to social order. As Sandstrom et al. (2001: 224) emphatically note, ‘[e]ven Blumer, chided for his “astructural bias,” wrote extensively about industrialization, power conflicts, race relations and collective action’ (see also Fine 1993, 1996; Maines 1977). Page 9 of 15

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There is no doubt that symbolic interactionists were slow to make their perspective more relevant to levels of analysis above interaction. However, the negotiated order perspective provided the lens through which the relationship between agency and structure could be explored (Joas and Knobl, 2009). Maines (1977), in a very influential article revieweding work conducted from an SI perspective, to argue that symbolic interactionists have developed additional concepts like constraint, collective action, and commitment to organizations to analyze large-scale social units. Following Maines, other interactionists have also used constructs such as network (Faulkner, 1983; Fine and Kleinman, 1983), power (Hall, 1997), organizational culture (Fine, 1984), symbolic meaning (Manning, 1982), and frame alignment (Snow et al., 1986) as tools to engage in macro-level analysis (Sandstrom et al., 2001). Maines’ (1979, 1982) concept of ‘mesostructure’ offered a useful starting point for interactionists. Maines (1979) originally used this term to refer to the negotiated order perspective and its promise to transcend the ‘micro–macro’ distinction, which Maines regards as ‘a coprolitic distinction that does more harm than good for purposes of understanding social life’ (1982: 274). Central to such an approach is the unification of subject–object by means of a dialectical relationship through which human beings are envisioned ‘as suspended in webs of significance of their own creation’ (Geertz, 1973) (p. 275). The domain of mesostructure is therefore the domain of subject–object unity: Social orders are transcacted and made meaningful in the mesostructural realm. It is in that realm that social structures are enacted and which, through their enactment, become modified into meaningful patterns of participation. […] the domain of mesostructure does not deny the institutional structures of social orders, but it does deny that those structures can be understood without understanding how they are enacted. Nor does it deny the importance of interaction processes. Indeed, it is through interaction that structures are enacted, but in that process, interaction becomes conditional interaction. (pp. 275–6, original emphasis) Following Maines, Hall (1987) provides a review of work within the SI tradition to argue that the conceptual tools and infrastructure required for bridging the micro–macro gap exist and that interactionists have examined collective activity and social relations and lodged them in larger contexts and extended temporality. He discusses examples of work beyond that conducted explicitly from a negotiated order perspective, including Howard Becker's (1982) work on art worlds; Robert Faulkner's (1983) on Hollywood musicians; Harvey Farberman's (1975) and Norman Denzin's (1977) on criminogenic market structures; the arena dynamics of social problems (Wiener, 1981); and Carl Couch's (1984) work on civilizations. Fine's (1996) later ethnographic work of four restaurant kitchens by embedding interactions in the restaurant industry is also relevant here. These studies, Hall (1987: 10) notes, are part of the emerging ‘mesostructure’ paradigm as most of them explicitly ground and link collective activity to the larger society in which it exists, while some seek to formulate how time and history affect activity. Concepts available to interactionists like collective activity, network, conventions-practices, resources, processuality-temporality, and grounding can be used as orienting and sensitizing mechanisms for establishing a strong focus on the meso domain. Although the conceptual background and tools required to bridge the micro–macro gap have been laid out, as Joas and Knobl (2009: 149) note, Strauss, Maines, and Hall ‘were anything but alone in this field,’ as the micro–macro divide was considered too difficult to solve by traditional sociological theories, and existing macrotheoretical arguments were judged unsatisfactory. In the following, I discuss how these issues have recently resurfaced in work in the institutional tradition, as well as in the field of organizational research, where scholars have drawn upon SI in their efforts to transcend the agency and structure dualism and conceive structure as process.

Inhabited Institutions It has only been recently that work in the institutional tradition started drawing on SI (e.g., Fligstein, 2001; Lounsbury, Ventresca, and Hirsch, 2003) to overcome the so-called ‘people problem in contemporary institutionalism’ (Hallett and Ventresca, 2006: 214). Hallett and Ventresca (2006) note that ‘much of organizational Page 10 of 15

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sociology – especially in the “new institutionalist” idiom – is oriented towards a macro, structural perspective’ (p. 213–4) and ‘has been “decoupled” from its foundations in social interaction’ (p. 215). Following Scully and Creed (1997), who have used the term ‘inhabited institutions’ to promote an approach to the study of institutions that brings people into attention, Hallett and Ventresca (2006) draw on a ‘lesser known branch of SI [that] focuses on how interactions both organize and are organized by the social order’ (p. 216), referring largely to the paradigm of mesostructure (without though using the term) described just before. The authors argue that they use institutionalism and SI not as antagonistic but complementary components of an ‘inhabited institutions approach,’ according to which institutions provide the raw materials and guidelines for social interactions (‘construct interactions'), and on the other hand, the meanings of institutions are constructed and propelled forward by social interactions. (p. 13) To illustrate the power of such an approach, the authors conduct a symbolic interactionist re-analysis of Gouldner's (1954) classic study Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy to argue that the three different types of bureaucracy (i.e., ‘punishment-centered,’ ‘mock,’ and ‘representative’ bureaucracy) in a gypsum mind identified by Gouldner are ‘produced in interactions through which different responses to and meanings of bureaucracy are negotiated […] through interaction bureaucracy is inhabited and takes on three different meanings’ (Hallett and Ventresca, 2006: 226). At the same time, although meanings are negotiated in interactions, bureaucracy as a larger, higher-order logic ‘confronts both the workers and management as an obdurate feature of their world’ (p. 232).

Organizations and Organizing More recently, Bechky (2011) makes an argument similar to Hallett and Ventresca (2006), by suggesting that accounts of organizations are not well grounded to capture the realities of organizational life. Bechky suggests that we should draw inspiration and guidance from studies from the literature on inhabited institutions, occupations as institutions, and occupations, because despite its challenges, grounded theorizing has a powerful payoff. In particular, she notes that scholarly work in these areas has ‘offered new perspectives that respond to theoretical challenges in understanding change and stability, organizational formation, and relationships between structures and action’ (2006: 1163). She makes especially notes on Blumer's (1969) suggestion to incorporate social interaction into our theorizing of organizations to avoid developing abstract theories that privilege structure and contradict people's actual experiences. Perhaps the most notable example of SI's influence in organization theory is that of Weick's seminal work on organizing (1979) and sensemaking (1995). Weick draws on pragmatism and SI to discuss how larger collectivities can be built up from smaller collective structures or ‘double-interacts’ (1979: 117–8) and urges scholars to use gerunds instead of nouns to develop a processual understanding of organization and organizing that captures the fluidity of organizational life. This view of the inherently uncertain, fluid nature of organizational life and interaction, characteristic of pragmatism and SI in particular (Blumer, 1969; Dewey, 1922; Mead, 1932; 1938), permeates Weick's thinking, and has also highly influenced contemporary accounts of agency (Emirbayer and Miche, 1998; Joas, 1997) and organizational change (Farjoun, 2010; Tsoukas and Chia, 2002). Another central theme of Weick's work on organizing – and later on sensemaking – has been how common meaning is created and stabilized through participants’ ongoing interactions in joint activities, leading to the emergence of recurrent patterns of interaction: ‘to organize is to assemble ongoing interdependent actions into sensible sequences that generate sensible outcomes’ (1979: 3). Weick acknowledges SI's influence on his work by declaring it ‘the unofficial theory of sensemaking’ and suggests that scholars of sensemaking need to ensure they ‘remain alert to the ways in which people actively shape each other's meanings and sensemaking processes’ Weick (1995: 41). Page 11 of 15

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In a recent article, Dionysiou and Tsoukas (2013) draw both on SI and Weick (1979) to develop an account of the process of routine creation ‘from within,’ namely, from the perspective of participants’ situated, symbolic interactions. Following Feldman and Pentland's (2003) practice-based conceptualization of routines as consisting of a duality (Giddens, 1984) of mutually constitutive performative (the ‘routine in practice') and ostensive (‘the abstract, generalized idea of the routine or the routine in principle') aspects (Feldman and Pentland, 2003: 101), Dionysiou and Tsoukas (2013) focus on the process through which the structural component of routines (the ostensive aspect) is created. Mead's (1934) account of the emergence of the self has been central to their work, as it helped them theorize the process through which routines emerge as collective, effortful phenomena with role-taking as an underlying mechanism. In particular, Dionysiou and Tsoukas (2013) discuss how participants in routines, by interacting with reference to a common activity, develop individual selves and mutually compatible understandings and habits, and align their actions to achieve coordination; selves, understandings, and aligned actions are all implicated in mutually constitutive relations in the context of the joint activity, and give rise to repetitive, recurrent patterns of interaction, or routines. Recent work on routines conducted from a practice-based perspective (Dionysiou and Tsoukas, 2013; Feldman and Pentland, 2003; Howard-Grenville, 2005) has also been informed by Emirbayer and Miche's (1998) account of agency, which in turn relies heavily on Mead (1932; 1938) to account for the temporal-relational dimensions of agency and the inherently creative nature of agency and action. Broadly speaking, this stream of research on routines has been particularly productive in grounding explanations of patterned, ordered interactions in the situated actions and understandings of interacting individuals to advance our understanding of routines as emergent collective phenomena. This has been an important theoretical development as routines today are widely recognized as ‘building blocks’ (Becker, 2008; Eggers and Kaplan, 2013; Hutchins, 1991) of higher-order phenomena (e.g., organizations, organizational capabilities, and performance) and suggests that research seeking to explore processually and diachronically the links between different levels of analysis is much likely to benefit from employing SI's thinking and ideas.

Conclusion Today, the appeal of SI ideas and concepts is broad as they have been integrated into the body of diverse areas of work, without those who are using them necessarily identifying themselves with SI, or even recognizing where their ideas come from (Fine, 1993). Owing to space limitations, this chapter offered only a glimpse of SI's influence on contemporary research. However, it is clearly suggestive of its promise to advance process studies and thinking in several important areas. Adopting an SI perspective allows scholars interested in higher-level phenomena and outcomes (e.g., organizational performance, capabilities, stability, and change) to ground their explanations at the level of situated interactions (Dionysiou and Tsoukas, 2013). This grounding is important as process studies seek to address questions about how and why things emerge, develop, grow, or terminate over time (e.g., Langley et al., 2013). SI's emphasis on temporality and mutually constitutive relationships is particularly conducive to overcoming a static, dualistic way of thinking that compromises our efforts to conceive the world as constituted fundamentally through processes, as being in a state of ‘perpetual becoming’ (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002: 576). To the extent, therefore, that scholars are interested in processes as constitutive of the world we live in, SI offers a powerful lens to achieve their research objectives.

Notes 1Mead uses the term ‘gesture’ to refer to the ‘beginnings of social acts which are stimuli for the response of other forms’ (1934, p. 43). ‘The vocal gesture becomes a significant symbol when it has the same effect on the individual to whom it is addressed or who explicitly responds to it, and thus involves a reference to the self Page 12 of 15

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of the individual making it (p. 44). […] Where the gesture reaches that situation, it has become what we call “language.” It is now a significant symbol and it signifies a certain meaning’ (p. 46). 2For example, see Becker et al., 1961; Bucher and Strauss, 1961; Davis, 1963; Hall, 1949; Hughes, 1945, 1958; Roth, 1963; Smith, 1955). For a more detailed exposition on the negotiated order perspective, its contribution, and criticism received, see Day and Day, 1977; Fine, 1984; Hall, 1972, 1987; Maines, 1977; Strauss, 1978).

References Bechky, B. A. (2011). Making organizational theory work: Institutions, occupations, and negotiated orders. Organization Science, 22(5): 1157–1167. Becker, H. S. (1982). Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Becker, H. S., Geer, B., Hughes, E. C., and Strauss, A. (1961). Boys in White: Student Culture in Medical School. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Becker, M. C. (2008). The past, the present and future of organizational routines. In M. C. Becker (Ed.), Handbook of Organizational Routines. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, pp. 3–14. Blumer, H. (1937). Social Psychology. In E. P. Schmidt, (Ed.), Man and Society: A Substantive Introduction to the Social Science. New York: Prentice-Hall, pp. 144–198. Blumer, H. (1946). Collective behavior. In A. M. Lee (Ed.), New Outline of the Principles of Sociology. New York: Barnes and Noble, pp. 170–200. Blumer, H. (1966). Sociological implications of the thought of George Herbert Mead. American Journal of Sociology, 71(5): 535–544. Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press. Blumer, H. (1980). Mead and Blumer: The convergent methodological perspectives of social behaviorism and symbolic interactionism. American Sociological Review, 45(3): 409–419. Blumer, H. (1990). Industrialization as an Agent of Social Change. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Blumer, H. (2004). George Herbert Mead and Human Conduct (edited by Thomas Morrione). Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira. Bucher, R. and Strauss, A. (1961). Professions in process. American Journal of Sociology, 66: 325–34. Busch, L. (1980). Structure and negotiation in the agricultural sciences. Rural Sociology, 45(1): 26–48. Couch, C. J. (1984). Constructing Civilizations. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Davis, F. 1963. Passage Through Crisis: Polio Victims and Their Families. Indianapolis, Indiana: The BobbsMerrill Company, Inc. Day, R. and Day, J. V. (1977). A review of the current state of negotiated order theory: An appreciation and critique. Sociological Quarterly, 18(1): 126–142. Denzin, N. K. (1977). Notes on the criminogenic hypothesis: A case study of the American liquor industry. American Sociological Review, 42(6): 905–920. Dewey, J. (1922). Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology. New York: Modern Library. Dionysiou, D. D. and Tsoukas, H. (2013). Understanding the (re)creation of routines from within: A symbolic interactionist perspective. Academy of Management Review, 38(2): 185–205. Eggers, J. P. and Kaplan, S. (2013). Cognition and capabilities. Academy of Management Annals, 7(1): 293–338. Emirbayer, M. and Miche, A. (1998). What is agency? American Journal of Sociology, 103: 962–1023. Farberman, H. A. (1975). A criminogenic market structure: The automobile industry. Sociological Quarterly, 16(4): 438–456. Farjoun, M. (2010). Beyond dualism: Stability and change as a duality. Academy of Management Review, 35(2): 202–225. Faulkner, R. R. (1983). Music on Demand. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Feldman, M. S. and Pentland, B. T. (2003). Reconceptualizing organizational routines as a source of flexibility and change. Administrative Science Quarterly, 48: 94–118. Page 13 of 15

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Actor-Network Theory

Contributors: Barbara Czarniawska Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Actor-Network Theory" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n10 Print pages: 160-172 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Actor-Network Theory Barbara Czarniawska … the science of association is the mother of science; the progress of all the rest depends on the progress it has made.1 (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1840)

ANT: The Beginnings2 The arrival of the actor-network theory approach to the Anglo-Saxon world3 is usually dated to 1981, when French authors Michel Callon and Bruno Latour published ‘Unscrewing the Big Leviathan or How Do Actors Macrostructure Reality and How Sociologists Help Them to Do So’ – a chapter in Karin Knorr and Aaron Cicourel's anthology, Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro and Macro Sociologies. The chapter begins with a reference to Thomas Hobbes and his idea that society emerged from a contract among individuals who enter an association with one another and agree to have their wishes expressed by a common spokesperson. In this way, a ‘Leviathan’ is constructed, a macro actor such as a State. To outside observers, it appears to be much larger than any of the individuals that form it, and therefore its true character – that of an association, an assembly, a network – remains hidden. Enter sociologists, who, according to Callon and Latour, helped to hide the collective character of these macro actors by treating them as givens and their existence as starting points of sociological inquiries: here is a State, a corporation, and a powerful actor; let us see how they exert their power. And yet, Callon and Latour claimed, it is the very emergence of such macro actors that needs to be studied, as the process of their construction is usually protracted and complicated. It includes negotiations, conflicts, even wars – but first the building and maintaining of associations. The task of studying these processes is not an easy one, as the successful macro actors wipe away all traces of their origins, presenting themselves through their spokespersons as indivisible and solid. Two sources of inspiration are visible in Callon and Latour's chapter. One is actant theory, a version of structuralist analysis proposed by Algirdas Julien Greimas, a French narratologist of Lithuanian origin (see, e.g., Greimas and Courtés, 1982 and Greimas, 1990). Greimas borrowed from French linguist and Slavic languages specialist Lucien Tesniére (1966/2015) the notion of an actant: a being or a thing that accomplishes or undergoes an act. This notion can be applied not only to human beings, therefore, but also to animals, objects, and concepts (Greimas and Courtés, 1982: 5). Depending on the success of its acts, an actant can remain an object of the actions of others or can acquire a character and become an actor in a narrative, in which different acts are chained together in a succession dictated by the logic of the narrative (the plot). The early use of the Greimasian model is especially visible in Bruno Latour's text ‘Technology Is Society Made Durable’ (1992),4 in which he analyzed the history of the Kodak camera and the simultaneous emergence of a mass market for amateur photographers. Latour examined the encounters among the programs of many actants, from which Kodak emerged as a macro actor. He then asked if, at the end of the story, consumers were actually forced to buy Kodak cameras. In other words, has Eastman become powerful? And he answered: In a sense, yes, since the whole landscape is now built in such a way that there is no course of action left but to rush to the Eastman company store. However, this domination is visible only at the end of the story. At many other steps in the story the innovation was highly flexible, negotiable, at the mercy of a contingent event. (p. 113) Page 2 of 14

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And, as we know, the stories never end, even after they have been written down. The once all-powerful Eastman is now but a historical name, while the Kodak Company, a micro actor, only recently (2014) – re-emerged from bankruptcy and is trying to survive by trying new narrative programs. This turn of events is not strange, as there was nothing in the ‘nature’ of Eastman Kodak that made it into a macro actor in its time. It was an actant like many other actants, but it managed to convince many others to join their acts with it. Each time an anti-program was launched by competitors, Eastman Kodak managed to attract new allies, thus winning subsequent trials of strength. But digital photography proved to be a competitor too strong to win over, its network too large … A study that adopts an ANT approach (usually easier to conduct retrospectively than prospectively) proceeds as follows. After having located the phenomenon to study, it begins with a preliminary identification of actants: beings or things that act and are acted upon. It continues by tracing connections between observed programs and anti-programs of action, until it is clear how some actants became actors or even macro actors, elucidating the process of building a network. If this network acquired a distinct and stable character, it ‘speaks in one voice’ – that of its spokesperson. In companies, that person is usually the CEO, chairperson of the board of directors, or chief communication officer. But how is this association, this unification of many actants made possible? The answer is through translation, another crucial ANT concept with a meaning far wider than the linguistic one, a meaning coined in philosophy by Michel Serres (1974/1982; Steve Brown, 2002) and applied to sociology by Michel Callon (1975). The term is taken literally – as the Latin trans-latio – moving something from one place to another.5 Thus, translation is a concept that helps describe the movements of different forms of knowledge and cultural practices, but also forms of technology and artifacts. The key point is that moving anything from one place to another changes not only what is moved, but also the mover – the translator. In the case of building networks, translation stands in the first place for the translation of interests, and only secondly for the translation of forms, so that they fit one another (can be aligned). This notion has been well illustrated by Callon's study of the fishermen6 and researchers who enrolled scallops into their networks, constructing a macro actor of ‘cultivated scallops’ (Callon, 1986). Keeping to the narrative tradition, a good illustration of the role of translation in forming an actor-network is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – L. Frank Baum's 1900 fairy tale, which engendered many political interpretations in its time. The story is about a girl named Dorothy and her dog, Toto, who live in Kansas. When a nasty neighbor tries to have Toto killed, Dorothy runs away with her dog. A cyclone appears and carries her to the magical land of Oz. Wishing to return, she begins to travel to the City of Oz, the home of a great Wizard who can help her. On her way, she meets Scarecrow, who needs a brain; Tin Man, who wants a heart; and Cowardly Lion, who desperately needs courage. Dorothy saves them from their troubles and promises that they will acquire what they need if they follow her to the Wizard. On the way there, they encounter many adversities, which they overcome by helping one another. Once in the City of Oz, they discover that the Wizard of Oz is a small, frightened man who hides behind a big mask. But it does not matter, as they all got what they wanted on the way, and became a macro actor, much more powerful than the Wizard. In Callon's terms, the story begins with problematization, in which an initial set of actants defines or redefines a problem and offers itself as a solution. The acceptance of the goal is an obligatory passage point for entering the network: ‘We must go to Oz.’ Next comes interessement: each entity that passed through the obligatory passage point is locked into place, so that its reciprocal relations are invested with some interest. Dorothy wants to return home to Kansas, Scarecrow needs a brain, Tin Man wants a heart, and Lion needs courage. On their way to Oz, adventures on the road force them to align and coordinate. Callon calls that process enrolment. And then they come to Oz and mobilize: they speak as one, and successfully confront the Wizard, because together, they are larger than the Wizard. A successful translation took place on the road. Yet in his 2005 book, Latour said, ‘It would be fairly accurate to describe ANT as being half Garfinkel and half Page 3 of 14

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Greimas (…)’ (p. 54, note 54), not mentioning Serres, in spite of their intellectual proximity (see, e.g., Serres and Latour, 1995). This omission likely occurred because ANT has diversified over time into at least three similar but different versions: Latour's and Callon's, and that of John Law and Annemarie Mol. I present them all here in brief.

Reassembling the Social: Latourian ANT in 2005 Reassembling the Social is subtitled ‘An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory,’ but it is more a summary of rather than an introduction to the approach, which is one of the reasons I decided to present it in detail, rather than trying to summarize many of Latour's articles and other books. Reassembling the Social was meant as a textbook (which it has become, even in management and organization courses; translations proliferate). Latour wanted to convince social science students that they need to abandon the taken-for-granted idea that social is a kind of essential property that can be discovered and measured (a stuff of which something is made) and return to the etymology of the word. Social is not a material or a property, but a relationship: something is connected or assembled, in contrast to being isolated or disconnected. The question for the social sciences is not, therefore, ‘How social is this?’ but ‘How do things, people, and ideas become connected and assembled in larger units?'7 Actor-network theory is an approach, a guide to the process of answering this question. It is not a theory of the social, but a suggestion for of how to study the social – an approach set apart from other approaches by this specific definition of its object. Indeed, Latour apologized in Reassembling for his outburst at the 1997 conference – ‘Actor Network Theory and After', organized by John Law and John Hassard. At the conference, he had criticized all the elements of the name of this approach, including the hyphen (published in Latour, 1999) whereas now he promised to defend them all, ‘including the hyphen!’ (Latour, 2005: 9, note 9). But the name is somewhat misleading. The more adequate term would be ‘an actant-net approach', but in 1981, when he and Callon launched ANT, nobody knew who or what actants were, and ANT is a better acronym than ‘ANA.' The first part of Reassembling the Social contains a presentation of five uncertainties – positions on which ANT differs from or is even critical toward traditional sociology. These uncertainties concern the ‘nature’ of groups, of actions, of objects, of facts, and of type of studies conventionally denominated as ‘empirical.’ In other words, Part I situates ANT in opposition to mainstream sociology. It ends with a dialogue with a student who is confused by the difficulty of doing ANT-inspired studies of organizations. The dialogue is certainly a composite, but convincing, exactly because of that; it represents many a doubt voiced by beginning researchers. The fictitious professor of the dialogue may be poking fun at the student (who is also irreverent, creating a symmetry), but Professor Latour takes the student's difficulties to heart. Thus, Part II begins with the admission that it is not easy to trace the social and gives advice on how to study associations in three moves. To be able to perform these moves, a new cartography is needed. The moves of the new scientists of a social are not to be between local and global or between micro and macro, because such places do not exist; they must be moves across a flatland.8 But what happens locally rarely occurs in only one place; the second move must consist of a redistribution of the local. The conversation of two lovers that you overheard at a nearby café has been fed by dozens of Hollywood films and hundreds of pop songs that have been produced – and consumed – in distant localities and distant times. And if intimate interactions are so densely populated, how overcrowded must be the public ones, such as those that occur in organizations! I have used this example before (Czarniawska, 2014) to make obvious the role of film technology in a redistribution of the local. Less obvious is the role of the interior decoration of the café, which, unlike a huge table in a pub, allows the lovers to engage in intimate conversation. Less obvious, too, is the fact that a love scene between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall was also once a local interaction, although probably repeated several times in order to obtain the best cut. It is those less obvious aspects of localizing and globalizing that Page 4 of 14

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Latour wants organization students to document in the first two moves. Neither ‘global contexts’ nor ‘face-toface interactions’ can be taken for granted; they are not what they seem to be. When both moves are performed simultaneously, the third move becomes obvious, because that which immediately and almost automatically comes into focus is the type of connections. If what seems to be global consists of many connected times and places and what seems to be local is a product of many connected times and places, how are these sites connected? And, what makes these connections stable? After all, the world of organizations is anything but flat – but how are the hierarchies made? Of what are they made? The metaphor of the flatland is one way to differentiate the standpoint of the observer from that of an actor. An ANT observer is a skeptic who needs to be shown how the mountains and valleys have been constructed. Here, the roles of standardization, formalization, and classifications of all kinds become instantly obvious. In the concluding chapter, Latour arrived at the point announced throughout the book by a variety of allusions: the need for a political stance, which differs, however, from that of critical social sciences as commonly practiced. He criticized critical theories primarily because they treat power, domination, and exploitation as explanatory concepts rather than phenomena requiring explanation. In his suggestion for a new kind of political epistemology, Latour wants to abandon the eternal dilemma of choosing between ‘the dream of disinterestedness and the opposite dream of engagement and relevance’ (2005: 251). For a member of the social sciences, this new stance would consist of three steps. We first have to learn how to deploy controversies so as to gauge the number of new participants in any future assemblage (…); then we have to be able to follow how the actors themselves stabilize those uncertainties by building formats, standards, and metrologies (…); and finally, we want to see how the assemblages thus gathered can renew our sense of being in the same collective (Latour, 2005: 249). The last step, a new composition of a collective assembled as Latour has described, is a tricky one. Latour suggests a replacement of the traditional political question, ‘How many are we?’ with the question, ‘Can we live together?’ Commonsensical as it may sound, it is a truly revolutionary question, not the least in organization theory, in which the distinctions between leaders and followers, men and women, employers and employees, producers and consumers – followed by counting the forces – was a matter of routine for any political faction. The idea of assembling a collective and a subsequent ‘progressive composition of one common world’ will allow animals, plants, and objects to join in, preserving the heterogeneity. After all, ‘to study is always to do politics in the sense that it collects or composes what the common world is made of’ (2005: 256). The Latourian ANT-program cannot be counted among critical approaches, but it is, without doubt, political.

ANT Goes Shopping: Callon Michel Callon's main interest has been the construction of the markets – at least until his retirement in 2013. His 1998 anthology, The Laws of the Markets, was truly pivotal, as it initiated a new turn in economic sociology, which continues to progress. But is it ANT? In the introduction to his 1998 volume, Callon spoke of ‘AST’ – an anthropology of science and technology (1998a). In the chapter Callon (1998b) contributed, he added Goffman to his set of tools, especially the notions of framing and overflowing, which have since become popular (see, e.g., Czarniawska and Löfgren, 2012, 2013). He did, however, emphasize the central role of objects in framing and embraced a theory of action ‘in which what counts are the mediations and not the sources’ (Callon, 1998b: 267, note 10). In his contribution to ‘Actor Network Theory and After,’ the conference organized by John Law and John Hassard in 1997, Callon specified the connections between ANT and the study of markets (1999). In his view, the most important trait of ANT – no matter that it is also a trait that attracts critique – is the radical indeterminacy of the actor. Actors can exist or vanish – their ontology is fluid. They can be big or small, and their size can Page 5 of 14

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change in over time, as can other traits. The market, as represented in economic theories, could be a serious challenge for ANT, ‘because it introduces a strict separation between what circulates (goods which are inert, passive, and classified as non-humans) and human agents who are active and capable of making complicated decisions (producers, distributors, and consumers)’ (Callon, 1999: 182). These human agents calculate and follow their interests in a well-informed way. Yet an observation of the actual markets (Callon's favorite example is Marie-France Garcia's [1986/2007] study of the construction of the strawberry market) reveals a picture that differs dramatically from that suggested by the economic models, and even the competing models of some economic sociologists. Uncertainty and incomplete information are the normal state of affairs. Furthermore, markets are the result of operations of disentanglement (of agents and goods, which become entangled as a result of any transaction, but must not remain entangled, if the market is to be ‘free'); framing (e.g., pricing, which, however, is invariably followed by further overflowing when supply or demand change); and internalization and externalization (deciding what should be included in and what should be omitted from economic calculations). If these operations are successfully performed, the result is indeed a market, but also a Homo economicus, a calculative agent. Such an economic man was never born, however; it takes a great deal of effort to construct one, exactly as ANT suggests. Thus, ANT has passed the most exacting test, Callon concluded – the market test!9 Callon's theoretical interest in ANT was focused particularly on the notion of agency, its construction and distribution in the markets (Cochoy, 2014). In a dialogical text by Callon and Law (1995), Callon noted that traditional Western culture demanded that agents have two attributes – intentionality and language use – which made it obvious that agents must be human beings. But if intentionality is reduced to intentions, which can be attributed to various entities, and given that both dolphins and computers are known to talk, this conclusion is no longer valid. In addition, ANT is a way of emphasizing that agents are rarely individuals – undividable entities – but are ‘hybrid collectives’ (or collectifs, to emphasize that it is a noun and not an adjective). Thus, as Cochoy jested in his commentary, there is no single Callon; there is a hybrid collectif of which the person of Michel Callon is but one ingredient. Later, Callon abandoned the notion of a hybrid collectif in favor of another Frenchism: agencement. In the research program for the study of markets sketched with Koray Çalışkan (Çalışkan and Callon, 2010), they defined the term: The term agencement is a French word that has no exact English counterpart. In French its meaning is very close to ‘arrangement’ (or ‘assemblage'). It conveys the idea of a combination of heterogeneous elements that have been adjusted to one another. But arrangements (as well as assemblages) could imply a sort of divide between human agents, those who do the arranging or assembling, and things that have been arranged. (…) We therefore chose to use the French word agencement, instead of arrangement, to stress the fact that agencies and arrangements are not separate. (p. 10) I have nothing against Frenchisms, but I am not sure about the wisdom of importing terms that are polysemic in the language of origin, and would prefer Cochoy's (2014) ‘agencing,’ even at the cost of losing the ‘assemblage’ aspect of it (after all, one could speak of ‘agencing an assemblage,’ even if it is a mouthful). Such loans have become common practice, however. The confusion created by these loans can be best illustrated by a verbal duel between Daniel Miller (2002) and Michel Callon (2005), in which the reader wonders if the duelists ever read one another's texts. There is no doubt, however, that Callon's application of ANT to the study of markets revolutionized economic sociology (for a quantitative proof, see Leyesdorff, 2010).

Semiotic Materiality: Law and Mol Although the term ANT was never mentioned in John Law's 1986 article, in which he presented his study of Page 6 of 14

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the history of Portuguese travels to India as an example of long-distance control, his joining forces with ANT is thought to originate from this date. In this text, he claimed that ‘long-distance control depends upon the creation of a network of passive10 agents (both human and non-human), which makes it possible for emissaries to circulate from the centre to the periphery in a way that maintains their durability, forcefulness and fidelity’ (1986: 234). In contrast to the blundering Columbus, the Portuguese knew the maritime route to India well, as proved by the appearance of armed Portuguese ships in the Indian Ocean in 1498. The secret of their success, claimed Law, was the assemblage of ‘documents, devices and drilled people.’ The new methods of long-distance control meant that European imperialism could proceed. In Law's Organizing Modernity (1994), ANT was presented as comprising a ‘sociology of verbs’ (in contrast to the prevailing ‘sociology of nouns'), symbolic interactionism, and poststructualism. In Law's opinion, ANT subsumed the two latter approaches and contributed the novelty of abolishing micro–macro dualism. In its place, ANT postulated a symmetrical anthropology in which there were no privileged accounts: managers and workers, Westerners and Easterners, humans and non-humans, objects and quasi-objects all have the opportunity for their voices be heard. This was his take on the Daresbury SERC Laboratory that he studied – seen not as an object, an entity with borders, but as an ongoing process of ordering (or, in the vocabulary of organization theory, of organizing). The ANT aspect of Law's ethnography has been made especially visible in the dialogue between Callon and Law (1995) mentioned previously – the dialogue to which Law contributed an ANT-analysis of his own material. What would happen if we took away the managing director's telephone? Why, he would become like a baboon.11 How does he know anything well enough to be able to act upon his knowledge? Why, because he has access to a ‘collectif of materially heterogeneous bits of pieces’ (Callon and Law, 1995: 489). To return to the workshop organized at Keele University by Law and Hassard in July 1997: In 1999, the papers contributed to it became a book, Actor Network Theory and After. In his introductory chapter, Law summarized the main contributions of ANT – judged by then to be ‘one of the most influential approaches to social theory to have emerged in recent years’ (back text) – and tried to predict ‘the after.' The two aspects (called stories) of ANT that he emphasized were, first, ‘a ruthless application of semiotics. It tells that entities take their form and acquire their attributes as a result of their relations with other entities’ (Law, 1999: 3). Ruthless – in the sense that semiotics (more specifically, narratology) has been applied to a previously distant field: studies of technology. This application can thus be called ‘a semiotics of materiality.’ Second, it was a stress on performativity: ‘How is it that things get performed (and perform themselves) into relations that are relatively stable and stay in place’ (Law, 1999: 4). Indeed, Latour has constantly stressed the importance of performative definitions (as opposed to ostensive definitions, traditionally accepted as correct in the sciences), and Callon has focused on performativity of economic utterances in the contexts of markets. Law worried, however, that ANT was becoming ‘naturalized', reified, and tamed. Thus, he borrowed from mathematics the notion of ‘fractionality,’ which was to stand as a metaphor for the observation that objects, subjects, and societies can be both single and multiple, coherent without being centered (Law, 2002). Annemarie Mol joined ANT in 1982/1983, when she attended an STS research seminar conducted by Michel Callon and Bruno Latour in the École des Mines in Paris (Mol, 2010). As a postdoc in 1995, she wrote a paper with John Law related to his idea of ‘semiotics of materiality.’ They closely read several STS studies (their own and those of other authors), looking for proof that sociality needs materiality if it is to be sustained. They also noted that many narratives about science use a strategy consisting of ‘pulling material differences together into a single kind of story’ (p. 287), of homogenizing heterogeneous assemblies. Their recommendation was a ‘patchwork strategy': sewing together ‘partial and varied connections between sites, situations and stories’ (p. 290) – a strategy favored by Annemarie Mol in her studies. One of those studies is the research conducted by Annemarie Mol and Marianne de Laet (2000): the study of a Zimbabwe bush pump, which turned to be … a fluid actor. Her bestseller, Body Multiple (2002), should be Page 7 of 14

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also counted as an ANT work. Although she does not mention the term, the references clearly point in that direction; and she used the same field material in her earlier article with Law. Law and Mol also joined forces in describing ‘an actor-enacted’ in the form of a Cumbrian sheep (2008), undertaking another excursion into the semiotics of materiality. Considering the possibility that a sheep can be an actor, they pleaded for a disentangling of agency from intentionality: ‘an entity counts as an actor if it makes a perceptible difference’ (2008: 58). The first move is the same as the one suggested by Callon (although he simply postulated replacing ‘intentionality’ with ‘intentions'). Indeed, their take on ANT combines threads that were clearly drawn from the texts of both Callon and Latour, but they added many original contributions. The Cumbrian sheep, victims of foot and mouth disease spreading in Cumbria, were enacted in several ways, like the atherosclerosis patients in Body Multiple. There was the veterinary sheep, the epidemiological sheep, the economic sheep, and the farming sheep. They all existed simultaneously and interacted, even if some version could have been momentarily more visible than the others. Does it mean that sheep are passive hosts of the virus? Much less passive than the Portuguese sailors, it turns out. In Law and Mol's reading, all members of this network acted: the disease was difficult to diagnose, the farmers and veterinarians missed the signs, the sheep displayed symptoms in a mild way, and suffered from other problems. All these actions were specific to this situation, but the authorities ignored them; rather, they adopted an epidemiological model constructed on the basis of another disease and different animals. A great many sheep were slaughtered unnecessarily, even though the farmers opposed the killing. The story (Law and Mol emphasized the importance of narratives in enacting actors) led them to conclude that actorlike entities can be seen as fractal, in that they look different depending on the fragment under examination, and their actions are ‘like a viscous fluid’ (Law and Mol, 2008: 72): it is often unclear who is doing what. Thus, the question, ‘Who is doing what?’ is less important than the question, ‘What is happening?’ – a point made by all proponents of ANT. Law wrote a (final?12) text on ANT in 2009. It starts with the following definition (observe that Law never uses the hyphen used by other authors in ‘actor-network theory,’ and that he maintains the existence of two worlds): Actor network theory is a disparate family of material-semiotic tools, sensibilities, and methods of analysis that treat everything in the social and natural worlds as a continuously generated effect of the webs of relations within which they are located. (Law, 2009: 141) He continued with qualifications, three of which are worth repeating.13 First, it is possible to describe ANT in the abstract, but this maneuver misses the point, because it is an approach meant for field studies. Second, it is an approach, not a theory (all ANT proponents repeat this dictum, albeit with little effect). Third, ANT actually covers a large diaspora of approaches (thus, Law himself would prefer the label ‘material semiotics,’ which he used in the title). What follows is the history of ANT, or rather four histories, which are worth reading in detail and which illustrate Law's qualifications. After the history came suggestions for the future. The aspects of the ‘new material semiotics’ that Law wants to develop and which were already visible in the story of the Cumbrian sheep are enactment, multiplicity, fluidity, and controversies about reality. Developing them amounts to a kind of ‘ontological politics,’ contrary to the criticism of ANT's allegedly apolitical character. In a text summarizing ANT, Annemarie Mol, too, claimed that it is ‘a term that stopped working a long time ago’ (Mol, 2010). She analyzed – and problematized – the three elements: the notion of actor, the notion of network, and the notion of theory. She added, however, in agreement with John Law, two other elements of the ANT approach not always covered by the label: ordering (or aligning) and coordination. These two activities may be important to study – especially in management and organization studies, as aligning and coordination are what the management and organization studies (MOS) scholars call organizing. Page 8 of 14

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Applications and Critiques In spite of Law and Mol's opinion that ANT has outlived its utility, the approach is as popular as ever, not least in MOS. But it has been translated into great variety of versions. It is sometimes understood as ‘actors and their networks’ and other times as ‘actor's network.’ Furthermore, as in the case of grounded theory in the 1980s, it is used as a label to be attached to any approach that a given author happened to be favoring at a given moment. Among its creators, Latour is quoted most often (but then he counts among the most quoted authors in general), although his excursions into narratology are rarely followed (but see the collection edited by Czarniawska and Hernes, 2005). Since its outset, ANT has attracted almost as many critics as followers. Susan Leigh Star (1991) accused it of taking a managerialist, functionalist, and masculinist stance. Yet as John Law (2009) pointed out, the managers he portrayed in his Organizing Modernity (1994) are far from masters of the world, male as they may be. As for ‘functionalism,’ it is difficult for a non-sociologist to figure out whether it is abbreviation for ‘structural functionalism’ (a school of thought that has been criticized rightly and at length) or for ‘functionalism’ in the sense used by the architects who claimed that ‘form should follow function,’ and also by those organization theorists who, like myself, would like to see both organizations and machines functioning well. Erhard Friedberg (1993) has accused followers of ANT of anthropomorphism. There is something to the accusation, but one could use a counterargument similar to the one Richard Rorty (1990) applied to defend ethnocentrism in his dispute with Clifford Geertz. There is no view from nowhere and there is no other centrism possible for anthropoi. Even the founder of sociobiology, Edward O. Wilson, projected the human world on ants in his novel Anthill (2010). The main argument is, however, the necessity to follow the requirement of a symmetrical approach: as humans were usually treated as superior to all other entities, an anthropomorphization is an equalizing move. British anthropologist Tim Ingold (2008) protested exactly that move. In his amusing text about ANT meeting SPIDER (Skilled Practice Involves Developmentally Embodied Responsiveness), he vehemently opposed the idea that all entities should be treated symmetrically, because ‘[o]ur concept of agency must make allowance for the real complexity of living organisms as opposed to inert matter’ (p. 214). He also prefers ‘meshworks’ to ‘networks': ‘not an assemblage of heterogeneous bits and pieces but a tangle of threads and pathways’ (p. 212) – a concept that is becoming fashionable in organization studies. But meshwork is a net of homogeneous elements (otherwise it could not be so tightly woven). Is that what Ingold suggests? I agree with part of his suggestion, however: it is important to pay attention to the net itself, not only to what it connects. Thus my idea, which sprang from ANT: the study of action nets (Czarniawska, 2004): the construction of connections between different collective actions, whether or not they would stabilize into formal organizations. One recurring if startling criticism is that ANT neglects power relationships. Latour's critique of critical theory (see, e.g., Latour, 1993), in particular, provoked many reactions, also within organization theory. Some were strongly accusatory: Whittle and Spicer (2008) accused ANT of legitimizing a hegemony of power by avoiding normative statements. Some have been balanced and thoughtful (e.g., Alcadipani and Hassard, 2010). Rolland Munro (2009) examined ANT from the perspective of power studies and found it useful for extending the analysis of power and broadening a sociological understanding of the phenomenon. Latour has answered most of the standard critiques against ANT in Reassembling the Social (2005). He even provocatively claimed there that the symmetry between humans and non-humans does not constitute anthropomorphism; nor does it raise non-humans to the level of humanity; rather it elevates humans to the higher level of non-humans that non-humans occupy in the natural sciences (p. 254). Recently, however, he decided to abandon sociology and return to philosophy. His magnum opus, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2013; also a collective ‘digital humanities’ project), is based upon different premises than those of ANT and conPage 9 of 14

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tains a critique of ANT – from those premises. It maintains14 the previous definition of an organizing act as consisting of scripting (planning future actions) and dispatching (sending actants to right places at right time to perform scripted actions) (pp. 389–394), and contains a claim that ‘philosophy may well have drawn some of its most important concepts from the organizing act’ (p. 397). It also continues the critique of mainstream organization studies; they proceed ‘as though an organization were an individual entity with clearly defined borders and a complete, well-rounded identity that has been inserted ‘inside’ a set much larger in size’ (p. 414). Yet Latour joined some of ANT's critics, admitting that the studies conducted to that point had focused too much on those actors who succeeded in acquiring the character of macro actors (p. 64). I agree with his observation, yet I see it not as an unavoidable result of the assumption of symmetry, but, as I have already stated, as a consequence of the difficulties of access. Still, studies of disassembling could be truly fascinating. Latour wants to find a vocabulary that will allow researchers to differentiate among values that various practitioners hold dear (here, the proximity to such other French pragmatist sociologists as Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991/2006, is most obvious); but as a management and organization scholar, I am content to remain with the study of organizing as ‘just one of the forms through which we can grasp any course of action’ (p. 64). Limited as it is, it can still be a contribution to an ‘anthropology of the Moderns', an ANThropology, as it were.

What Has MOS Learned from ANT? MOS has learned (and borrowed) much from actor-network theory, although the specific borrowings can differ among authors. I am mentioning only the most obvious and those with the widest spread. To begin, ANT offered a new approach to management and organizations studies, which after a period of bloom in the 1960s (when organization theory replaced the theory of administration) and the 1980s (when an encounter with anthropology led to interest in culture and symbolism), it was becoming somewhat repetitive by the 2000s. ANT's arrival coincided with the narrative turn in social sciences (of which ANT is an offspring); furthermore, it is fully compatible with the new institutional theory (after all, as Latour used to say, sociology is about institutions), applying a more down-to-earth approach to same processes. Most importantly, ANT forced the gaze of management and organization scholars back to technology, which has been forgotten in spite of the triumphal entrance of computers, digital work, and big data to work organizations. Further, it demanded a symmetrical approach to the study of objects, thus delineating an approach to studying management and organization that does not require a priori decisions about which countries are advanced and which are backward, which companies are based on knowledge and which on ignorance, and who or what are the heroes and the villains of a story that has not yet run its course. In this way, it opened a completely new way of being engaged – without prejudice – and reminded MOS scholars that a good study must result in a good story. Not many MOS authors followed the narrative template of ANT, however. Kjell Tryggestad (2005) told a detection story of a failing technological innovation, following the format used in Latour's (1996) account of the failure of an automated train called Aramis. Lena Porsander (2005) made an artifact (a software) the main narrator of the story of constructing an action net in preparation for a Culture Capital event in Stockholm. More scholars felt encouraged to follow, making their actors objects rather than persons (Adolfsson, 2005; Bruni, 2005; Frandsen, 2009). But even those scholars who did not introduce all aspects of the approach into their studies acknowledged the main message of ANT. Like sociologists, many of traditional MOS scholars tended to confuse the explanans (the explanation) with the explanandum (the phenomenon to be explained). Power does not explain other phenomena if its emergence is not explained first. What seems large, solid, and eternal used to be a bunch of small actants trying to get together – and therefore it can also melt into the air in the future. Page 10 of 14

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Like ethnomethodologists, but using other techniques, ANT followers continue the work demanded by Alfred Schütz long ago. Social scientists need to study that which is taken for granted in the societies they study. In order to do that, they must not take it for granted themselves. Our world is filled with organizations, but they did not always exist and will not exist forever. It is the process of their emergence – and dissipation – that can be fruitfully studied with the ANT approach.

Notes 1‘Dans les pays démocratiques, la science de l'association est la science mère; le progrès de toutes les autres dépend des progrès de celle-là.' 2I thank Bernward Joerges and Haridimos Tsoukas for their useful comments, and my language editor, Nina Lee Colwill, for her diligence. 3Bruno Latour and John Law have both attributed the coining of the French term acteur-réseau to Michel Callon. 4And in a later work, The Making of Law (2009). 5The French word traduction has a close meaning, but according to Umberto Eco (2001), it is not ‘translation’ because of the original faulty translation of the Greek word into French and Italian. 6My language editor tells me that the correct word is now ‘fishers’ (women fish, too). Nevertheless, I uphold the term used in Callon's text. 7And, one may add, how larger units are disassembled. There are still too few studies of the disintegration of macroactors, probably because access to failure is always more difficult than access to success. But there are studies of actors that fail to become macroactors (e.g., Callon, 1980; Latour, 1996). 8The metaphor, intended to oppose the idea that there exist levels of reality (global-local, macro-micro), has been borrowed from the title of Edwin A. Abbott's 1884 novel, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. 9At the end of the chapter, Callon added that this was possible because ANT is not a theory, but an approach to research. It has been called a theory, but merely by overenthusiastic readers. The last sentence is, ‘I fear our colleagues and their fascination for theory’ (Callon, 1999: 194). How true! And how neglected is his warning! 10In the sense of ‘obedient'. 11An allusion to the sociality of baboons that cannot be stabilized because they lack an appropriate technology – an example of the importance of technology used often in ANT (see Latour and Strum, 1987). 12‘Actor network resource’ website (http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/centres/css/ant/ant.htm) was last updated in 2004, when John Law left Lancaster for the Open University. His present webpage is called Heterogeneities (http://heterogeneities.net, accessed 2015-02-12). 13The fourth warns the reader against unconditioned belief in the author's version of events. 14Aligning and coordination can be seen as both premises and results of scripting and dispatching.

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References Adolfsson, Petra P. (2005). ‘Obelisks of Stockholm.’ In Bruno Latour & Peter Weibel (Eds.), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Karlsruhe/Cambridge, MA: ZKM/MIT Press, pp. 396–397. Alcadipani, Rafaele and Hassard, John (2010). ‘Actor-network theory, organisations and critique: Towards a politics of organising', Organization, 17(4): 419–435. Baum, Frank L. (1900). The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Chicago, IL: George M. Hill Company. Boltanski, Luc and Thévenot, Laurent (1991/2006). On Justification: Economies of Worth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brown, Steve (2002). ‘Michel Serres: Science, translation and the logic of the parasite', Theory, Culture & Society, 19(3): 1–28. Bruni, Attila (2005). ‘Shadowing software and clinical records: On the ethnography of non-humans and heterogeneous contexts', Organization, 12(3): 357–78. Çalışkan, Koray and Callon, Michel (2010). ‘Economization, part 2: A research programme for the study of markets', Economy and Society, 39(1): 1–32. Callon, Michel (1975). ‘L'operation de traduction comme relation symbolique', in Philippe Roqueplo (Ed.), L'incidence des rapports sociaux sur la science. Paris: CORDES, pp. 105–141. Callon, Michel (1980). ‘Struggles and negotiations to define what is problematic and what is not: The sociology of translation', in: Karin D. Knorr, Roger Krohn, and Richard D. Whitley, (Eds.), The Social Process of Scientific Investigation. Boston: Reidel, pp. 197–220. Callon, Michel (1986). ‘Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc's Bay', in John Law (Ed.), Power, Action and Belief. A New Sociology of Knowledge? London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 196–229. Callon, Michel (1998a). ‘Introduction: The embeddedness of economic markets in economics', in Michel Callon (Ed.), The Laws of the Markets. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 1–57. Callon, Michel (1998b). ‘An essay on framing and overflowing: Economic externalities revisited by sociology', in Michel Callon (Ed.), The Laws of the Markets. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 244–269. Callon, Michel (1999). ‘Actor-network theory – the market test', in John Law and John Hassard (Eds.), Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 181–194. Callon, Michel (2005). ‘Why virtualism paves the way to political impotence: A reply to Daniel Miller's critique of The Laws of the Markets', Economic Sociology European Electronic Newsletter, 6(2): 3–20. Callon, Michel and Latour, Bruno (1981). ‘Unscrewing the big Leviathan or how do actors macrostructure reality and how sociologists help them to do so', in Karin D. Knorr and Aaron Cicourel (Eds.), Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro and Macro Sociologies. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 277–303. Callon, Michel and Law, John (1995). ‘Agency and the hybrid collectif', The South Atlantic Quarterly, 94(2): 481–507. Cochoy, Franck (2014). ‘A theory of “agencing”: On Michel Callon's contribution to organizational knowledge and practice', in Paul Adler, Paul du Gay, Glenn Morgan, and Mike Reed (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Sociology, Social Theory and Organization Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 106–124. Czarniawska, Barbara (2004). ‘On time, space and action nets', Organization, 11(6): 777–795. Czarniawska, Barbara (2014). ‘Bruno Latour: An accidental organization theorist', in Paul Adler; Paul du Gay; Glenn Morgan, and Mike Reed (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Sociology, Social Theory and Organization Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 87–105. Czarniawska, Barbara and Hernes, Tor (Eds.) (2005). Actor-Network Theory and Organizing. Malmö/Copenhagen: Liber/CBS Press. Czarniawska, Barbara and Löfgren, Orvar (Eds.) (2012). Managing Overflow in Affluent Societies. New York: Routledge. Czarniawska, Barbara and Löfgren, Orvar (Eds.), (2013). Coping with Excess: How Organizations, Communities and Individuals Manage Overflows. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Eco, Umberto (2001). Experiences in Translation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Frandsen, Ann-Christine. (2009). ‘From psoriasis to a number and back', Information and Organization, 19(2): 103–128. Friedberg, Erhard (1993). Le pouvoir et la règle. Paris: Seuil. Page 12 of 14

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Garcia, Marie-France (1986/2007). ‘The social construction of a perfect market', in Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa, and Lucy Siu (Eds.), Do Economists Make Markets? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 20–53. Greimas, Algirdas J. (1990). The Social Sciences.: A Semiotic View. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Greimas, Algirdas J. and Courtés, Julien (1982). Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Ingold, Tim (2008). ‘When ANT meets SPIDER: Social theory for arthropods', in Carl Knappett and Lambros Malafouris (Eds.), Material Agency: Toward a Non-anthropocentric Approach. London: Springer, pp. 209–215. de Laet, Marianne and Mol, Annemarie (2000). ‘The Zimbabwe bush pump: Mechanics of a fluid technology', Social Studies of Science, 30(2): 225–263. Latour, Bruno (1992). ‘Technology is society made durable', in John Law (Ed.), A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination. London: Routledge, pp. 103–131. Latour, Bruno (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno (1996). Aramis, or the Love of Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Latour, Bruno (1999). ‘On recalling ANT', in John Law and John Hassard (Eds.), Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 15–25. Latour, Bruno (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno (2009). The Making of Law: An Ethnography of the Conseil d'Etat. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Latour, Bruno (2013). An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno and Strum, Shirley (1987). ‘The meanings of social: From baboons to humans', Social Science Information, 26: 783–802. Law, John (1986). ‘On the method of long distance control: Vessels, navigation, and the Portuguese route to India, in John Law (Ed.), Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? London: Routledge, pp. 234–263. Law, John (1994). Organizing Modernity: Social Ordering and Social Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Law, John (1999). ‘After ANT: complexity, naming and topology', in John Law and John Hassard (Eds.), Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 1–14. Law, John (2002). Aircraft Stories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Law, John (2009). ‘Actor network theory and material semiotics', in Barry S. Turner (Ed.), The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 141–158. Law, John and Mol, Annemarie (1995). ‘Notes on materiality and sociality', The Sociological Review, 43: 274–294. Law, John and Mol, Annemarie (2008). ‘The actor-enacted: Cumbrian sheep in 2001', in Carl Knappett and Lambros Malafouris (Eds.), Material Agency: Toward a Non-anthropocentric Approach. London: Springer, pp. 57–77. Leyesdorff, Loet (2010). ‘What can heterogeneity add to the scientometric map? Steps toward algorithmic historiography', in Madeleine Akrich, Yannick. Barthe; Fabian Muniesa, and Philippe Mustar (Eds.), Débordements. Mélanges offerts à Michel Callon. Paris: Presses des Mines, pp. 283–289. Miller, Daniel (2002). ‘Turning Callon the right way up', Economy and Society, 31(2): 218–233. Mol, Annemarie (2002). The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mol, Annemarie (2010). ‘Actor-network theory: Sensitive terms and enduring tensions', Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 50(1): 253–269. Munro, Rolland (2009). ‘Actor-network theory', in Stewart Clegg and Mark Haugaard (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Power. London: Sage, pp. 125–137. Porsander, Lena (2005). ‘“My name is Lifebuoy”: An actor-network emerging from an action net', in Barbara Czarniawska and Tor Hernes (Eds.), Actor-Network Theory and Organizing. Malmö/Copenhagen: Liber/CBS Press, pp. 14–30. Rorty, Richard (1990). ‘On ethnocentrism: A reply to Clifford Geertz', in Objectivity, Relativism and Truth. Philosophical Papers Vol. 1. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 203–210. Page 13 of 14

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Serres, Michel (1974/1982). Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Serres, Michel and Latour, Bruno (1995). Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time: Michel Serres with Bruno Latour. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Star, Susan Leigh (1991). ‘Power, technologies and the phenomenology of conventions: On being allergic to onions', in John Law (Ed.), A Sociology of Monsters? Essays on Power, Technology and Domination. London: Routledge, pp. 26–56. Tesniére, Lucien (1966/2015). Elements of Structural Syntax. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Tryggestad, Kjell (2005). ‘Technological strategy as macro-actor: How humanness may be made of steel', in Barbara Czarniawska and Tor Hernes (Eds.), Actor-Network Theory and Organizing. Malmö/Copenhagen: Liber/CBS Press, pp. 31–49. Whittle, Andrea and Spicer, André (2008). ‘Is actor network theory critique?', Organization Studies, 29(4): 611–629. Wilson, Edward O. (2010). Anthill. A Novel. New York: W.W. Norton. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n10

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Ethnomethodology

Contributors: Andrea Whittle & William Housley Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Ethnomethodology" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n11 Print pages: 174-189 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Ethnomethodology Andrea WhittleWilliam Housley Where others might see ‘things', ‘givens’ or ‘facts of life', the ethnomethodologist sees (or attempts to see) process: the process through which the perceivedly stable features of socially organized environments are continually created and sustained. (Pollner, 1974: 27)

Introduction: What Is Ethnomethodology? The term ‘ethnomethodology’ can be quite confusing. It sounds a bit like a form of research ‘methodology’ like, say, interviews or questionnaires. This is misleading because it is not. Nor is it a social ‘theory’ like, say, institutional theory or agency theory. Rather, it is a distinct paradigm of sociological inquiry in its own right. Ethnomethodology seeks to ‘re-specify’ the issues, topics, and concepts of mainstream social science (Button, 1991). The term ‘re-specify’ means taking those concepts used within mainstream functionalist social science to explain social action, such as ‘social rules’ or ‘social norms', and studying them as endogenous accomplishments of knowledgeable members of a social group (Leiter, 1980; Handel, 1982; Button, 1991; Coulon, 1995; ten Have, 2004). In other words, what others take as pre-given external social ‘facts’ and ‘forces', ethnomethodology takes as things that people have to produce in an ongoing and never-ending process. Ethnomethodology is the term that the field's founding thinker, Harold Garfinkel, used to describe the study of ‘the work of fact production in flight’ (Garfinkel, 1967: 79, emphasis added). It may be useful to break the term ethnomethodology down into its component parts. ‘Ethno’ comes from the Greek word ethnos and means ‘people’ – who may gather or organize in a variety of groupings, both large and small, formal or informal: a crowd, a sports team, a large multinational corporation, or even a whole network of professional organizations that make up a social institution such as the legal system. The key thing is that the people in the group share, recognize, and employ similar ‘methods’ to do whatever they do, such as operating a global business or upholding the law. The term ‘methodology', then, refers to the methods or procedures that competent members of that social group use to go about ‘organizing’ themselves. Put simply, then, ethnomethodology is the study of the practical methods through which members of a particular social group accomplish social organization. It might be useful to take a simple example. Ryave and Schenkein (1974) use the example of walking down the street. In a similar vein, Llewellyn and Hindmarsh (2010: Ch. 1) and Francis and Hester (2004: Ch. 5) use the example of forming a queue. Let us take the example of crossing the road. Crossing the road relies upon the ethno-methods of both pedestrians and road users, such as cyclists and car drivers, to produce recognizable signals to each other. These could be signals that the pedestrian intends to cross (accomplished by producing stopping at the pavement edge and gazing left and right, for instance) and signals that the car driver intends to stop (accomplished by slowing down, or a quick flash of their headlights, or waving a hand, or a nod, and so on). The question ‘what is recognizably going on here?’ is a problem not just for a social scientist looking at the road-crossing scene, in their ‘professional theorizing’ about social organization, but also for members themselves, in their ‘practical theorizing'. As Llewellyn (2008: 767) puts it, ‘the question of what should be inferred from specific expressions, utterances and bodily movements is a problem – not for analysts – but for members.’ The task for the ethnomethodologist, then, is to undertake systematic and fine-grained studies of how members solve these problems in order to produce ‘order’ and ‘organization’ in various institutional and mundane settings. This simple example of crossing the road illustrates a number of central ethnomethodological constructs (see Garfinkel, 1967): indexicality (developed from earlier uses in linguistics), reflexivity, and the documentary method of interpretation (a concept taken from Mannheim, 1952). The term indexicality refers to the fact that Page 2 of 15

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any social action only ‘makes sense’ through inferences about what the action ‘indexes’ or ‘points to’ in that particular context. The documentary method of interpretation refers to this circular process of how each ‘appearance’ of social action we encounter is made sense of as ‘documenting', ‘indexing', or ‘pointing to’ an underlying pattern or ‘typification’ – a concept taken from the phenomenology of Schutz (1953). Moreover, the ‘pattern’ itself is derived from collecting together these ‘appearances’ in an ongoing cycle of ‘pattern-making'. In the example above, social actions such as the direction of gaze of pedestrians and gestures like ‘nods’ from drivers were made sense of as ‘documenting’ or ‘indexing’ patterns such as ‘pedestrian wanting to crossing the road’ and ‘driver signalling pedestrian to cross'. The term ‘reflexivity', then, refers to the inherent circular nature of this process of making sense of particular appearances through reference to wider patterns and simultaneously creating these self-same patterns through collections of appearances. We will return to this point in the discussion of Wieder's (1974) study later. Trouble and disorganization soon emerge when people use different ‘patterns'. Only a minor ‘trouble’ – inconvenience – is caused when the car driver slows for what looks like a pedestrian wanting to cross, only to come to the conclusion that the pedestrian seems to have stopped for another reason. More consequential ‘troubles’ emerge when the pedestrian thinks a nod from a driver signals ‘permission to cross', or mistakes slowing down for ‘I have seen you want to cross and will stop'. Indeed, these are the very same commonsense patterns and typifications of road use(rs) that ethnomethodological studies of traffic courts (Pollner, 1987) and road safety auditors (Hartswood, et al., 2011) rely on to arrive at their professional judgements about the causes of infringements and accidents, respectively. Thus, while the social rules and legal regulations governing traffic at first appear to be fixed and enduring ‘entities’ – independent ‘structures’ that ‘push and pull’ people to obey them – they are in fact the ongoing accomplishment of members and do not exist outside of those practices which reproduce them. The appearance of stability and orderliness is in fact built from the continuous use of member's commonsense knowledge of what is happening and commonsense reasoning about what they should do next. Hence, ethnomethodology seeks to study the ‘stock of knowledge’ and ‘reasoning procedures’ that that makes social organization possible. Maintaining the ‘status quo’ of cars driving and pedestrians crossing (without cars crashing and pedestrians being run over) therefore requires constant, albeit largely imperceptible and predominantly unconscious, effort and activity. It is what Rawls (2008: 701) refers to as the ‘constant mutual orientation’ to unfolding scenes of action. In short, what appears as a stable object – a ‘rule’ – belies a continuous social process. Rawls (2008: 713) explains as follows: ‘Social objects are not just there; … they must be rendered in a mutually intelligible form in order to exist as social objects ….’ In the next section, we will explain in more detail the perspective ethnomethodology takes to studying process.

Ethnomethodology and the Study of ‘Organization-In-Action' In line with process thinking, ethnomethodology rejects the idea that organizations – or indeed any other social phenomenon – can be understood as ‘entities’ with various ‘attributes’ that are amenable to analysis with a cause-and-effect logic. Therefore, it does not see organizational rules and norms (such as organizational structure charts, job descriptions, rules and regulations, norms and values) as ‘input variables’ that can be measured as predictors of organizational outcomes, such as employee engagement, firm performance, level of innovation, or sources of competitive advantage. Within organization studies, terms such as organizational structure or culture are typically listed as an ‘attribute’ of an organization, and typically treated as a variable that either causes other things to happen, or is itself a causal output of another variable. Sometimes these ‘facts’ and ‘factors’ are represented visually as a word in a box, with an arrow arising from it or pointing to it, as if to indicate that they are objects that have properties that do things, or can have things done to them – in the same way that, say, water has the property of being able to be heated in order to produce steam. The social process that is ‘organization’ is treated as a ‘thing', and presumed to have ‘attributes’ like a structure and a culture, in the same way as an office block as a physical object can be said to have attributes like a particular height or number of floors. Page 3 of 15

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Bittner (1974: 73) explains how this commonsense and taken-for-granted reasoning enables the rational structures (or what he calls the ‘formal scheme') of bureaucracy to operate: … one is confronted with a rich and ambiguous body of background information that normally competent members of society take for granted as commonly known. … [This] information enters into that commonplace and practical orientation to reality which members of society regard as ‘natural’ when attending to their daily affairs. Hence, it is through their ‘everyday mundane knowledge and reasoning procedures’ that organizational members ‘“make sense of” and “act on” the situations in which they are involved …’ (Samra-Fredericks and Bargiela-Chiappini, 2008: 660). The formal schemes of organizations – their rules, hierarchies, guidelines, procedures, plans, and instructions – do not simply push and pull members into compliance, as if working as invisible background forces. Rather, they rely on the knowledge and reasoning of members regarding when, and how, they should apply. Bittner uses the term ‘gambit of compliance’ to describe the ways in which competent members find in the formal scheme the means for doing whatever needs to be done, connecting an infinite variety of actual circumstances to instances of ‘rule compliance', making rules do things that could never be predicted from their abstracted written form. As a result: … problems referred to the scheme for solution acquire through this reference a distinctive meaning that they should not otherwise have. Thus the formal organizational designs are schemes of interpretation that competent and entitled users can invoke in yet unknown ways whenever its suits their purposes. The varieties of ways in which the scheme can be invoked for information, direction, justification, and so on, without incurring the risk of sanction, constitute the scheme's methodical use. (Bittner, 1974: 76, emphasis in original). The point is not that organizational members ‘misbehave', and should be more strictly controlled to comply with formal instructions. The point is that this is precisely how organizing is possible. Literal, grammatical readings of rules would threaten to bring organizations to a halt without the competence of members in supplying their ‘rich and ambiguous body of background information’ (Bittner, 1974: 73). Those applying rules ‘literally’ could actually expect to be sanctioned for such behaviour. For Bittner and other ethnomethodologists, then, ‘the task of deciding the correspondence between schemas and actualities is one that should be transferred from the sociological theories back to the workplace participants who operate with those schematics’ (Sharrock, 2012: 22). As Gephart (1978: 558) argues, ‘members must work to define activities as falling within the organizational scheme. As members confront practical problems, they invoke the organization as a scheme furnishing solutions, but this scheme is reconstructed, modified and negotiated continuously to fit the practical problems at hand'. This continuous work of making sense of organizational schemes of various kinds – both formal prescriptions and informal ‘ways of doing things', both ‘macro’ aspects of broad institutional fields and ‘micro’ aspects of immediate work groups – means that they cannot be understood as stable ‘variables’ but must instead be understood as social and interpretative processes. Ethnomethodology emerged as a critique of the structural functionalist sociology of Parsons and Durkheim, in particular, the functionalist project to identify the social structures, facts, variables, and forces that are presumed to create social order. This critique applies equally to the so-called ‘macro’ social order of the ‘rules', ‘norms', and ‘values’ purported to emanate from institutions such as the state, the education system, or religion, which are understood to govern society writ-large, and the so-called ‘micro’ social order of crossing the road. Indeed, for ethnomethodology, this distinction between micro and macro is a misnomer (Hilbert, 1990), as all social action is endogenously generated, and the classification of ethnomethodology as a ‘micro’ approach has been strongly rejected (Garfinkel and Rawls, 2002). Thus, ethnomethodology does not ignore social structure or indeed organizational structure; rather it respecifies it as an ongoing accomplishment of Page 4 of 15

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members (Button, 1991) – what Boden (1994) refers to as ‘organization-in-action'. Ethnomethodology addresses the same ‘problem’ or ‘topic’ as sociology – namely, how social order and structure is generated or transformed – but ‘turns it on its head'. Rather than seeing people as ‘judgemental dopes’ or ‘dupes’ who are ‘pushed and pulled’ by social facts – such as a social rule, norm, or value – it views social order as the ongoing, artful, and knowledgeable accomplishment of members (Garfinkel, 1967). Members employ their ‘stock of knowledge’ and ‘reasoning procedures’ to produce the very ‘social facts’ that other theories treat as unproblematic. Order and organization is indeed how forms of business and management of various kinds get done, but this order is ‘an ongoing achievement of member's methods for producing it – rather than the result of structures, cultures, habits, routines, power, or interests, as other theories assume’ (Rawls, 2008: 709). Three important notes are necessary here. First, this emphasis on ‘knowledge-ability’ must not be confused with claiming that members are always conscious of these ethno-methods. In fact, a central project of ethnomethodology is to explicate, study, and document the typically taken-for-granted ethno-methods used by members. Samra-Fredericks and Bargiela-Chiappini (2008) use Garfinkel's phrase ‘seen-but-unnoticed’ to describe this taken-for-granted nature of commonsense reasoning. Rawls (2008: 711) describes it as the ‘normally thought-less’ character of ordinary activity: citing Garfinkel's infamous ‘breaching experiments’ as exercises designed to help us ‘see’ the constant mutual orientation that makes organization possible. These breaching experiments showed that taken-for-granted ‘facts’ are only topicalized when they become problematic in some way. The fact that it is ‘obvious’ and ‘just common sense’ to competent members of society that a particular pedestrian wants to cross the road – just as most organizational business seems common sense to organizational members – is precisely the point. Only when a pedestrian looks like they ‘obviously’ want to cross the road, but does not move when the car stops to let them cross, does this activity become problematic and therefore noticed. The point of studying what members take as ‘obvious’ – and more importantly how they produce that ‘obviousness’ – is that this common sense is what is constitutive of, and consequential for, the unfolding scenes of social action they are involved in, such as conducting a recruitment interview (Llewellyn, 2008) or a conversation about business strategy (Samra-Fredericks, 2003). Moreover, this emphasis on the ‘ongoing’ and ‘artful’ accomplishment of social organization does not mean that ‘anything goes': that any social action is viewed as sensible or that any account will be accepted or ratified by others. Quite the contrary, ethnomethodology is centrally concerned with the more or less institutionalized and unequal opportunities and rights of different social actors to produce accounts and have them accepted by others (Watson and Goulet, 1998). This takes us to our third and final point. Ethnomethodology is not concerned with just ‘talk', or even just ‘interpretation', understood as separated from so-called wider ‘material structures'. Material outcomes flow most certainly from the ethno-methods used in various institutional settings. Forms of unequal power, domination, inequality, and exploitation are also thus implicated. The ethno-methods used in institutions such as the education system and the judicial system are what produce the unequal outcomes according to gender, race, or class, as illustrated by studies of school classrooms (Leiter, 1976, Mehan, 1979), high school counsellors (Cicourel and Kitsuse, 1963), and the policing (Meehan, 1986) and prosecution (Cicourel, 1968) of juvenile offenders. Hence, ethnomethodology is not ‘silent’ on the ‘big issues’ of structural inequality in society, even though the commitment to so-called ‘ethnomethodological indifference’ means it deliberately does not ‘take sides’ and privilege or ratify certain versions over others (Gubrium and Holstein, 2012). Having explicated the ethnomethodological perspective on process, we will begin with a more detailed examination of a single ethnomethodological study of an ‘organization’ – Lawrence Wieder's study of a halfway house, in order to show how organization studies can engage with this programme of ‘re-specifying’ social facts as processes. After this, we will go on to examine the insights that have been generated from ethnomethodological studies of workplace settings, management, and economic exchanges more generally.

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Re-specifying Organizational Structure and Culture: The Study of ‘Facts in Flight' Lawrence Wieder's (1974) study of the ‘convict code’ in a halfway house has become renowned as a classic ethnomethodological study. It also provides an insightful illustration of how ethnomethodology can be applied to the study of formal organizational settings. Wieder's halfway house was certainly a formal ‘organization'. There was an official organizational goal – the rehabilitation of narcotic offenders who has recently been released from prison, who were sent to live in this ‘halfway house’ before being released into the community. There were formal rules and policies to be followed, such rules about visitors, a night-time curfew, and an official schedule of therapy and employment skills training for rehabilitation purposes. There was also a clear division of labour and distribution of roles between staff, and between staff and residents. Before starting his study, Wieder was well aware of the traditional sociological work that had been done on the so-called ‘counter-cultures’ that are presumed to govern communities of criminals and other such deviant groups. Typical explanations of deviant behaviour held that there exists a ‘moral code’ that deviants followed, with ‘rules’ or ‘maxims’ such as: • • • •

Do not ‘snitch’ (e.g., inform on the deviant behaviour of other convicts) Show your loyalty to other convicts (e.g., by providing cover stories or sharing your drugs) Do not trust officials (e.g., police, prison guards, social workers) Do not be a ‘kiss ass’ (e.g., be over-friendly with officials, by participating in their rehab programmes)

The traditional sociological explanation for the convict's behaviour goes as follows: these ‘rules’ of the code comprise deeply held norms and values that explain why convicts behave the way they do. This traditional type of analysis is based on the Durkheimian notion of rules, norms, and values as external ‘social facts’ which produce social order. Similar types of analysis can indeed be found in management and organization studies, with notions of organizational sub-cultures and in-group identification. Wieder's ethnomethodological analysis of the convict code can be contrasted with this traditional analysis. Wieder was interested in the continuous constitution of the ‘facts’ that made up the rules of the convict code. Rather than describe the ‘social facts’ that ethnographers encounter in the field, ethnomethodology involves describing the methods through which they come to be experienced as external and constraining ‘facts'. For Wieder, the idea that these ‘rules’ of the convict code determined the resident's conduct seemed to be fraught with problems. The first issue that Wieder encountered was that there was no final, complete, or fixed version of the code against which any individual action could be judged. When he entered the halfway house to start his fieldwork, he only ever heard it in an incomplete, piecemeal form – as snippets of conversation or phrases thrown into conversations. When residents were asked about the code by staff, or indeed by Wieder himself as a researcher, they were told that telling them the code was itself to breach the code. The second problem was that the word ‘code’ was rarely, if ever, used, so the researcher had no way of telling for sure when a particular action was code related. The third problem that Wieder noted was that while some ‘rules’ seemed fairly unambiguous and made predicting resident's behaviour quite easy – such as sharing your drugs and not ‘snitching’ (informing authority) on others for using drugs – others were not so straightforward. For example, did the rule ‘show your loyalty’ mean that residents should act in a hostile and disruptive manner during group meetings, or just appear distant and disinterested? Did it mean they should only comply with instructions from staff delivered in the form of authoritative ‘orders', or polite and gentle ‘suggestions'? Some behaviours were also difficult to ‘tie’ to a rule. How would convicts stealing from each other be ‘predicted’ from these rules? A fourth problem was that the behaviour Wieder observed in group meetings – such as residents slouching about in their chairs, gazing out of the window, and the regular use of foul language – could easily have been explained as motivated by the desire to gain admiration and respect from the other convicts by ‘acting cool', rather than gaining trust by following the maxim of ‘showing loyalty’ per se. Of course, all of these problems were not unique to academic researchers such as Wieder: members also experienced these same issues when learning ‘the code'. Page 6 of 15

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Wieder was interested in how staff used the code to make sense of residents’ behaviour. Staff used the code to collect together individual events into a familiar ‘pattern’ using the documentary method of interpretation, even though the specific behaviours themselves may not have been predicted. When residents were late for meetings, ridiculed staff in front of others, and played staff off against each other for personal gain, these were all made sense of using the ‘pattern’ of ‘not being a kiss ass’ and ‘showing loyalty to other convicts'. In a particular episode where a resident set fire to the mattress on his bed, staff interpreted this as an attack on staff (the chosen ‘pattern'), discounting other interpretations such as an accident, or covering his own illegal activities or those of others (alternative ‘patterns'). When residents were rude or uncooperative, the code provided a ‘trans-situational explanation’ for this behaviour. By explaining it as rule-bound and role-governed behaviour, what ‘any resident would do in the circumstances given the maxims they have to live by', they avoided a situation-specific interpretation, such as ‘he does not like me’ or ‘he is getting me back for what I did before'. Crucially, the code was not a fixed set of maxims that specified their situations of relevance, but rather had an ‘open, flexible structure’ which ‘gives it the capacity to explain a very wide range of events’ (Wieder, 1974: 157). The code could therefore never fulfil the requirements of a precise, objective ‘science’ of measurement, causation, and prediction. Instead of ‘predicting’ behaviour, the [code] is actually employed as an interpretive device. It is employed by an observer to render any behaviour he encounters intelligible, i.e. as coherent in terms of patterned motivation. (Wieder, 1974: 168) The code was not only used retrospectively, to make sense of things that had already happened. It was also used prospectively as well. One of the residents, Pablo, asked to be released early on the grounds that he was suspected by a fellow convict who was about to join the halfway house of being a ‘snitch’ and therefore his life was in danger (retribution for ‘snitches’ was typically violent). Residents who gave other reasons for requests for early release, such as having secured employment far away or claims of being racially harassed, were not granted their request. But Pablo was. The code was used as a reasoning procedure to anticipate future events that had not even happened yet. Similarly, official policies, such as policies on curfews and compulsory attendance at therapeutic meetings, were abandoned on the grounds that they would be ‘unrealistic’ because of the normative constraints of the code anticipated that residents would not comply. Deviance from official organizational policies and orders was made ‘reasonable', therefore, through the reasoning procedures provided by the code. Wieder's study neatly demonstrates the use of the ‘informal organization’ (i.e., the code) as a scheme of interpretation for making sense of why aspects of the ‘formal organization’ (i.e., official policies) should not be implemented. The study also illustrates the consequential nature of ‘telling the code'. Material consequences arose from its use. Certain residents were released (such as Pablo), while others were not. Certain policies were implemented and others were abandoned, as a result of the code being employed as a scheme of interpretation. Wieder also turned the analytic gaze on himself, examining how he started to piece together disparate events as he developed his understanding of the code. Early in his study, Wieder observed one group meeting where a resident had suggested that a baseball team should be formed. A staff member – the programme director – agreed this was a good idea and asked him if he could organize this team. The resident replied: You know I can't organize the baseball team. The programme director simply nodded, and the issue was never raised again. Wieder used his emergent understanding of ‘the code’ to make sense of this as ‘you know the code forbids me to be a “kiss ass” and to help staff and their program, so I cannot do this'. (Let's call this ‘Pattern 1'). Wieder realized that without his embryonic understanding of the code, which acted as ‘an interpretive device for translating utterances into maxims of a moral order’ (Wieder, 1974: 161), this utterance would either have Page 7 of 15

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been meaningless to him, or meaningful in terms of another pattern. For example, he could have explained the remark as reference to the existing commitments of that particular resident, perhaps being overloaded with work after having already volunteered for other activities (let us call this ‘Pattern 2'). Or it could have been taken as a reference to a particular ‘grudge’ this resident has against this member of staff (let us call this ‘Pattern 3'). And so on. It was not so much that Wieder heard the utterance, and then tried to find a sense of its meaning by finding a ‘pattern'. Rather, the ‘sense’ of this as being an instance of ‘telling the code’ was created through the use of the code as a scheme of interpretation (what we have called Pattern 1). Other schemes of interpretation produce an ‘instance’ of something very different indeed: a ‘busy and overcommitted person’ (Pattern 2), or an ‘angry person in search of retribution’ (Pattern 3). Elements of the context were also used by Wieder to develop this ‘scheme of interpretation'. His common-sense stock of knowledge of their social roles were crucial to his chosen scheme. Had this exchange been between a staff member and another staff member, the event would have certainly not been heard as code related. Instead, patterns such as workload or work allocation would invariably have been used instead. The setting was also crucial to Wieder's use of the documentary method. In a less formal and more ‘private’ setting, such a conversation between resident and staff in the kitchen rather than group meeting, the utterance would have presumably been interpreted as motivated by something altogether different, such as a lack of knowledge or interest in that particular sport. Wieder concluded that this so-called ‘counter-culture’ referred to by term ‘convict code’ is not a stable and external set of facts and forces that somehow caused the residents to behave in a particular way. It was not a ‘property’ or ‘attribute’ of the social group. Rather, the convict code was actually an interactional and interpretative process: a scheme of interpretation that enabled staff, residents, and observers such as Wieder to ‘organize particular behaviours into coherent, classifiable types of behaviour’ (Wieder, 1974: 166). What Wieder's study shows is that knowledge of the code enabled members to undertake the interpretive work of transforming each and every behaviour and utterance they encountered into the ‘application of a rule', namely, the rules of the convict code. The organization of this institution – a halfway house for rehabilitating narcotics offenders back into society after release from prison – was achieved through this sense-making process. Importantly, this process was never complete: each and every new experience had to be made sense of using this (or indeed other) scheme. Wieder therefore concluded that … it is much more appropriate to think of the code as a continuous, ongoing process, rather than a set of stable elements of culture which endures through time. (Wieder, 1974: 161, emphasis added). The norms and rules of the convict code did not cause members to comply, as if pushing and pulling them in particular directions. In the same way, the formal or informal ‘rules’ of business settings – such as organizational structure charts, job descriptions, strategy statements, codes of conduct, manuals, guidelines, and so on – do not determine what people do at work (Bittner, 1974). The code could not be used to explain or predict the behaviour of organizational members in the way a positivistic science might demand. Rather, the existence of this social order was created by the ‘methods of giving and receiving embedded instructions for seeing and describing a social order’ (Wieder, 1974: 172).

Ethnomethodological Insights into Organizations ‘in Process' For researchers studying ‘organizations’ of various kinds, ethnomethodology invites us to look for very different things compared to conventional, positivistic styles of research. Ethnomethodological studies of organization do not seek to measure ‘variables’ relating to the organization or its members. Even the term ‘organization’ itself is viewed as an unhelpful abstraction (Rawls, 2008). An ethnomethodological analysis would examine how that ‘organization’ relies upon the ‘constant attention and competent use of shared methods of organizing action for its achievement’ (Rawls, 2008: 702). This would involve close observation of people going about their everyday work, perhaps with the aid of some kind of recording technology that would enable Page 8 of 15

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these organizing processes to be slowed down and subject to repeated analysis (Llewellyn and Hindmarsh, 2010). Fortunately, the field has many exemplars to guide us because ethnomethodology has, since its inception, been centrally concerned with work and organizational settings. Classic early studies examined the work of coroners tasked with deciding the cause of death when presented with a dead body (Garfinkel, 1967), police officers dealing with crimes (Sudnow, 1965; Meehan, 1986), case workers in a welfare agency (Zimmerman, 1974), and scientists at work in a laboratory (Lynch, 1993). Interestingly, almost all of the early studies were in formal ‘organizations’ of some sort, with some kind of ‘business’ to conduct and formal structures, regulations, and rules concerning how they should operate. More recent ethnomethodological studies of work in organizational settings have produced a number of insights into the processes of organizing. In what follows, we will give a brief overview of some of the significant recent studies on management, work, and organization organized around a number of key themes, namely: technologically mediated interaction, working with texts and documents, organizational decision making in interaction, and markets and marketing. Uniting all these studies is the close attention to the details of how activity unfolds sequentially, informed by deep immersion in the field site(s) that will enable ‘an embodied experience of the work in question’ (Rawls, 2008: 711) and often accompanied by audio and/or video recording that enables activity to be later ‘slowed down’ and ‘repeated’ during the analysis process.

Technology at Work One of the most fruitful lines of enquiry within ethnomethodology has been the study of technologically mediated workplace interaction. The collection of studies in the book edited by Garfinkel (1986) entitled Ethnomethodological Studies of Work began to unpack the locally produced orders of work that existing studies of work all relied upon but ignored. Under the rubric of so-called ‘Workplace Studies', research has revealed the methods that organizational members use to make coordinated action possible by interacting with other people, spaces, artefacts, and machines of various kinds. Interestingly, almost all of the most influential Workplace Studies involved technological artefacts of some kind, and work in this field often focused on ‘computer supported cooperative work'. Suchman's (1987) work on human–machine interaction challenged the dominant thesis that plans – or for that matter any formal system of instructions or rules – are what guides conduct, using the example of an expert system designed for a photocopiers. Julian Orr (1996) also draws ethnomethodological inspiration in his study of photocopier repair technicians, showing the inadequacy of even the best instruction manual given the tacit knowledge required to ‘read’ the machines. Button and Sharrock's (1998) study of a large-scale technology project in a multinational company shows how members of the project team designed their actions to be organizationally accountable. Button and Sharrock (1998: 74) point out how essential this process is for the organization of work: The design of social actions so that others can make sense of them is an indispensable feature of social action, for unless it is possible for people to recognise ‘ordinary social facts', they would not be capable of mutually adjusting their conduct with respect to one another in commonplace settings. In other words, if people did not produce actions that others could ‘recognize', concerted action would break down because nobody would know what just happened and, inter alia, what they should do next. If it would be hard to imagine an ordinary conversation between two people functioning smoothly in such circumstances, imagine what would happen to the functioning of a complex organization such as a global corporation. After her classic early study of interactions with photocopiers, Suchman (1993) went on to explicate the use of various digital displays and controls in air-traffic control centres to accomplish the organization of flight paths. Christian Heath, Jon Hindmarsh, and Paul Luff take up a similar project in their study of the use of information systems in a variety of organizational settings, most notably the work of London Underground control rooms Page 9 of 15

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(Heath and Luff, 2000) and train drivers (Heath, Hindmarsh and Luff, 1999). More recently, Neyland (2006) explored how CCTV operators make decisions about what the images on screens mean and what actions should be taken based on their reasoning about the motive, intent, and moral standing of different categories of person. One inference made about ‘kids standing still', for instance, was that some ‘trouble’ was under way that required further investigation and perhaps even a visit by the police. Underlying all these studies is the assumption that technologies are not a ‘variable', to be considered as one of the inputs into a causal model of explanation. Rather, they are integral to the sense-making processes that make organized conduct possible. This work has also found many practical applications, particularly in the design of human–computer interfaces and information systems (Luff, Hindmarsh, and Heath, 2000).

Texts at Work Another central and recurring concern for ethnomethodological studies of the workplace has been texts, graphs, and documents of various kinds. Again, these texts are viewed as part of organizing processes, not fixed as static objects that ‘contain’ their meaning and remain invariant over time, serving to simply record things or give instructions. One of Garfinkel's studies was of clinical records in an outpatient psychiatric clinic (Garfinkel, 1967: Ch. 6). To outsiders, such as Garfinkel and his research students trying to extract ‘useful’ information from them, these records looked pretty ‘bad'. A lot of information was missing, incomplete, or hard to infer from what was written in them. Garfinkel argues that there were some very ‘good’ reasons for these apparently ‘bad’ records. Not only were there costs associated with collecting information (i.e., staff time), and not only was paperwork typically seen as a less valuable use of time than their medical work, the information was also being collected for future but unknown purposes, including purposes of supervision and review by management. Moreover, future ‘readings’ could – and indeed do – vary in the way in which they infer the meaning of the record. Understanding the meaning and import they have for the clinicians rested on understanding the practices through which their authors created them for certain intended future readers, namely, other clinicians in the course of therapeutic treatment for the patients. The records may have been ‘bad’ from the perspective of a bureaucratic record of events, but were certainly ‘good enough’ from the perspective of clinicians. They used their stock of knowledge about the typical work of the clinic as an ‘ordering scheme', piecing together the fragments into a version of past events using the documentary method of interpretation. As Zimmerman (1974) puts it, from his study of document use by welfare claim assessors, the accomplishment of organizational tasks ‘is dependent on the document user's sense of an ordered world of organizations, and an ordered world of the society-at-large. … Indeed, such routine recognition, and the action and inference proceeding from it, is the mark of a competent worker’ (p. 143). Organizing occurs through the production of ‘accounts’ of various kinds, whether these are oral or written, linguistic or numerical, verbal or nonverbal. Accounts do not describe ‘the facts of the matter', they produce them. Documents of various kinds, such as strategy texts, management accounts, or financial reports, therefore require study within the interactions through which they are made to make sense (Watson, 2009). For example, recent work in Rouncefield and Tolmie's (2011) book Ethnomethodology at Work considers how people in organizational settings produce numbers that transform the organization into a ‘calculable’ entity (Hughes, 2011), how activities are rendered intelligible in relation to formal plans (Randall and Rouncefield, 2011), how meetings are organized around documents and artefacts such as agendas, projectors, and spreadsheets (Hughes et al., 2011), how documents – both paper based and digital – are used for mundane coordination and decision making (Hartswood et al., 2011), and how various texts are ‘read’ and made sense of in situ (Rooksby, 2011). Heath and Luff (1996) show how medical records are more than just a list of medical facts and records of interactions. Records did not simply transport facts between health professionals, but relied upon the background reasoning shared by doctors to make inferences about the ‘facts’ concerning the patient. Documents of various kinds are also important in the collection of studies in Llewellyn and Hindmarsh's (2010) recent book Organization, Interaction and Practice. Samra-Fredericks (2010) shows how Page 10 of 15

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strategic plans are put to work in business meetings and Moore, Whalen, and Hankinson Gathman (2010) examine how apparently simple order forms enable the coordination of dispersed organizational activities.

Leadership and Decision Making at Work Leadership and decision making in workplace interaction is another central focus of ethnomethodological studies of organizational settings. Gephart (1978) examined how a sense of ‘crisis’ was constructed during a committee meeting that enabled the ‘status degradation’ of a current leader and succession to a new leader to be accomplished. Housley (2003) examined how critical decisions about social care and welfare are made when ‘expertise’ from different professionals is brought together in multidisciplinary teams. Work by SamraFredericks on strategic decision making and leadership has shown how boardroom influence is accomplished (Samra-Fredericks, 2000), how managers attempt to shape strategic direction (Samra-Fredericks, 2003), how emotions and rationality are intertwined in leadership talk (Samra-Fredericks, 2004), and how power effects are constituted through everyday interaction (Samra-Fredericks, 2005). Iszatt-White (2010, 2011) also contributes insights into leadership-in-action, revealing ‘the nature and accomplishment of strategic leadership work as an ongoing, processual activity’ (Iszatt-White, 2010: 409). Insights into HRM practices have also been generated in recent years through the use of ethnomethodology. Bolander and Sandberg (2013) draw on ethnomethodology to examine the reasoning procedures used to make recruitment decisions following job interviews. Also looking at the recruitment process but this time the job interview itself, Llewellyn (2010) and Llewellyn and Spence (2009) examine how both the interviewer and interviewee mutually oriented to, and thereby produced, their talk ask a ‘recruitment interview'. Interview questions were transformed by candidates into opportunities to ‘sell’ their achievements rather than inquiries into matters of fact, and interviewee answers were evaluated according to reasoning about the distinction between merit, achievement, and skill versus luck, privilege, and chance. Both interviewer and interviewee used their knowledge of the typical purposes, presuppositions, and identities of ‘job interviews’ to make sense of each other's utterances.

Markets and Marketing at Work Finally, an important trend in recent work has been studying market transactions of various kinds. Here, the material consequences of member's ethno-methods for coordinating action is often most visible, by tracing the consequences of interactions for the exchange of money for goods or services. Ethnomethodological studies have sought to uncover the interactional practices through which markets are constituted via the display, recognition, evaluation, comparison, valuation, and purchase of goods and services. Clark and Pinch (2010) show how shoppers in a retail store attempted to elicit, or evade, the attention of salespeople, even before a conversation had begun – exchanges that were a necessary precondition for a sale to take place. Heath and Luff (2010) demonstrate how deceptively simple actions, such as the nod of a head, are produced and recognized to accomplish the order of bidding in a fine art and antiques auction. Llewellyn (2011) examines how a ‘gift exchange’ is established when people offer to ‘pick up the bill’ for another person, such as a friend or family member. ‘Big’ economic categories such as the distinction between market exchange and gift exchange can be shown to be managed delicately by members themselves, sometimes in a matter of seconds as a market exchange is transformed into a gift exchange through the use of speech, gesture, and bodily position (Llewellyn, 2011a). Llewellyn and Hindmarsh (2013) coin the term ‘inferential labour’ to describe the importance of the taken-for-granted but essential work that service workers undertake in ‘sorting’ their customers of various kinds according to establish relevant ‘facts’ about them, such as their age or employment status. This emerging body of ethnomethodological work on economic exchange shows great potential for recovering the activities that are ‘glossed’ in disciplines such as marketing, finance, and economics.

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Conclusion Ethnomethodology offers a way of studying ‘the flow of “real-time” or “live” conduct within organizations’ (Llewellyn and Hindmarsh, 2010), which sets it apart from other perspectives in organization studies. Where other perspectives take the accomplishment of concerted action for granted, or merely provide a brief second-order description of this work in order to get on with the business of ‘analysis', ethnomethodology turns its analytic attention to this very fundamental activity that makes organization possible. As Llewellyn and Hindmarsh (2010: 4) argue: ‘It is only possible to witness, as seemingly objective and concrete phenomena, a business presentation, a recruitment interview or an action because they are continually being built and reproduced that way by members.' In line with other forms of process thinking, ethnomethodology rejects the ‘object-like’ characterization of organizations as a static noun. The term ‘organization’ is viewed at best as an abstraction, or at worst an attempt to gloss over activities in service of producing a ‘refined and purified’ and therefore ‘corrupt and incomplete’ (Bittner, 1974: 74) version of members’ methods for producing organization. Instead, ethnomethodology turns attention to the common-sense reasoning that makes ‘organization’ happen over and over again in a ceaseless process: often in repetitive ways, but sometimes in novel ways. Ethnomethodology, then, contributes to process theory by directing us to study the ongoing sense-making processes that produce social organization. As Leiter (1980: 21) puts it: ‘social reality is the set of activities and interpretive processes of experiencing and depicting the social as factual.' In recent years, following calls to ‘bring work back in’ to management and organization studies (Barley and Kunda, 2001), there has been a proliferation of studies which have sought to examine the work that underlies the reproduction of organizations and institutions (Lawrence, Suddaby and Leca, 2011; Phillips and Lawrence, 2012; Lok and de Rond, 2013; Lawrence, Zilber and Leca, 2013). What this ‘turn to work’ has achieved is significant, particularly for process thinking, because it has moved beyond viewing organizations – and entire social institutions – as stable objects of analysis and turned attention instead to the social processes that continually renew, and occasionally re-create, them. However, what this work misses, and what ethnomethodology offers, is ‘how we come to “see” intelligible things in the first place – how we mutually constitute the “objects” and “things” that inhabit social situations’ (Rawls, 2008: 707): processes that are not captured by abstractions that ‘gloss’ over the actual accomplishment of social organization through labels such as ‘agency', ‘routines', ‘habits', ‘coupling', ‘embeddedness', ‘entrepreneurship', or ‘logics'. Following Garfinkel and Rawls (2002), if we look at organizations and see that they manifest some kind of stability over time, some kind of ‘patterned orderliness’ to use their term, then we must therefore assume that, first, this is something that people must work constantly to achieve and secondly, that they therefore must have some shared methods for achieving this patterned orderliness. In other words, while other approaches to organization studies start with ‘facts’ such as ‘an organization’ and its ‘attributes’ as an input or output variable in their theorizing, ethnomethodology is the study of the activities through which these ‘facts’ are produced. The point is not to judge whether these facts are right or wrong: to prove or disprove their ‘factual’ status. Nor is it to replace them with the analyst's own version of what the facts really are. Rather, the point is to study the activities (‘methods') that are used to make them ‘fact-like'. This project could be taken up in future research through studies of organizing in a range of contexts, from apparently simple acts of organizing such as everyday workplace conversations to more complex and distributed forms of global business operations and market exchange.

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strategic direction', Journal of Management Studies 40(1): 141–174. Samra-Fredericks, D. (2004) ‘Managerial elites making rhetorical/linguistic “moves” for a moving (emotional) display', Human Relations 57(9): 1103–1143. Samra-Fredericks, D. (2005) ‘Strategic practice, “Discourse” and the everyday constitution of “Power Effects”', Organisation 12(6): 803–841. Samra-Fredericks, D. (2010) ‘Ethnomethodology and the moral accountability of interaction: Navigating the conceptual terrain of ‘face’ and face-work', Journal of Pragmatics 42(8): 2147–2157. Samra-Fredericks, D. and Bargiela-Chiappini, F. (2008) ‘Introduction to the symposium on the foundations of organizing: The contribution from Garfinkel, Goffman and Sacks', Organization Studies 29(5): 653–675. Schutz, A. (1953) ‘Common-sense and scientific interpretation in human action', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 14(11): 1–38. Sharrock, W. (2012) ‘The project as an organisational environment for the division of labour', in M. Rouncefield and P. Tolmie (Eds.), Ethnomethodology at Work. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, pp. 19–36. Suchman, L. (1987) Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Suchman, L. (1993) ‘Technologies of accountability: Of lizards and aeroplanes', in G. Button (Ed.), Technology in Working Order: Studies of Work, Interaction and Technology. London: Routledge, pp. 113–126. Sudnow, D. (1965) ‘Normal crimes: Sociological features of the penal code in a public defender office', Social Problems 12(3): 255–276. ten Have, P. (2004) Understanding Qualitative Research and Ethnomethodology. London: Sage. Watson, R. (2009) Analysing Practical and Professional Texts. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Watson, G. and Goulet, J. (1998) ‘What can ethnomethodology say about power?', Qualitative Inquiry 4(1): 96–113. Wieder, D. L. (1974) ‘Telling the code', in R. Turner (Ed.), Ethnomethodology: Selected Readings. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, pp. 144–172. Zimmerman, D. H. (1974) ‘Fact as a practical accomplishment', in R. Turner (Ed.), Ethnomethodology: Selected Readings. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, pp. 128–143. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n11

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Discourse Theory

Contributors: Loizos Heracleous Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Discourse Theory" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n12 Print pages: 190-203 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Discourse Theory Loizos Heracleous

Introduction The title ‘discourse theory’ implies a unified body of concepts that together make up this theory. Nothing could be further from this state of affairs (and perhaps rightly so). A more representative term would be ‘discourse theories,’ paying heed to the multiplicity of theoretical antecedents to the field (Heracleous, 2006; Phillips & Oswick, 2012). The concept of organizational discourse refers to collections of texts patterned by deeper structures or common features that cut across particular texts (Heracleous & Hendry, 2000). Language is the raw material of texts, collections of which make up discourses (Heracleous, 2006). Despite the multiplicity of antecedents, and bearing in mind some exceptions (such as Wittgenstein's early views about correspondence theories of language expressed in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and some branches of linguistics), most discourse theories inspired by the philosophy of language and social theory are interpretivist and social constructionist in nature; with the attendant ambitions to be processual and context sensitive. In this chapter, these ambitions are exemplified by discussion of semiotics, conversation analysis, speech act theory, critical discourse analysis, the structurational perspective, and rhetorical analysis. In each case, I outline the analytical foci of the approach, point to relevant sources and empirical studies, and discuss the processual orientations attendant to each approach. I selected these discursive approaches because each one of them, at its inception and subsequent impact, represented fundamental developments in social theory or philosophy; and has informed or in some cases shaped aspects of the organizational discourse field. By the term process in this chapter, I adopt van de Ven's (1992: 169) third view of process as ‘a sequence of events that describes how things change over time.’ Van de Ven's (1992) other two definitions refer to process as a causal relationship between input and output variables in a variance theory, or certain concepts operationalized as variables and measured on numerical scales. Hutzschenreuter and Kleindienst's (2006) review of strategy process research focuses on studies adopting the latter definitions. Variance- and construct-related definitions of process would likely not be accepted as processual by most organizational discourse theorists, and particularly by advocates of processualism in strategy and organization theory (e.g., Langley, 2007; Pettigrew, 1997; Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). A process perspective operates at different levels simultaneously. Micro-process in narrowly defined settings (such as conversation analytic studies, e.g., Samra-Fredericks, 2003), meso-level processes such as organizational change (Ford & Ford, 1995), or societal-level change and its links with language change (e.g., Fairclough, 1992). Studies can be carried out longitudinally as comparative cases, for example, in real time combined with historical exploration, or purely historically. Pettigrew (1997) notes that guiding assumptions of processual studies include the embeddedness of actions in context, over time and at multiple levels of analysis; holistic rather than linear explanations; and an effort to link processes and outcomes. Several empirical studies of organizational discourse discussed in this chapter would conform with these criteria. We can discern at least two interrelated types of process considerations in relation to discourse theory; first, what we can call ontological process considerations, that is, viewing discourse as an embedded, ongoing, constitutive processual element in the construction of social reality. This is apparent, for example, in Giddens’ (1984) structuration theory, in Saussure's (1983) structural linguistics, and in the various antecedents of critical discourse analysis (e.g., Fairclough, 1992, 2005). Secondly, and flowing from the above, what we can call epistemolological process considerations. This refers to how we analytically and methodologically make sense of the role of discourse in relation to its social effects, for example, Fairclough's tripartite framework of the mutually constitutive interrelations among texts, discourses, and social practices (Fairclough, 1992, Page 2 of 15

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2005), where the parts should be understood as mutually constitutive over time. Studies tracking argumentsin-use over time, and discerning links between changes in arguments, and institutionalization processes or particular organizational changes (e.g., Green, Li & Nohria, 2009; Heracleous & Barrett, 2001) also exemplify this epistemological orientation. Organizational discourse studies draw from social constructionist ontologies, which hold that what may appear as reified, stable social reality is, in fact, the result of ongoing processes of social construction, patterned by discourses and other ongoing and recursive social practices (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). The social construction process is characterized by social interaction, strategic employment of language and texts, and power dynamics within broader organizational and institutional contexts (Phillips, Lawrence & Hardy, 2004). The processes involved are complex and engage the modalities of interpretive schemes, norms, as well as resources or facilities, as Giddens’ (1984) structuration theory outlines. Organizational discourse studies assume that social and organizational reality is a work in progress that can best be understood in a process of becoming rather than as a given. Views of organizations as discursive have accompanied the attention to process. Fairhurst and Putnam (2005) discern three ways in which the interrelationship between discourse and organization has been seen: organizations as already formed objects with discursive elements, organizations in a state of becoming with discourse as constitutive, and organizations as grounded in discursive action. The latter two views are inherently processual in terms of both ontology and methodology. In what follows, I explore various discourse theories, their analytical foci, and their processual orientations. I begin with semiotics as a foundational perspective that can reveal key assumptions about the processual embeddedness of meaning that apply to all the other approaches discussed in this chapter.

Signs, Symbols, and the Embeddedness of Meaning The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1983) viewed language as a system of signs where there is an arbitrary link between the signifier (the word) and the signified (the meaning). Rather than a single meaning being linked to a single word, the meaning arises from the differences between interconnecting signifiers. With shifting differences come different meanings. At a foundational level, Bateson's (1987) analysis of play shows that particular moves and sounds in simulated, playful combat between animals are interpreted as play rather than as real combat because meta-communicative messages signaling ‘this is play’ provide a frame within which other signs are interpreted. Therefore, different frames (the presence of which is itself communicated by signs) lead to different interpretations of the same sign or set of signs. If the frame shifts, the associated meanings shift. Further, even within the same frame, the linguistic context of a particular utterance shapes its meaning. For example, if during a conversation one of the conversants, A, says, ‘it's getting hot in here,’ it could be interpreted as a literal statement of the temperature of the room; as a statement that conversant B is taking the discussion to areas that are perceived as contentious, emotional, or interrogative; a warning to bring back the discussion to more agreeable terms; or a warning that conversant A is about to leave. In terms of speech act theory, the locutionary statement ‘it's getting hot in here’ uttered by conversant A has a certain intention (illocutionary force) that may produce differential effects for conversant B (perlocutionary force) depending on how conversant B interprets the statement. Conversant B's interpretation (the meaning arising from the utterance) is in turn dependent on the linguistic, situational, organizational, and even broader contexts; on the topic of conversation; and on such issues as racial, gender, occupational, or national identities as relevant to the situation. Therefore, Saussure conceived of a fundamental process, relational orientation in terms of how meanings emerge and may change over time. At the level of method, Saussure distinguished between synchronic and Page 3 of 15

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diachronic linguistics, or studies of language at a certain point in time versus studies of language change over time, with an explicit processual concern. Further, while over time signs can remain the same, the meanings associated with them (their symbolic, connotative elements) may shift. For example, the swastika, currently widely derided and reviled as a Nazi symbol, has its roots in antiquity as an auspicious symbol found in a number of cultures around the world: As Heller (2008) writes: Today, simply uttering the word ‘swastika’ evokes revulsion, indeed terror, in many. Yet by all accounts, throughout most of its long history, the swastika, the Zelig of all symbols, was comparatively benign. Prior to its transfiguration, it served as religious phylactery, occult talisman, scientific symbol, guild emblem, meteorological implement, commercial trademark, architectural ornament, printing fleuron, and military insignia (p. 4) … Its roots dig into deep regions of prehistory and emerge in antiquity. In 1874, Dr. Heinrich Schliemann discovered swastika decorations during his archeological excavations of Homer's Troy. He later traced similar iterations to, among other realms, Mycenae, Babylonia, Tibet, Greece, Ashanti on the Gold Coast of Africa, Gaza, Lapland, Paraguay, and Asia Minor. It was discovered painted or etched into Etruscan pottery, Cyprian vases, and Corinthian coins (pp. 6–7). From a synchronic perspective, at a certain point in time the swastika appears to agents to have a particular meaning, that is, to possess an apparently stable link between the signifier and the signified. From a diachronic, process perspective, however, the signifier/signified link is ever-changing and contingent, even with contradictory meanings across its different iterations over time, depending on context and the strategic employment of this sign by particular agents pursuing particular goals. Signs can also incrementally change diachronically, with stability in the type of intended meaning (combined with incremental change in the precise meaning). For example, the mearkaoalli system of earmarks in the reindeer herding culture of the Saami in Lapland has been employed for centuries as a way to identify ownership of reindeers. Reindeers are crucial for survival in Lapland and other locations with similar climate. Without denying their nature as live creatures, they are also ‘facilities,’ to use Giddens’ (1984) language, resources, the control of which is linked to the power of individuals, families, and tribes. There are major ear cuts, denoting particular families and lines of inheritance, combined with more minor cuts denoting ownership by particular individuals. As individuals marry and herds combine, the cuts change accordingly (Pennanen, 2006). Even though the pattern of cuts is different, the class of meaning is the same; it denotes ownership, and is linked to the identity of both the family and the community the overall pattern is related to. Figure 12.1 below shows a traditional community record of these marks and the individuals and families associated with them.

Figure 12.1Record of meomerkalli reindeer earmarks in the Sami culture Source: Siida Sami Museum, Inari, Lapland. Photo by L Heracleous.

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In this example, we can see each earmark pattern as a text, with the individual large and small marks as signifiers that make up the text. Each signifier is meaningless without reference to the surrounding ones, and the text itself is meaningless without reference to the inter-subjective beliefs of the community. Without these beliefs, these patterns would just be random cuts on reindeer ears rather than symbols of ownership and identity. This example shows that meaning is socially attributed, rather than inherent to the signifiers. Further, these signifiers are parts of a broader discourse that revolves around the survival needs and functioning of the Sami community. The local language has evolved accordingly. Reindeer herders employ additional features to identify individual reindeer, such as ‘gender, age, body shape, hair colour, shape of antlers, lack of antlers and character’ (Nakkalajarvi, 2009: 140). The Kanunokeino dialect of North Saami has over a thousand terms to describe reindeer (Eira, 1984: 59). A semiotic perspective (among others) shows that meaning is contextually contingent rather than universally and longitudinally linked to particular signifiers. Further, and in particular from a process perspective, contexts (semantic, situational, organizational, social) shift over time, and so do the meanings accruing to particular signifiers. With respect to linguistic labels, the denotative meaning can acquire several different connotations. By denotative meaning, we refer to the conventional dictionary meaning of a term, what Bateson (1987: 184) calls a sign. By connotative meaning, we refer to the associated meanings that arise depending on context, conventions, and interpretation, when a sign becomes a signal. As Bateson (1987: 183–184) notes, ‘human verbal communication can operate and always does operate at many contrasting levels of abstraction. These range in two directions from the seemingly denotative level (“The cat is on the mat”). One range or set of these more abstract levels includes those explicit or implicit messages where the subject of discourse is the language. We will call these metalinguistic … The other set of levels of abstraction we will call metacommunicative … In these, the subject of discourse is the relationship between the speakers … the vast majority of both metalinguistic and metacommunicative messages remain implicit.' Page 5 of 15

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The swastika is an apt example of the process of how connotative meaning (the signal) may change over time, whereas the denotation (the sign) is the same. The swastika has meant different things (has become a symbol of something else) at various historical periods. Its current meaning is so emotionally charged that even displaying or re-creating this symbol in public can provoke disorder and the intervention of the state apparatus (the news regularly reports arrests of individuals who have dared to display or create this symbol in public). It is clear that signs and symbols are not merely a matter of cognition, but often involve intense emotional associations, which are again not inherent in the signifier but are attributed by broader systems of meaning and the agents operating within these systems.

Discourse Theories and Processual Orientations Below I discuss five discursive approaches: conversation analysis, speech act theory, critical discourse analysis, the structurational perspective, and rhetorical analysis. Table 12.1 outlines this discussion.

Table 12.1Discourse approaches, analytical focus, and processual orientation

Conversation Analysis Page 6 of 15

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Conversation analysis (CA) has its roots in ethnomethodology, viewing social life as an ongoing accomplishment rather as a taken-for-granted fixture. It is ‘a generic approach to the analysis of social interaction that was first developed in the study or ordinary conversation but which has since been applied to a wide spectrum of other forms of “talk-in-interaction”’ (Goodwin & Heritage, 1990: 284). The focus of CA is conversational turn-taking and other observed features such as pauses and repair mechanisms; and seeks to discover empirically the implicit rules of interaction, treating conversation as a ‘speech exchange system’ (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974: 696). Sacks et al. (1974: 699) maintained that such an analysis had ‘important twin features of being context free and capable of extreme context-sensitivity'; in other words, that the principles identified would hold in general terms in different contexts; but that they would also manifest in context-specific ways. In this sense, actions are both ‘context shaped’ as well as ‘context renewing,’ since their production and interpretation arise from particular frames, and they in turn become context for subsequent actions (Goodwin & Heritage, 1990: 289). This view of context is a very specific one, and while useful and appropriately circumscribed for the purposes of CA, would be seen as limited when compared with the broader contextual concerns of other approaches such as rhetoric or critical discourse analysis. Empirical studies have brought CA more explicitly into organization studies and sociology by showing, for example, how intentional control of conversations can have contextual relevance in terms of accomplishing particular agendas, such as Molotch & Boden's (1985) studies of transcripts of the Watergate hearings. Others such as Tulin (1997) and Samra-Fredericks (2003) have endeavored to show how talk-in-interaction can empirically illustrate the links between micro processes (the talk) and macro processes (the actualization of structures), seeking to illustrate central claims of structuration theory (Tulin, 1997). Samra-Frederick's (2003) research shows how strategizing is accomplished via strategists’ rhetorical and relational skills exhibited in routine conversation. The processual orientation of CA operates at the micro-level of interaction, and more particularly interactional talk. Where video data is available, features such as gaze, gestures, and spatial positioning are taken into account (Tulin, 1997). Claims that CA can shed light on macro-level processes however, are as yet debatable.

Speech Act Theory Speech act theory was developed by Austin (1961, 1962) and elaborated by Searle (1969). It draws on earlier insights by Wittgenstein (1986 [1953]), in particular the notion of ‘language games.’ Wittgenstein (1986 [1953]) noted that his earlier correspondence view of language advanced in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (that words have particular, invariant meanings that have a one-to-one correspondence to particular things they refer to) included ‘grave mistakes’ (1986: viii). He argued in Philosophical Investigations that words acquire their meanings in use, in the context of language games that interweave language and actions; these language games are interrelated in terms of ‘family resemblances': ‘I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes use of the same word for all, – but that they are related to one another in many different ways. And it is because of this relationship, or these relationships, that we call them all “language” … I can think of no better way to characterize these similarities than “family resemblances”’ (1986: 31–32, emphasis in original). Austin (1961) took issue with the prevalent approach of the philosophy of language that was concerned with utterances or ¸statements and their truth or falsity in describing a situation. He argued that language has other uses, one of which is to accomplish things rather than just to describe. These utterances may look like statements, and truth or falsity may be relevant, but is not their main intent: ‘… if a person makes an utterance of this sort we should say that he is doing something rather than merely saying something. … Now these kinds Page 7 of 15

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of utterance are the ones that we call performative utterances’ (Austin, 1961: 222). Performative utterances, rather than potentially being true or untrue, are primarily felicitous or infelicitous depending on whether there are relevant conventions that support the performative act and whether the act is invoked in appropriate circumstances. Austin (1962) distinguished between locutionary acts, the act of saying something; illocutionary acts, the intent or force of the utterance; and perlocutionary acts, what we achieve by the utterance (1962: 108); and elaborated on five types of performatives (1962: 150). Searle (1969) elaborated further on the notion of the speech act in a more systematic way, and related the notion of speech acts to prevalent debates in the philosophy of language. He proposed that language is structured by constitutive rules, as an activity that is logically dependent or constituted by these rules. Speech act theory has been employed in organization theory to understand the functions and performative role of language in particular situations. For example, Ford and Ford (1995) inverted the conventional view that communication occurs in the context of change, to argue that change is constituted by different types of intentional, performative communicative acts. These can accomplish among other things, initiation of a change process, understanding of what needs to be accomplished, evaluation of performance, and closure. Guild (2002) analyzed the illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts of management and employees as a participant observer during a layoff at a ski resort, which indicated the relative importance of different stakeholders to management. She argued that speech act analyses can inform an understanding of legitimation processes pertaining to particular discourses. Heracleous and Marshak (2004) employed speech act theory among other approaches to develop a conception of discourse as situated symbolic action. They employed this conception to analyze the trajectory of discursive acts within a management meeting, which moved from a position of contest between advocates and opponents of a proposed organization design, to a transition point, to collaboration, to subsequent renewal of confrontation. Speech act theory in particular lent an applied orientation focusing on the intent and the outcomes of communicative acts, that is, the illocutionary and perlocutionary dimensions. In focusing on the performative power of utterances as well as their perlocutionary dimension, speech act theory is contextual and amenable for employment during processes of organizational change (Ford & Ford, 1995), to research particular organizational events in depth (Guild, 2002), or particular debates that have strategic import (Heracleous & Marshak, 2004). In all these studies, processual considerations are embedded by virtue of the need to study the flow of events over time.

Critical Discourse Analysis Critical discourse analysis (CDA) gains inspiration from social theorists such as Foucault, Gramsci, and Althusser to view discourses not merely as representations of objects or events, but as social practices and ideologies that have real effects in terms of power inequalities and domination. A well-known formulation that has influenced CDA in organization theory is Fairclough's (1992) tripartite analytical framework of texts, discourses, and social practices. As he notes: ‘discourse analysis has a doubly relational character: it is concerned with relations between discourse and other social elements, and relations between texts as discoursal elements and “orders of discourse” as discoursal elements of networks of social practices’ (2005: 924, emphasis in original). CDA is not content with mere analysis, but is interventionist (Blommaert & Bulcaen, 2000), seeking to expose the ways in which discourses perpetuate inequalities and unfair practices and to advocate for social change. Change can take place through the ‘transformative potential of social agency’ that can in time lead to reworked discourses and different social practices (Fairclough, 2005: 925). Page 8 of 15

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Fairclough (2005: 926) views texts as processual, in terms of how texts are textured, made, and remade as instances of social action; involving processes of reification and nominalization, for example. Such processes can be studied at various time scales, from the historical time frame to current, ongoing textual processes and relations with social practices. Such studies often explore how discourses are associated with particular understandings and interpretive schemes, what van Dijk (1993: 980) refers to as the ‘socio-cognitive interface between discourse and dominance.' CDA has enjoyed significant influence in organization theory (e.g., Balogun, Jarzabkowski & Vaara, 2011; Mantere & Vaara, 2008; Phillips, Sewell & Jaynes, 2008). Jacobs and Heracleous (2001), for example, employed a Foucauldian archeological approach to analyze the conceptual foundations of German management accounting, or ‘Controlling science.’ The term ‘Controlling’ has been used in Germany since the 1950s to refer to management control based on cost accounting techniques; the aim is to ensure rationality in managing the organization. The authors note that whereas Controlling science presents itself as a rational, neutral accounting system, it also conforms with and embraces Panoptical principles, in particular hierarchical observation and normalizing sanction. In this way, it becomes a technology of power rather than a neutral representation of performance. Understanding the operations of Controlling science as a mode of discourse that produces its own truth effects and authority regime, necessitates a process-oriented perspective that can reveal the interactions between this system and how agents attempt to both function with it as well as subvert it in a Giddensian (1984) process of dialectic of control.

Structurational Perspective Despite the fact that Giddens has not produced extended discussions of the concept of discourse per se, a hermeneutic view of language is embedded in his works and is integral to his theory of structuration (1984). Structuration theory (1984) includes communication as one of three strands of interaction; in particular, communicative interaction is linked with structures of signification through the modality of interpretive schemes. Giddens views discourses as modes of knowledge articulation, constitutive of social life, and operating through agents’ discursive and practical consciousness (Giddens, 1984: 83–92). Further, discourses are ideological, amenable to manipulation by dominant classes in pursuit of particular ends (1979: 190–193). The constitutive quality of language, as the raw material of communication and discourses, is based on its ubiquitous nature as a medium of social interaction (1984: xvi) and its ability to characterize and typify (1993: 54) what it refers to. Structuration as a term connotes process and becoming (as opposed to the term structure, which connotes stability and fixedness). Structuration theory draws attention to how social structures that appear immutable are far from that, depending on ongoing recursive interactions to maintain their stability. From a process perspective, it is worth noting that language is employed by Giddens as an illustration of the concept of duality of structure (that structures are both the medium and outcome of recursive interactions and practices). In particular, linguistic rules (structures) are enacted, reaffirmed, and sustained through recursive communicative actions, thereby exhibiting a duality between the rules themselves and their recursive usage in practice. A structurational view of discourse therefore incorporates a duality of communicative actions and deep structures, interacting through the modality of actors’ interpretive schemes (Heracleous & Hendry, 2000; Heracleous & Barrett, 2001). Yates and Orlikowski (1992), for example, discuss how communication genres can emerge through the interaction of individual communicative actions and institutionalized practices. Further, from a process perspective, structuration theory is sensitive to temporal considerations, recognizing the reversible time spans of duree (daily life) and longue duree (long-term, institutional time frame); and irreversible time, the finite human life span (1993: 28). The duality of structure and, more broadly, structuration processes are accomplished via ‘reversible time’ (Giddens, 1984: 35), enabling the recursivity and routinizaPage 9 of 15

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tion of social practices. By ‘reversible time,’ a term he borrowed from Levi-Strauss, Giddens (1984) refers to time that repeats itself, in recurrent cycles within which routines are embedded and in turn constitute social systems. As he noted, ‘all social systems, no matter how grand or far-flung, both express and are expressed in the routines of daily social life’ (1984: 36). Empirical studies of discourse employing structuration theory have overwhelmingly adopted the concept of duality of structure, together with associated understandings of the nature of structures as rules and resources instantiated through recursive practices; and the mutual constitution of the action and structure levels (Barrett, Heracleous & Walsham, 2013; Heracleous & Barrett, 2001; Heracleous, 2006; Witmer, 1997). Empirical research on organizational discourse, however, has yet to grapple with some of Giddens's fundamental, process-oriented concepts. These include both the concept of reversible time, as well as the interwoven dimensions of temporality relating to daily practices, individual life spans, and historical, institutional time (Heracleous, 2013). Such discourse studies would need to track features of communicative actions and texts longitudinally and relate the patterns identified to institutional features. This could be done at various time frames, including at the macro level in the context of ‘episodic characterizations’ and ‘world time’ (1984: 244), the analysis of historical episodes as shaped by discourses and social practices.

Rhetoric Rhetoric is the employment of discourse in context, to accomplish persuasion of the audience. Traditionally, ethos (character of the rhetor), pathos (use of emotion), and logos (use of logical argument) were seen as the main means of persuasion (Aristotle, 1991). Arguments could draw from various ‘commonplaces’ or ‘topics’ which reflected widely held opinions and concerns of the audience, and the rhetor would attempt to create identification or ‘consubstantiality’ between the direction of persuasion they aimed for and appropriate topics, as well as between themselves and their audience (Burke, 1969). Therefore, awareness of context, including audience and situation, were and are crucial for effective rhetoric (Bitzer, 1968). Such classical considerations continue to be central in analyses of rhetoric and have illuminated diverse areas such as processes of institutional change (Brown, Ainsworth & Grant, 2012), the legitimization of contentious decisions (Erkama & Vaara, 2010), and the exercise of charismatic leadership (Heracleous & Klaering, 2014). Over time, the domains of application of rhetorical analysis have expanded. Barrett et al. (2013), for example, informed a rhetorical approach with the discursive levels of communicative action and deep structures suggested by structuration theory, and operationalized these two levels through the concepts of framing and ideology lenses, respectively, to analyze the process of diffusion of new technologies. Green, Li, and Nohria (2009) employed rhetorical analysis, focusing on the enthymeme (arguments-in-use) to show how processes of institutionalization are mirrored into argument structures, using a case study of the diffusion of total quality management. Suddaby and Greenwood (2005) employ rhetorical analysis, in particular the concept of rhetorical strategies, to show how proponents and opponents of a new organizational form employ such strategies, based on underlying notions of legitimacy, to support or oppose this form. The above are rhetorical studies of macro-level change, of the diffusion of new technologies (Barrett et al., 2013), of new organizational practices (Green et al., 2009), and of new organizational forms (Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005). In all cases, such change is seen as reflected in, as well as shaped by, the kinds of rhetorical arguments and rhetorical strategies employed by actors engaged with these changes.

Hybrid Approaches The foregoing approaches are not necessarily distinct, and have been used in conjunction with each other in Page 10 of 15

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particular research programs. Yates and Orlikowski (1992), for example, employed rhetoric with structuration theory, Heracleous and Marshak (2004) employed speech act theory, rhetoric, and ethnography of communication within a social constructionist perspective, and Barrett, Heracleous, and Walsham (2013) employed rhetorical analysis informed by structuration theory as well as the framing and ideology perspectives. Further, particular theoretical perspectives on the role of discourse and its relation to organization have been developed, drawing from the above and other domains. One example is the Montreal School, within the CCO, or ‘communication as constitutive of organization’ movement (Kuhn & Putnam, 2014). The Montreal School draws primarily from speech act theory and actor network theory (e.g., Cooren & Taylor, 1997; Taylor & Cooren, 1997), and focuses on co-orientation of agents, involving both the micro-discourse of conversation through interaction, as well as the creation of more enduring texts. In this view, the dialectical relationship between conversations and texts is what constitutes organization. According to Kuhn and Putnam (2014: 425), ‘the text-conversation dialectic evinces a grammatical structure that provides the necessary and sufficient conditions for organizing – in other words, the seeds of organization are found in language, its text-conversation relationship, and its coordinated activity.'

Where to for Discourse Theory in Relation to Process Studies? I would suggest that the most pressing need, in terms of employing discourse theory in process studies, is not in the development of the antecedents or substance of discourse theory. These benefit from long lines of development and constitute rich traditions that can be consulted to instill sophisticated discursive concepts in empirical research. Rather, what is needed is an explicit effort to link particular aspects of discourse theory, as relevant to the theme being researched, with processual frameworks that can shed light on that theme. For example, Paroutis and Heracleous (2013) employed discourse theory to understand what are the main themes that strategists employ when they refer to strategy, and whether these themes manifest to different degrees in different stages of institutional adoption, signifying particular types of institutional work carried out by these strategists. Underlying the theoretical grounding of that work was the Figure 12.2 (accompanied by a theoretical narrative), which relates a specific aspect of discourse theory (first-order strategy discourse) to managerial cognition, managerial practice, and institutional outcomes.

Figure 12.2Relationships between first-order strategy discourse, managerial cognition, managerial practice, and institutional outcomes

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Secondly, theoretical experimentation would allow us to extend key discursive perspectives to a broader variety to empirical settings. By theoretical experimentation, I mean adopting a given perspective beyond domains, levels, or time frames within which it has been conventionally adopted. For example, whereas speech act theory was developed in relation to analysis of particular speech acts during conversational interaction in particular situations, Ford and Ford (1995) employed this perspective to shed light on classes of performative acts that enable organizational change, over longer time frames; and Guild (2002) to shed light on processes of legitimation and to offer insights to the perspectives that different groups of agents adopt, in the context of organizational layoffs. By the same token, we can employ particular discursive ideas outside their conventional habitus to shed light on processual issues or theoretical areas where a process perspective would be fruitful. This would have to be accomplished while remaining faithful to the spirit of those discursive ideas, and in the context of robust conceptual and empirical operationalizations of these ideas. Effectively extending discursive studies in this manner would also entail open-minded gatekeepers in terms of publishing this work. These would be gatekeepers able to see the substance of the work being done, and judge it on its internal coherence, validity, and insight, rather than making recommendations based on unproductive dogma or particular agendas of established perspectives. Third, discourse theory has to try and shed its image of being incomprehensible and conceptually inconsistent; both of which occur more often than we would like to admit, and in the process may dissuade young, promising scholars from pursuing discourse-related research. As discourse theorists, we should try to write in logical, clear, accessible, understandable terms, rather than complicating things as a matter of course, believing that this is somehow an indicator of excellent scholarship. I am not holding my breath on this last one. Page 12 of 15

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Institutional fashions, demands, and long-term habits are difficult to break out of. But it is still worth mentioning. I have argued in this chapter that discourse theories are inherently processual, in both ontological and epistemological terms. Combined with views of organizations as discursively constituted (or at least as discursively shaped; Fairhurst & Putnam, 2005) and in a state of continual becoming (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002), organizational discourse approaches are naturally suited to fulfill the call for more empirical, processual studies that regard actions as contextually and temporally embedded and privilege dynamic over cross-sectional explanations (Langley, 2007; Pettigrew, 1997).

References Aristotle. 1991. On Rhetoric. G. A. Kennedy (Trans.). New York: Oxford University Press. Austin, J. L. 1961. Philosophical Papers. Urmson, J. O. & Warnock, G. J. (Eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Balogun, J., Jarzabkowski, P. & Vaara, E. 2011. Selling, resistance and reconciliation: A critical discursive approach to subsidiary role evolution in MNEs. Journal of International Business Studies, 42: 765–786. Barrett, M., Heracleous, L. & Walsham, G. 2013. A rhetorical approach to IT diffusion: Reconceptualizing the ideology-framing relationship in computerization movements. MIS Quarterly, 37: 201–220. Bateson, G. 1987. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. NJ: Jason Aronson. Bitzer, L. F. 1968. The rhetorical situation. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 1: 1–14. Blommaert, J. & Bulcaen, C. 2000. Critical discourse analysis. Annual Review of Anthropology, 29: 47–466. Brown, A. D., Ainsworth, S. & Grant, D. 2012. The rhetoric of institutional change. Organization Studies, 33: 297–321. Burke, K. 1969. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cooren, F. & Taylor, J. R. 1997. Organization as an effect of mediation: Redefining the link between organization and communication. Communication Theory, 7: 219–260. Eira, N. I. 1984. Boazobargi giella. Dieđut 1/1984. Sámi instituhtta, Guovdageaidnu. (In North Saami) Erkama, N. & Vaara, E. 2010. Struggles over legitimacy in global organizational restructuring: A rhetorical perspective on legitimation strategies and dynamics in a shutdown case. Organization Studies, 31: 813–839. Fairclough, N. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity. Fairclough, N. 2005. Discourse analysis in organization studies: The case for critical realism. Organization Studies, 26: 915–939. Fairhurst, G. T. & Putnam, L. 2005. Organizations as discursive constructions. Communication Theory, 14 (1): 5–26. Ford, J. D. & Ford, L. W. 1995. The role of conversations in producing intentional change in organizations. Academy of Management Review, 20: 541–570. Giddens, A. 1979. Central Problems in Social Theory. London: Macmillan. Giddens, A. 1984. The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity. Giddens, A. 1993. New Rules of Sociological Method ( 2nd ed. ). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Goodwin, C. & Heritage, J. 1990. Conversation analysis. Annual Review of Anthropology, 19: 283–307. Green, S. E., Li, Y. & Nohria, N. 2009. Suspended in self-spun webs of significance: A rhetorical model of institutionalization and institutionally embedded agency. Academy of Management Journal, 52: 11–36. Guild, W. L. 2002. Relative importance of stakeholders: Analysing speech acts in a layoff. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 23: 837–852. Heller, S. 2008. The Swastika: Symbol beyond Redemption? NY: Allworth Press. Heracleous, L. 2006. Discourse, Interpretation, Organization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Page 13 of 15

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Heracleous, L. 2013. The employment of structuration theory in organizational discourse: Exploring methodological challenges. Management Communication Quarterly, 27: 599–606. Heracleous, L. & Barrett, M. 2001. Organizational change as discourse: Communicative actions and deep structures in the context of IT Implementation. Academy of Management Journal, 44: 755–778. Heracleous, L. & Hendry, J. 2000. Discourse and the study of organization: Towards a structurational perspective. Human Relations, 53: 1251–1286. Heracleous, L. & Klaering, A. 2014. Charismatic leadership and rhetorical competence: An analysis of Steve Jobs’ rhetoric. Group & Organization Management, 39: 131–161. Heracleous, L. & Marshak, R. 2004. Conceptualizing organizational discourse as situated symbolic action. Human Relations, 57(10): 1285–1312. Hutzschenreuter, T. & Kleindienst, I. 2006. Strategy-process research: What have we learned and what is still to be explored. Journal of Management, 32: 673–720. Jacobs, C. & Heracleous, L. 2001. Seeing without being seen: Towards an Archaeology of Controlling Science. International Studies of Management and Organization, 31(3): 113–135. Kuhn, T. & Putnam, L. L. 2014. Discourse and communication. In P. Adler, G. Morgan, P. DuGay & M. Reed (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Sociology, Social Theory and Organization, 414–446. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Langley, A. 2007. Process thinking in strategic organization. Strategic Organization, 5: 271–282. Mantere, S. & Vaara, E. 2008. On the problem of participation in strategy: A critical discursive perspective. Organization Science, 19: 341–358. Molotch, H. L. & Boden, D. 1985. Talking social structure: Discourse, domination and the Watergate hearings. American Sociological Review, 50: 273–288. Nakkalajarvi, K. 2009. Perspective of Saami reindeer herders on the impact of climate change and related research. In UNESCO, Climate Change and Arctic Sustainable Development: Scientific, Social, Cultural and Educational Challenges, 131–143. Paris: UNESCO. Paroutis, S. & Heracleous, L. 2013. Discourse revisited: Dimensions and employment of first-order strategy discourse during institutional adoption. Strategic Management Journal, 34: 935–956. Pennanen, S. 2006. Sami reindeer herders. A task differentiation analysis. In Jarvenpa, R. and Brumbach, H. J. (Eds.), Circumpolar Lives and Livelihood. A Comparative Ethnoarchaeology of Gender and Subsistence, 186–237. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Pettigrew, A. M. 1997. What is a processual analysis? Scandinavian Journal of Management, 13: 337–348. Phillips, N. & Oswick, C. 2012. Organizational discourse: Domains, debates, and directions. Academy of Management Annals, 6: 435–481. Phillips, N., Lawrence, T. B. & Hardy, C. 2004. Discourse and institutions. Academy of Management Review, 29: 635–652. Phillips, N., Sewell, G. & Jaynes, S. 2008. Applying critical discourse analysis in strategic management research. Organizational Research Methods, 11: 770–789. Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A. & Jefferson, G. 1974. A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language, 50: 696–735. Samra-Fredericks, D. 2003. Strategizing as lived experience and strategists’ everyday efforts to shape strategic direction. Journal of Management Studies, 40: 141–174. Saussure, F. 1983. Course in General Linguistics. London: Duckworth. Searle, J. R. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Suddaby, R. & Greenwood, R. 2005. Rhetorical strategies of legitimacy. Administrative Science Quarterly, 50: 35–67. Taylor, J. R. & Cooren, F. 1997. What makes communication ‘organizational'? How the many voices of a collectivity become the one voice of an organization. Journal of Pragmatics, 27: 409–438. Tsoukas, H. & Chia, R. 2002. On organizational becoming: Rethinking organizational change. Organization Science, 13: 567–582. Tulin, M. F. 1997. Talking organization: Possibilities for conversation analysis in organizational behavior research. Journal of Management Inquiry, 6: 101–119. van de Ven, A. H. 1992. Suggestions for studying strategy process: A research note. Strategic Management Page 14 of 15

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Journal, 13: 169–188. Van Dijk, T. A. 1993. Principles of critical discourse analysis. Discourse & Society, 4: 249–283. Yates, J. & Orlikowski, W. J. 1992. Genres of organizational communication: A structurational approach to studying communication and media. Academy of Management Review, 17: 299–326. Witmer, D. F. 1997. Communication and recovery: Structuration as an ontological approach to organizational culture. Communication Monographs, 64: 324–349. Wittgenstein, L. 1986 [1953]. Philosophical Investigations ( 3rd ed. ). G. E. M. Anscombe (Trans.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n12

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Evolutionary Theory

Contributors: Geoffrey M. Hodgson Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Evolutionary Theory" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n13 Print pages: 204-219 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Evolutionary Theory Geoffrey M. Hodgson Contrary to the impression given by their widespread usage, terms such as ‘evolutionary theory’ lack consensus or clarity concerning their meaning.1 After briefly surveying this vagueness and confusion, this chapter attempts to establish a robust framework for analyzing organizational evolution. One comprehensive framework is inspired by Darwin. Its core principles entail the need to explain variation, selection, and retention (or inheritance). But contrary to much casual incantation of ‘variation, selection, and retention', these terms are complex and require much clarification, with reference to a substantial theoretical and philosophical literature on these concepts. It is also necessary to rebut some objections. The chapter outlines these core principles and establishes their relevance for the study of organizations. The word ‘evolution’ derives from the Latin evolvere, meaning ‘to unroll', as with the revelation of the contents of a scroll. In French, the word evolution is frequently used to refer to any process of development of a single entity. When Joseph Schumpeter had his Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung translated into English, he had the choice of translating Entwicklung into either ‘evolution’ or ‘development'. He chose ‘development', probably because ‘evolution’ had (by then) strong (and unpopular) biological connotations (Schumpeter 1934). Earlier, Herbert Spencer had widely popularized the term ‘evolution'. He gave it his own meaning: ‘Evolution is said to be a change from a state of definite, incoherent homogeneity to a state of definite, coherent heterogeneity’ (Spencer 1898: 53). It was Spencer, not Charles Darwin, who coined the term ‘survival of the fittest'. Darwin generally avoided the term ‘evolution', using it rarely, and preferring terms such as ‘selection’ and ‘descent with modification'. The term ‘evolution’ was long unpopular in the social sciences, but since the 1980s it has enjoyed a resurgence (Hodgson 1999). But there is no agreement on what ‘evolution’ means. It is used interchangeably, and often sloppily, to refer to either the development of a single entity or several interlinked processes of change in populations of entities. But while we may have different understandings of the e-word, we often play host to the presumption that there is a single shared meaning and a common understanding. We talk of ‘the evolutionary perspective’ or ‘the evolutionary approach'. We nod in agreement, but under that false consensus, there is chaotic jumble of varied and sometimes contradictory meanings. Attempts to give the terms ‘evolution’ or ‘evolutionary’ a single meaning are doomed to fail, because of the obdurate etymology, contrasting usage, and multiple legacies of the word. Yet the term is often uttered with gravitas, as if it betokened a clear framework or approach. Researchers into organizations refer to ‘evolution’ or ‘co-evolution’ while being insufficiently clear what they mean (Huygens et al. 2001; Jenkins and Floyd 2001; Jones 2001; Lewin and Volberda 2003; Rodrigues and Child 2003). One is left asking what kind of evolutionary theory or meta-theoretical framework is intended. One aim of this chapter is to reveal part of this chaos, particularly as it affects organization studies. Following that, we consider the type of (changing) entities that are relevant in the organizational domain. This ontological excursion gives us ground to consider some meta-theoretical principles that are relevant for that zone of enquiry. These core principles turn out to be the same as those that were laid down by Darwin, notwithstanding the important differences between the social and biological worlds. There is general agreement that Darwinism involves three core principles of variation, selection and inheritance (or retention).2 I shall also explain the relevance of the replicator–interactor framework within a version of generalized Darwinism. Worries about ‘social Darwinism', misleading portrayals of Darwinian selection as ‘blind', and false claims that Darwinism necessarily means that mutations are ‘random', and that it downplays or excludes intentionality, have all helped to dissuade social scientists from addressing Darwinian principles. In fact, Darwin never described mutations as random, and he fully acknowledged the role of intentionality. He required that intentions and mutations should be eventually explained in causal terms, even if we are currently unaware of the causes. He never described evolution as blind. He did not treat the selection environment as always static or given Page 2 of 16

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(sexual selection being an important example), and he gave important examples of environmental interaction and niche construction. While Darwinism has been abused in the past, many contemporary worries turn out to be ungrounded.3 In fact, Darwinism is the only complete overarching theoretical framework available for understanding populations of entities that are struggling for locally and immediately scarce resources.4 There exists no viable alternative general conceptual framework for addressing change in such complex systems. We now know that Darwin was wrong on several details, and we have learned much more about evolutionary processes since his death. But his core ideas remain robust. No one has produced a full, rival, alternative theoretical framework in the 150 years since the Origin of Species. Non-Darwinian approaches leave key elements unexplained, such as theories of cultural evolution that fail to address the origins of culture or of human agency. Especially if generalized Darwinism is rejected while ‘evolution’ retained, then what is intended by ‘evolution’ or ‘co-evolution’ must be clearly specified. Persistent misuse and imprecision of terminology have obstructed the introduction of theoretical insights from generalized Darwinism, Any focus on selection does not mean that organizational adaptation or development can be ignored. Contrary to a widespread supposition, Darwinism emphasizes both development and selection. This chapter also shows how the replicator concept from generalized Darwinism helps understand the evolution of complexity. It considers some of the implications of this framework for understanding the evolution of routines, along with other implications of the conceptual framework.

Some Prominent Confusions In some academic disciplines, such as biology, ‘evolution’ evokes Darwinism, despite Darwin's general avoidance of the word. Many sociologists avoid the term precisely because of its perceived link with Darwinism. But in modern ‘evolutionary economics’ (Nelson and Winter 1982), it refers much more broadly and loosely to innovation or change. Yet in all these cases, the e-word is still used as if it meant something definite. This conceptual vagueness, emanating from an enduring failure to define terms with sufficient clarity, creates theoretical havoc and severely impairs scientific advance. Although ‘evolution’ means different things in different disciplines, further confusion is created by the abuse of related categories. A major example of this in organization studies is the depicted contest between ‘Darwinian’ and ‘Lamarckian’ processes. Partly because of fears about Darwinism, many prominent social scientists have described social or economic evolution as ‘Lamarckian'.5 In many cases, the ‘Darwinian’ label is even ignored or dismissed. The dispute within organization science over the relative importance of adaptation and selection (Baum 1996; Lewin and Volberda 2003), and the extent to which firm routines can change in individual firms, is sometimes described as a contest between ‘Darwinian’ and ‘Lamarckian’ conceptions of organizational change (Usher and Evans 1996). The seminal work of Michael Hannan and John Freeman (1989) is described by many as ‘Darwinian’ because it stresses selection in a relatively static industry-level environment, and downgrades the possibilities of individual organizational adaptations. ‘Lamarckism’ is typically interpreted as stressing adaptation, with the inheritance of acquired adaptations. ‘Lamarckian’ volitional acquisition of characteristics is often contrasted to the allegedly ‘blind’ or random mutations in some versions of Darwinism. But Darwin fully recognized intentionality and never wrote of random mutations. Furthermore, he believed that the inheritance of acquired characters was possible: he was a Lamarckian! Later many biologists turned against the idea of Lamarckian inheritance. But logically, and in principle, Darwinism and Lamarckism are not mutually exclusive, contrary to many suggestions in the literature. Page 3 of 16

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Some acquired characters, such as injuries, are not beneficial. But the effects of deleterious acquired characters must be restricted. Hence, Lamarckism depends on the Darwinian principle of selection in order to explain why any propensity to inherit acquired impairments does not prevail. As Richard Dawkins (1986: 300) argued, ‘the Lamarckian theory can explain adaptive improvement in evolution only by, as it were, riding on the back of the Darwinian theory'. Lamarckism, if valid, depends on Darwinian mechanisms of selection for evolutionary guidance. The false dichotomy between ‘Darwinian’ and ‘Lamarckian’ conceptions has prevented organizational researchers from tapping into the rich vein of Darwinian theory that is applicable to their domain of study (Hodgson 2013b). ‘Darwinism’ is wrongly characterized as an extreme and limited stance, with at best partial application to social and organizational phenomena. Such misconceptions help to generate more misleading terminology. Consider the term ‘co-evolution'. This became popular in organization studies in the 1990s, after long debates between approaches emphasizing managerial discretion (Child 1972) and those insisting on the role of competitive selection and elimination (Hannan and Freeman 1989). For many, the term ‘evolution’ was linked with Hannan and Freeman's position, with its emphasis on selection and its relative neglect of adaptation and replication. This selectionist stance was linked with a false view of Darwin's theory as about ‘blind’ or ‘random’ sources of variation, necessarily denying intentionality or strategic adaptations. After these false presumptions, a new term had to be found: it was ‘co-evolution'. As Arie Lewin and Henk Volberda (1999: 523) put it: Such a coevolutionary approach assumes that change may occur in all interacting populations of organizations, permitting change to be driven by both direct interactions and feedback from the rest of the system. In other words, change is not an outcome of managerial adaptation or environmental selection but rather the joint outcome of intentionality and environmental effects. Hence, ‘co-evolution’ was an explicit attempt to transcend formerly contrasting views, and the term became popular in organization studies. But how does this differ from ‘evolution'? On reading Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), we find that he too was often talking about change ‘in all interacting populations … driven by both direct interactions and feedback from the rest of the system'. It is standard fare in modern biology. The term ‘co-evolution’ became necessary only because of a mistaken view that selection is not about intentionality or adaptation, and solely an ‘environmental effect'. Yet Darwin wrote a lot about intentionality, and in particular about artificial selection (e.g., breeding pigeons), which is clearly driven by intentions. Much of the so-called ‘co-evolution’ literature seems driven by the myth that evolutionary selection downgrades intention or adaptation. Furthermore, the use of the term ‘co-evolution’ in organization studies differed markedly from its use elsewhere. Evolutionary anthropologists take it for granted that Darwinian processes of selection also involve adaptation and interacting populations (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Durham 1991). Here the term ‘co-evolution’ signals something quite different. It refers to multiple levels and modes of inheritance, above the replication of genes. Alternatively, it is called ‘dual inheritance', referring to the twin tracks of cultural and genetic transmission. The fashionable use of the term ‘co-evolution’ by researchers into organizations was based on false premises and overlooked different and preceding usages.

Establishing the Replicator–Interactor Distinction Lamarckism involves the inheritance of acquired characteristics. A dog catches fleas and passes some of them to another dog. Is that Lamarckian inheritance? If so, the fleas must be regarded as an acquired character and their jumping from one animal to another must be treated as inheritance. This is not what most people mean by Lamarckism. Leaving aside its accuracy, to make the Lamarckian claim meaningful, inheritance must be distinguished from infection or contagion (Hull 1982). The genotype–phenotype distinction (or Page 4 of 16

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relevant equivalent) serves this purpose. It is only with such a distinction that inheritance can be properly defined and distinguished from catching colds or fleas. The genotype–phenotype distinction was introduced in biology in the early twentieth century.6 An infection or contagion affects the phenotype, not the genotype. By contrast, the Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characters would mean that a development in a phenotype can affect its own genotype, by some presumed internal process. The difference between Lamarckian inheritance and contagion becomes clear through the concepts of genotype and phenotype. But their significance extends far beyond that. The genotype is a mechanism for storing and passing on information. It guides the development and behaviour of the phenotype, in interaction with its environment. The phenotype is an entity that hosts the genotype. The term replicator is a generalization of genotype, and the interactor is a generalization of phenotype (Hull 1988, Brandon 1996). These concepts are important when we address social entities hosting information-retaining and developmental mechanisms. Following Hull (1988), Hodgson and Knudsen (2010b) define an interactor as a relatively cohesive entity that hosts replicators and interacts with its environment in such a way as to lead to changes in the population of interactors and their replicators. Social organizations can be interactors. Hodgson and Knudsen (2010b) regard a replicator as consisting of program-like bits of information held by an interactor, which can represent adaptive solutions to problems and guide its development.7 A genome is a biological replicator. But there are other replicators, such as routines in organizations (Nelson and Winter 1982), which also hold information and guide behaviour. Replication refers to the passing of such problemsolving or developmental information from one entity to another. Replication and inheritance are treated as synonyms. The replicator–interactor distinction helps develop the evolutionary research programs in organization studies and other social sciences. Once the key role of routines to retain potentially replicable instructions is appreciated, we can focus on how these instructions trigger developmental processes and thereby become expressed in particular entities. This helps social scientists study the learning processes that are situated within a broader selection environment. With their ‘routines as genes’ metaphor, Nelson and Winter (1982) suggested the possibility of a social replicator.8 But the idea of social replicators has met resistance from biological reductionists and those who deny that social evolution is essentially Darwinian. It must be emphasized that replicators are not cohesive entities in themselves; they are informational mechanisms hosted by interactors (which are cohesive entities). Clearly, the mechanisms of replication are very different in the biological and the social spheres. But some crucial problem-solving information is copied and transmitted from organization to organization, and this amounts to social replication. To consider the possibility of Lamarckian inheritance in social evolution, we must first identify the replicators and interactors in the social domain. Lamarckian social evolution would require social replicators (not biological replicators such as genes) that were affected by the acquired character of its interactor. If ideas are treated as replicators, then their passing from person to person would not be the inheritance of acquired characters because the ideas themselves have been defined as replicators and not characteristics. The spreading of ideas from one interactor to another is an example of contagion, not Lamarckism. Inspired by Darwinism, American pragmatist philosophers such as Charles Sanders Peirce (1878), William James (1890), and John Dewey (1922) reached a solution to the philosophical problem of reconciling ideas with materially grounded evolutionary processes. They regarded psychological habits as the foundations and preconditions of ideas. For pragmatists, habits are acquired dispositions that fuel beliefs. Pragmatism is unPage 5 of 16

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dergoing a revival (Joas 1993) and is supported by experimental and neurological evidence indicating that our underlying habitual dispositions are at work well before make conscious decisions (Hodgson 2010). The American institutional economist Thorstein Veblen was strongly influenced by pragmatism, and he argued accordingly that habitual and instinctive dispositions were at the foundation of social institutions. Habits are the most elementary replicators in social evolution. They are learned dispositions to behave in a particular way in particular circumstances. They are hosted by individuals (their immediate interactors). Consider the replication (copying) of habits. Learning a new language, we imitate and repeat. We are corrected. This goes on until our responses are ingrained in habit. Gradually the knowledge of the language is transferred from one person to another. The replicators are replicated. The process of habit replication relies on behavioural imitation.9 Further examples of social replicators include routines, which refer to capabilities of organizational teams to carry out sequences of actions. Routines are hosted by organizations as their interactors, and in turn are built on the habits of the individuals involved. Both habits and routines involve some automaticity, but neither is mindless. They are essential for individuals and organizations to deal with complex and changing information.

The Nature and Status of Generalized Darwinism The claim that socio-organizational evolution is Darwinian rests on social ontology. Hodgson and Knudsen (2006a, 2010b) use the term ‘complex population system’ to refer to sets of individually different and demarcated entities that interact with the environment and each other. By definition, they face immediately scarce resources and struggle to survive, whether through conflict or cooperation. They adapt and may pass on information to others, through replication or imitation. Examples of complex population systems are plentiful both in nature and in human society. They include every biological species, from amoeba to humans. And importantly for social scientists, they include human organizations, as long as organizations are cohesive entities having some capacity for the retention of information. An economic example is an industry involving cohesive organizational entities such as business firms. In this manner, the common ontological features of all complex population systems are established, including in nature and human society, without ignoring the huge differences of detail between them. Crucially, the evolution of any complex population system must involve the three Darwinian principles of variation, selection, and retention (Campbell 1965). These abstract principles do not themselves provide all the necessary details, but nevertheless they must be honoured, for otherwise the explanation of evolution will be inadequate. In particular, investigations into complex population systems must address • (a) the sources and replenishment of variety in the population, • (b) how information is passed from one entity in the population to another, and • (c) why some entities are more successful in surviving or passing on information than others. These three explanatory requirements map onto the three core Darwinian principles of variation, replication, and selection. To make this conceptual move, these Darwinian principles have to be defined in sufficiently abstract and general terms, so that they are no longer confined to the biological domain (Hull 1988; Hodgson and Knudsen 2010b). Darwinism is the only known overarching evolutionary framework that tackles the ontological phenomena of variation, selection, and retention in complex population systems. Existing rival approaches in this context turn out to be less encompassing or wrong.10

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The idea that social evolution is Darwinian does not mean that social evolution is determined solely by biological phenomena. By contrast to such reductionism, social entities and processes are identified and analyzed in their own right. Although metaphors are unavoidable in science, the idea of generalizing Darwinism is much more than the use of biological metaphors or analogies. Instead of analogies, which are typically inexact and sometimes treacherous, generalized Darwinism relies on the claim of common abstract features in both the social and the biological world; it is essentially a contention of a degree of ontological commonality, at a high level of abstraction and not at the level of detail. This commonality is captured by concepts such as replication and selection, which are defined as precisely and meaningfully as possible, but in a general and abstract sense. Ontological commonality implies neither detailed similarity nor analogy. The fact that Newton's laws of motion apply to billiard balls, spacecraft, and planets does not mean that these entities are similar. And no obvious analogy is invoked in the mathematical application of these laws. As the evolutionary economist J. Stanley Metcalfe (1998: 36) pointed out: ‘Evolutionary theory is a manner of reasoning in its own right quite independently of the use made of it by biologists. They simply got there first'. It is legitimate to describe these general evolutionary principles as Darwinian, because Darwin did get there first, and he also rightly hinted that his general principles might apply to social evolution (Hodgson and Knudsen 2010b: 5–6). Observers of ‘evolution’ or ‘co-evolution’ in organization studies are obliged to say more clearly what they mean. If they avoid the Darwinian label, then further explanation is required. Indeed, in complex population systems, the core Darwinian principles of variation, selection, and inheritance offer the only overarching conceptual framework yet available. Having identified the three core principles, attention must be given to the specific mechanisms involved in organizational evolution. Variation (mutation) can come about by design or by accident: examples and case studies are required to illustrate this. Selection occurs typically by market competition: again concrete studies are required. Inheritance involves imitation and knowledge transfer: already there is a large literature on this, but it needs to be related to the overarching Darwinian triad. The identification of distinct social replicators and interactors is a key step in elaborating the proposition that abstract Darwinian principles apply to evolution in both nature and society. The remaining but hugely important task is to demonstrate their significance.

Embracing Both Selection and Adaptation Contrary to several depictions of ‘Darwinism’ in organizational studies and elsewhere, Darwin himself did not put a one-sided or exclusive emphasis on selection – he fully considered the development of organisms – and Darwinian theory must logically embrace development and adaptation, as well as selection. In any real population system, both selection and adaptation are bound to occur. As established below, selection generally requires adaptation in complex population systems. Selection occurs because organizations differ in their characteristics (Nelson 1991) and their local environments. Some firms go bankrupt. Some are so successful that their routines are copied by other firms. Others lead to successful spin-offs (Dahlstrand 1998; Klepper 2008; Bünstorf 2009). In principle, such differential success and replication amounts to selection, according to its technical definition (Price 1995; Hodgson and Knudsen 2010b). Selection can be a major reason for changes in the overall profile of a population of organizations.11 Page 7 of 16

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The concept of adaptation has acquired different meanings in biology and organization studies. In the organizational studies literature, it typically refers to a change in a specific organization rather than an environmental or other change. For Daniel Levinthal (1992: 432), ‘adaptation is defined to have occurred when an organization changes its strategy, structure or some other core attribute to fit some new environmental contingency'. More narrowly, for Ross Brennan and Peter Turnbull (1999: 182): ‘Adaptations can be defined as behavioural modifications made by one company, at the individual, group or corporate level, to meet the specific needs of another organization'. Although this focuses appropriately on organizational change, it overly restricts adaptations to serving the undefined ‘needs’ of another entity. When addressing organizations and their strategic dilemmas, the primary matter is the capacity of an organization to change, in a manner that improves its performance by some appropriate criterion, and increases its chances of survival. Organizations are more than the sums of their individual members. They involve structured interactions between individuals. The capacity of any organization to change – even a small firm – depends partly on structured internal relations and does not depend on the intentions or attributes of individuals alone. Organizational adaptability is also about internal structures and procedures and their capacity to enable appropriate change. The internal culture of the firm is intimately connected to those structures and procedures, as well as to the values and beliefs of individuals (Schein 1996, S?rensen 2002). We may define organizational adaptability as the capacity of an organization to change its strategies, structures, procedures, or other core attributes, in anticipation or response to a change in its environment, including changes in relations with other organizations. The resulting adaptations do not necessarily improve performance by some criterion, but they are generally intended to do so. Adaptation does and must occur in reality. A move from a single-person firm to an enterprise of three or four members involves considerable organizational development and adaptation, especially in complex and changing environments. A new division of labour would be required in the organization, with further moves towards the codification of some rules and tasks. Furthermore, given rapidly changing circumstances – new entrants, new technologies, new products, changing government policies – most firms are required to adapt to some degree, on an almost continuous basis, or face extinction. The objects of selection are interactors. Selection leads indirectly to changes in the population of hosted replicators. These two faces of selection are unavoidably connected by a developmental and adaptive process, which depends on both the replicators and how they express themselves in particular environments. Although the detailed processes are very different, similar remarks apply to organizations and the replicators (habits and routines) that they host. Selection operates directly on organizations and individuals, which individually are outcomes of developments in particular contexts. Ascertaining the relative importance of adaptation is a matter of empirical enquiry. But the generalized Darwinian framework shows that both processes are unavoidably present to some degree in biological and social evolution. The ongoing adjustment of any biological organism to its environment involves massive, contextdependent change. Similarly, the development of any firm from its small beginnings is an immense feat of strategic adaptation. Evidence suggests that adaptation is slow and difficult (especially in larger firms), but that does not mean it can be ignored. Neglecting adaptation would overlook the difference between the information encoded in the replicator and its context-dependent expression in the developing interactor. Furthermore, simply to create a population of established firms upon which selection can operate requires the adaptive growth of every organization. Even if the possibilities for individual firm adaptation are limited, small differences in adaptive capacity from firm to firm may be crucial for survival. Consequently, even if much population-level change results largely Page 8 of 16

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from selection, the development of individual firms cannot be ignored in explanations of change or especially in the formulation of business strategies. As a result, some reconciliation may be possible between the organizational ecology approach, with its stress on selection and highly limited adaptation, and the business strategy literature, with its stress on the need for adaptability (Mintzberg and Quinn 1991; Baum et al. 2006).

Complexity and Organizational Evolution Just as biological evolution has led eventually to organisms of greater sophistication and complexity, socioeconomic evolution has seen an even more rapid increase in the complexity of technology and institutions in a relatively short period of human history. In a few thousand years, humans have evolved from primitive hunter-gatherers to inhabitants of complex civilizations. In a few hundred years, we have seen an explosion of scientific and technological knowledge. In a few decades, we have observed a new phase of globalization and the evolution of highly complex business organizations and information networks. Is important to understand the necessary conditions under which complexity is enhanced in evolving population systems. The most basic and important general condition is the existence of replicators that can store and copy information to instruct and guide the development of their host entity (Hodgson and Knudsen 2008, 2010a, 2010b). Another essential requirement is that copy error during replication is low. By contrast, both reading and developmental errors – which occur when using information from a source copy – do not corrupt the original information and are generally less serious. If the original information remains intact and is copied faithfully, then it might be retrieved. But if replication over time leads to the loss of information from the original, then it is gone forever. This argument suggests that replicators and faithful replication underlie the increasing complexity of social evolution. Some enduring fidelity in the copying of key information is a necessary condition for the evolution of complexity. With social evolution, the advance of complexity depends upon similar conditions. In a world of complexity and uncertainty, designed solutions to economic and business problems are difficult and risky. While some planning and guidance is desirable and unavoidable, we have to rely enormously on tried and tested knowledge. Many successful firms do this (Stadler 2007). Over one-third of all retail sales in the United States passes through chain organizations (Winter and Szulanski 2001). Most successful chains expand by imposing a single organizational template on all chain outlets, including those that are franchised (Bradach 1998). Similar replication strategies are found in firms when they develop new production plants in different locations. All these cases involve the strategic replication of habits and routines, replicating through a series of business units. Consider Intel's ‘Copy Exactly’ factory strategy (Intel 2014). This ramps up production quickly by copying everything at the development plant – the process flow, equipment set, suppliers, plumbing, manufacturing clean room, and training methodologies. Everything is selected to meet high volume needs, recorded, and then copied exactly.12 The proposition that copying fidelity is important for the evolutionary selection of complexity may be counterintuitive, because ongoing variety is the fuel of evolutionary selection and change. But the point of this argument is that while necessary, mutations must be limited to ensure that much information concerning viable adaptations is retained. Too much mutability can destroy valuable information. In evolution, there is a trade-off between mutability and copying fidelity. Business replication strategies that minimize copy error have themselves become widespread through a comPage 9 of 16

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bination of trial and error, and competitive selection weeding out firms with less successful policies. This theoretical argument may help to explain the otherwise puzzling observation that many firms grow by cloning existing arrangements as exactly as possible. A pressing question for the business strategists is to what extent habits and routines can be changed, and if so how. Evidence suggests that they are generally difficult to change; executives that try top-down change with insufficient regard to underlying habits and routines are courting failure (Kolb 2002; Stadler 2007; Hodgson 2011b). Because so much information held in habits and routines is tacit and inaccessible, business leaders cannot fully understand the knowledge stored in organizations (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995). This makes radical change from the top risky, and suggests that business strategies should be cautions and responsive to the opinions of workers in organizations.

Replication, Routines, Inertia, and Strategy This section points to further ways in which the framework of generalized Darwinism can guide research in organization studies. This is not primarily a process of applying biological analogies. Instead, it is one of using an overarching theoretical framework to guide and develop new lines of research. Where vague terms such as ‘evolution’ and ‘co-evolution’ typically obscure such distinctions, the difference between the diffusion of routines from organization to organization, on the one hand, and their inheritance through business spin-offs is crucial, as evidenced by empirical studies (Dahlstrand 1998; Klepper 2008; Bünstorf 2009). These processes are different forms of replication. Diffusion involves existing interactor (firm) Y copying a replicator (routine) from interactor (firm) X. By contrast, with spin-offs, an interactor (firm) X itself leads to the creation of a new interactor (firm) Y, which carries some replicators (routines) from its parent. Empirical case studies suggest that the faithful copying of routines through diffusion is often more difficult than through spin-offs. Generalized Darwinism not only helps make clear distinctions but also points to important further questions for empirical enquiry. Far from conflating social with biological evolution, the conceptual framework of generalized Darwinism may be used to illuminate key differences between the two. As Nelson and Winter (1982) point out, firms can alter their own routines (replicators), whereas (outside modern genetic engineering) no biological organism can manipulate its genes (replicators). Furthermore, the diffusion of replicators (routines) from organization to organization is commonplace in the business world. But diffusion is less prominent in biology, where generational replication through offspring is relatively more important. Clear concepts spanning different domains can illuminate detailed differences as well as abstract commonalities. Generalized Darwinism impinges on debates concerning the roles of routine rigidity and strategic choice. It is a mistake to regard all ‘evolutionary’ approaches as rivals to other analyses that put the emphasis on the efficacy of strategic choice by managers (Child 1972; Hrebeniak and Joyce 1985). Far from dispensing with the role of individual agency, Darwinism inspired a huge cluster of multidisciplinary studies on the evolution of brain, mind, and behaviour (Richards 1987). Crucially for this debate, the replicator concept used here emphasizes that routines are dispositional and informational, rather than behaviour as such. By contrast, conceiving routines in terms of behaviour leads to the mistaken notion that the definitional rigidity of the routine implies behavioural rigidity. The dispositional and informational conception (inspired by the refined replicator notion) makes it possible to combine routine rigidity with behavioural flexibility. Routines in an organization often link up with each other. Multiple levels exist, involving routines to monitor or change routines. Flexibility requires some routinization, such as routines to encourage the innovation of routines and to make existing routines more adaptable. Page 10 of 16

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Emerging and innovative organizations, led by dynamic entrepreneurs, cannot escape the need for routines. Entrepreneurs are not omniscient. Much valuable information in the firm has to be stored in the tacit knowledge of its employees. Consequently, as Brian Loasby (2007: 1104) explained, entrepreneurial and routine behaviours are complementary: ‘entrepreneurship defies routine; but it requires routine and results in routine'. Both habits and routines can operate on multiple levels, often where some rule-like dispositions are above others in a developmental control hierarchy. But we should not assume that terms such as ‘multi-level selection’ or ‘multi-level evolution’ are clear and unambiguous. We need to be clear whether the levels refer to interactors or replicators. Because hierarchical control systems among replicators (genes and organizational routines) are commonplace in complex population systems, the ‘multi-level’ term might best be reserved for hierarchically nested levels of interactors. Multi-level evolution would occur where an organization has subsidiaries or other component interactors. Habits and routines do not imply the absence of choice (Dewey 1922). In complex evolving systems, there are bound to be conflicts between habits or routines. Habits may clash within an individual, just as routines may conflict within an organization. These conflicts create enhanced necessities for choice. There may not be routines in place to deal with the dilemma, or full strategic deliberation may be required. Routinization generates rather than negates opportunities for strategic choice. Organizational strategy is not a set of ideas or a set of practices relating to one individual. To be viable, it has to be embedded in individual habit and organizational routine. Strategic development requires routinization. Strategic choice does not mean the abolition of automaticity. In the absence of routine, organizational choice would be both overwhelming and ineffective.

Conclusion Organization science has been keen to address processes of change in organizations and organizational populations. Terms such as ‘evolution’ and ‘co-evolution’ are commonplace but signify little on their own. It is often unclear whether they refer to single entities or populations. With the development of the conceptual categories of generalized Darwinism, researchers into organizations are obliged either to adopt this framework or to clarify the alternative type of evolutionary process involved. As yet, no adequate developed alternative framework exists for populations or organizations, where we are required to explain the processes of competitive selection, the sources of variation, and the manner of replication of key strategic information. Understanding of the conceptual framework of generalized Darwinism has in part been blocked by mischaracterizations. Previous objections turn out to be groundless. The adoption of Darwinian principles is not primarily a matter of analogy, but of ontological commonality at an abstract level. It does not mean that important differences between social and biological evolution are overlooked. Discussion of generalized Darwinism has further been thwarted by misleading terminology in the debate between selectionist and adaptationist views on organizational change. There is no warrant to confine Darwinism to one side of this debate. Darwinism does not uphold that intentions, strategy, or organizational adaptation are unimportant. Even if something like Lamarckian inheritance is apparent, Lamarckism is not an overarching evolutionary framework. The framework of generalized Darwinism can accommodate differing empirical assessments of the relative importance of selection and adaptation, and provide the conceptual structure for the development of detailed theories of organizational and industrial evolution (Stoelhorst and Huizing 2006). The version of generalized Darwinism promoted here entails the replicator–interactor distinction. This framework underlines the need to identify social replicators (such as habits and routines) and interactors (organizations), and it emphasizes the crucial role of social replicators in retaining and helping to pass on knowledge.

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Because replicators play a crucial role in the development of social interactors (organizations), and evolutionary selection acts directly upon organizations, the replicator–interactor framework emphasizes the importance of both developmental adaptation and competitive selection in social evolution. It invalidates any dichotomy between these processes, and helps to reconcile insights from organization studies, organizational ecology, and business strategy. The replicator–interactor framework is useful for helping to understand processes leading to greater complexity in social and business systems. A general theoretical argument underlines the importance of the copying fidelity of replicators in evolution. This also may help us understand why so many successful business firms insist on exact copying of business routines when they establish or franchise new plants or outlets. The emphasis on social replicators and their capacity to store information underlines the likelihood that radical strategic change from the top of organizations carries high risks (Hodgson 2011b). Because of its largely tacit nature, business executives can understand only a small part of the knowledge held in organizations. Leadership and entrepreneurship should not be overemphasized. Successful business strategy must involve employees and address habits and routines at every level of the organization. The general conceptualization of the replicator within this framework implies an information-based conception of organizational routines. Addressing routines as rule-like, informational entities, rather than behaviours, overcomes the apparent conflict between routine rigidity and flexibility. Rigid conditional informational rules in routines can permit enormous behavioural flexibility. Furthermore, routines can interact with one another, and on different levels. There may be routines to modify routines. The dichotomy between routines and strategic choice evaporates. The replicator–interactor concepts permit much greater precision when addressing ‘multi-level’ evolution. The concepts promoted here immediately reveal the complications. There may be different levels of routines (replicators) in a single organization (interactor). Alternatively, evolutionary selection can operate on individuals, organizations, organizations of organizations, and so on. Multiple levels exist in both cases, but they are quite different. The framework of generalized Darwinism, including the complex concept of selection, provides a means of analyzing both. The application of Darwinian principles to the evolution of social entities opens up a further agenda by building a bridge with the rapidly growing body of research on the evolution of social cooperation and morality (Hammerstein 2003; Henrich 2004; Bowles and Gintis 2011; Hodgson 2014). This research has clear implications for understanding cooperation within organizations (Hodgson 2013a). We are only at the beginning of this modern Darwinian research programme in the social sciences, and these are just a few of the possible insights and research questions that may emerge. The acceptance of Darwinian principles combined with the discovery of the specific mechanisms involved in biology led to an explosion of productive research in biology that continues today. By using generalized Darwinian principles in the social domain, combined with a detailed understanding of the psychological and social mechanisms involved in the retention and replication of information in social organizations, we may be on the brink of a substantial expansion of our understanding of organizational evolution. Of course, further empirical research is vital. But clear concepts and theories are required to guide all enquiry and give it adequate meaning.

Notes 1This chapter uses some material from Hodgson (2013b). The author is grateful to Howard Aldrich, Denise Dollimore, and Hari Tsoukas for helpful comments. 2See Veblen (1899), Campbell (1965), Hull (1988), Aldrich (1999), Hodgson (2002), Stoelhorst (2005, 2008), Page 12 of 16

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Stoelhorst and Huizing (2006), Aldrich et al. (2008), Hodgson and Knudsen (2006a, 2010b), Beinhocker (2011), and Pelikan (2011). 3Darwin was neither racist nor reactionary (Hodgson 2006). There were few explicit proponents of ‘social Darwinism’ and what was described as such by its more numerous critics changed radically through time (Bannister 1988; Hodgson 2004). 4See Hodgson and Knudsen (2010b) for criticism of other misguided rejections of Darwinism. Nelson (2006) broadly supports generalized Darwinism, except for his misgivings about the replicator–interactor framework. 5Examples include classic texts by McKelvey (1982), Nelson and Winter (1982), Boyd and Richerson (1985), and Hayek (1988). 6Darwin knew nothing of genes but anticipated the general idea of inherited information in organisms. 7Information here means a code or signal. A message has ‘information content’ when its receipt causes some action (Shannon and Weaver 1949). With social evolution, it is essential to bring meanings and interpretations into the picture. The informational and rule-based definition of replicators is defended in Hodgson and Knudsen (2010b). See also Adami et al. ( 2000), Beinhocker (2006, 2011). 8But Nelson and Winter's (1982) treatment of routines is confusing in some respects (Hodgson, 2008). 9 The copying of habits of thought is more complex and relies on language (Hodgson and Knudsen 2010b: 138-9). Although there is a ‘Lamarckian’ link from our behaviour to our habits, it is a causal cul-de-sac. It plays no part in the inheritance process. This is very different from any imagined Lamarckian process in the biological sphere, where replicators are copied directly. Similar arguments apply to the replication of organizational routines (Hodgson and Knudsen 2006a, 2006b, 2010b). 10See Hodgson and Knudsen (2010b) for critical discussions of other purportedly rival approaches, such as ‘self-organization theory'. 11Selection does not always lead to improvement or efficiency. As in biology, selection can lead to suboptimal outcomes (Gould 1980; Hodgson 1993). Selection is not a straightforward concept. It comes in different forms, notably subset selection and successor selection (Price 1995; Hodgson and Knudsen 2010b). Many ‘selectionist’ accounts focus on subset selection only. Successor selection involves generational transmission, as with business spin-offs. 12See Knudsen and Winter (unpublished) for other prominent examples.

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies

PART Ill

Process Methodology

Malena com d1re1tos a.utorats

The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Ethnography and Organizational Processes

Contributors: Merlijn van Hulst, Sierk Ybema & Dvora Yanow Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Ethnography and Organizational Processes" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n14 Print pages: 223-236 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Ethnography and Organizational Processes Merlijn van HulstSierk YbemaDvora Yanow All is in motion but some social flows move so slowly relative to others that they seem almost as fixed and stationary as the landscape and the geographical levels under it, though these too, are, of course, forever in slow flux. Victor Turner (1974: 44) We say the acrobat on the high wire maintains her stability. However, she does so by continuously correcting her imbalances …. Tsoukas and Chia (2002: 572) In recent decades, organizational scholars have set out to explore the processual character of organizations. They have investigated both the overtly ephemeral and sometimes dramatically unstable aspects of contemporary organizing and the social flux and flow of everyday organizing hiding beneath organizations’ stable surface appearances. These studies manifest a range of different approaches and methods. In this chapter, we evaluate the use and usefulness of one of these – ethnography – for studying organizational processes. As ethnographers draw close enough to observe the precariousness of such processes, stay long enough to see change occurring, and are contextually sensitive enough to understand the twists and turns that are part of organizational life, ethnography is well suited for such study. Ethnographers are commonly aware that ‘… incremental shifts and repositioning are the rule, not the exception, in organizational life’ (Morrill and Fine, 1997: 434). ‘By virtue of its situated, unfolding, and temporal nature', then, as Jarzabkowski et al. (2014: 282) put it, ethnography ‘is revelatory of processual dynamics'. Ethnography or, to emphasize the processual nature of doing ethnography itself, ethnographying (Tota, 2004; de Jong, Kamsteeg, and Ybema, 2013), typically means three things: (i) doing research (fieldwork), (ii) understanding the world with an orientation towards sensemaking (sensework), and (iii) articulating and presenting those understandings (textwork). The first of these refers to research done through prolonged and intensive engagement with the research setting and its actors, combining different fieldwork methods (observing, with whatever degree of participating; talking to people, including interviewing; and/or the close reading of research-relevant documents). Second, ethnography embraces a sensibility towards meaning and meaning-making processes, and this shapes the ways its observations and interpretations are carried out. Third, ethnographic analyses are commonly presented through a written text presenting data that give voice to the minutiae of everyday life, in their social, political, and historical contexts, thereby conveying to readers a sense of ‘being there'. This fieldwork, sensework, textwork trio may remind one of other treatments of field research methods (e.g., fieldwork, headwork, and textwork in Van Maanen, 1988; 2011; fieldwork, deskwork, and textwork in Yanow, 2000), which Wilkinson (2014) supplements with preparatory legwork. We replace the middle term with ‘sensework’ to encompass a broader range of analytic activity that is sensitive towards organizational actors’ meaning making, the complexities of the everyday, and the tacitly known and/or concealed dimensions of organizational life. More is involved, in our view, than just the ‘headwork’ of theory-informed interpretation and distanced analysis. Although previous work has typically not made a process focus explicit, the history of organizational studies shows ethnographic research being sensitive to a key feature of organizing processes unfolding over time: the intersubjective processes of ‘social reality’ construction. Ethnography has commonly required a prolonged period of researcher immersion in the research setting in which fieldwork is being carried out. This has inspired many influential organizational studies, both in the discipline's early days and in more recent years (Fine, Morrill and Surianarain, 2009; Ybema et al., 2009; Yanow, 2013). Earlier studies delved into the dynamics of, for instance, bureaucratic control and resistance (e.g., Selznick, 1949; Blau, 1955; Kaufman, 1960; Roy, 1960; Crozier, 1964; Kunda, 1992), organizational performances and dramatics (Goffman, 1959), and the unofficial Page 2 of 14

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workarounds brought into play through processes of power struggles and local meaning making of labour relations (Dalton, 1959). Some of these studies also covered longer-term developments, such as Gouldner's follow-up account of worker–management relationships in a gypsum mine (Gouldner, 1954). Although these studies show that an ethnographic approach is well equipped for doing process analyses, processes themselves were not often their explicit concern. More recent ethnographic studies, however, have taken a more explicit ‘process turn', focusing on the instability and dynamics of organizational life on the ground (e.g., Feldman, 2000; Jay, 2013; Lok and de Rond, 2013). We begin this chapter with a sketch of studying organizational processes which provides the conceptual footing to argue for the relevance of ethnographying for this kind of study. To bring the processual qualities of ethnographic work into sharp focus, ethnography can be seen as ‘following’ actors, interactions, and artefacts over time through and space. Ethnographers go along with actors, interactions, and artefacts on the move or stay in one place observing things that move around them. Next, we explain in more detail what ethnographic fieldwork, sensework, and textwork entail, and how these relate to process. We discuss two different foci in process analysis – long-term developments and micro-dynamics – and present two recent examples of ethnographic work which illustrate what ethnography can do for the study of process. We conclude with a few suggestions as to how ethnographers could become more process-sensitive in their field-, sense-, and textwork. That is, although ethnography has something to contribute to process studies, ethnographers could themselves learn from taking the issues engaged in this handbook into consideration.

Studying Processes: Verbs and Nouns A process approach sets out to address ‘questions about how and why things emerge, develop, grow, or terminate over time’ (Langley et al., 2013: 1). Focusing on ‘how’ questions, process studies bring into view ‘[t]he temporal structure of social practices and the uncertainty and urgencies that are inherently involved in them’ (Langley et al., 2013: 2; see also Langley, 2009). Reorganizations, innovations, and crises, in particular, are moments that show how organizational life changes. In one view, taking a process perspective entails looking at the way organizations move from one relatively stable state to another (referred to in the literature as a ‘weak process view'). A more radical process perspective (a strong process view) goes one step further. It conceptualizes organizational life as flow(ing), and organizing is ‘the attempt to order the intrinsic flux of human action, to channel it towards certain ends by generalizing and institutionalizing particular cognitive representation', finding in it ‘a pattern that is constituted, shaped, and emerging from change’ (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002: 567). In this view, ‘entities (such as organizations and structures) are no more than temporary instantiations of ongoing processes, continually in a state of becoming'. Moreover, changing ‘is not something that happens to things, but the way in which reality is brought into being in every instant’ (Langley et al., 2013: 5; see also Van de Ven and Poole, 2005). Organization, then, ‘is a verb, a process of organizing, an emergent flux’ (Van de Ven and Poole, 2005: 1387), a view echoing Weick's (1979) argument: ‘Without verbs, people would not see motion, change, and flow; people would only see static display and spines’ (Weick, 1979: 44). Process approaches turn conventional thinking on its head, as they take off from the assumption that change is the standard, suggesting that stability is what needs to be explained, instead. Organizations and other social systems, as Schön (1971: 30) would have it, are part of ‘continuing processes of transformation’ within society. Seen from this angle, organizations are often ‘dynamically conservative', because they ‘fight to remain the same’ (Schön, 1971: 32). In another view, fighting for stability and fighting for change may be seen as alternating processes. From this perspective, the dynamism of everyday life tends to solidify into routines, customs, recurrent patterns, and so forth (Bakken and Hernes, 2006; cf. Berger and Luckmann, 1966, on the reification and institutionalization of intersubjectively constructed social realities). And these seeming stabilities may subsequently become contested and deliberately or unintentionally altered, becoming ‘liquid’ again in ongoing iterations. Rendering both ‘organization’ and ‘organizing', both noun and verb, credible depictions call for a research method that is capable of analyzing both ‘what is routinely reproduced’ (nouns) and ‘what is being altered’ (verbs), and the relationships between them. This is what ethnography can offer. Page 3 of 14

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Ethnographers are often drawn to the unexpected, the non-routine, the unusual, the sudden ruptures, and so on, if only because these more manifestly verb-like moments of change tend to attract attention and talk. Ethnography may thereby allow researchers to capture organizational reality ‘in flight’ (Pettigrew, 1990: 268). As they become immersed in the day-to-day, the business-as-usual, the constant reproduction of yesterday, ethnographers are likely to get an inside view of the ‘noun-like’ qualities of organizational life as well. In working to understand business-as-usual, they may encounter the more submerged ‘flux’ of apparently stable routines (Feldman, 2000) and institutions (Lok and de Rond, 2013), thereby catching reality ‘in slumber’ (or ‘kept in slumber’ in, for instance, organizational actors’ attempt to secure the status quo). Ethnography cultivates a sensibility towards examining both ‘back’ and ‘front regions’ (Goffman, 1959), both ‘theories-in-use’ and ‘espoused theories’ (Argyris and Schön, 1974), and the interplays and contrasts between the two (see the section below on ‘sensework'). As a method of observation and inquiry, it has the potential to bring into view both apparent stability and hidden flux, both managers’ grandiose claims of radical change and persistent practices and business-as-usual.

Ethnography in Fieldwork, Sensework, and Textwork Ethnographic research ‘encourages appreciation of social life as constituted by ongoing, fluid processes’ (Emerson et al., 1995: 4). Through immersion in, and analysis of, the research setting, ethnographers seek to capture, in depth and over time, the unfolding of organizational life and its dynamism. As noted above, ethnography entails prolonged and intensive fieldwork, meaning-focused sensework, and ‘thick’ textwork. We take these up in turn, discussing their potential strengths for the study of processes.

Fieldwork Ethnography is commonly defined in the methods literature as a research strategy involving prolonged and intensive engagement with, and in, the everyday humdrum of social life. Also called field research or fieldwork, when used to study organizations it combines methods for observing (with whatever degree of participating), conversing (including formal interviewing), and close reading, literally and figuratively, of documentary sources and other material artefacts, seeking to understand their meanings for situational actors. In organizational settings, the third category includes such things as research question-relevant texts (e.g., annual reports, correspondence, internal memos, web pages) and objects that are amenable to visual methods (e.g., cartoons, jokes, photographs, and other forms of artwork published in those texts or hung on building walls, office doors, and bulletin boards; and built space and its furnishings; see Yanow, 2014, Table 10.1, for other possibilities). Observing actors, their interactions, and the material artefacts they engage in helps ethnographers explore the everyday business that makes up an organization. Using observing, talking, and reading in combination over an extended period of time makes it possible to capture the ‘up-in-the-airness’ of organizing as it unfolds and, as hanging out at an organizational site proceeds over time, the longer-term changes in the ways things are done. For example, the second author's ethnography of a newspaper, which focused on ‘change-talk', enabled him to see the newspaper's evolving identity as the temporary outcomes of editors’ negotiations over the transformation and preservation of existing editorial policies and practices in ongoing everyday discursive struggles over the collective past, present, and future (Ybema, 2014). Informal talks help ethnographers understand the reasons organizational members give for acting the way they do and the meanings that objects, other actors, and acts have for them. Ethnographic studies typically draw on a series of conversational encounters, including follow-ups with the same people, rather than one-off interviews, and this enables the researcher to trace shifts over time, bringing to light patterns that develop over a longer time. The study of material elements, such as documents, which allow ethnographers to follow the traces of history as well as providing snapshots of current states of affairs, can also be helpful in developing a view of changes over time. Page 4 of 14

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Ethnographers bring different kinds of data, generated through the use of different kinds of methods, into conversation with each other, and these interactions among different methods are what give ethnography its specific utility with respect to studying organizational processes. Such intertwining enables attention to the varied character of organizational life, such as noting organizational actors’ sensemaking practices across different situations; … what people do and what they say they do; routine patterns as well as dynamic processes of organizing; frontstage appearances and backstage activities; the minutiae of actors’ lifeworlds as well as the wider social and historical contexts in which these lifeworlds unfold. (Ybema et al., 2009: 6) Together with their extended immersion in organizational settings, ethnographers’ triangulation across methods helps to detect tensions, alterations, and reformulations that actors might talk about among themselves, explicitly and spontaneously, beyond an engagement with ‘official’ or public texts only. In these ways, fieldwork helps ethnographers generate accounts that fit a processual understanding of organizations, as these various modes of generating data bring diverse sorts of historical and present-day organizational complexities to the table for comparison and analysis.

Sensework In a second understanding of the term, ethnography involves specific ‘sensework'. Its distinctive ‘sensibility’ is increasingly catching methodologists’ attention. They refer, for instance, to ethnographers’ inclination to draw on, potentially, all the senses (hearing, seeing, smelling, etc.; Pink, 2009), to see the strange in the familiar (Ybema and Kamsteeg, 2009), to appreciate the spatial and temporal situatedness of organizational practices, or to be attuned to the symbolic, as well as the more hidden and concealed, dimensions of organizational life. Three forms of sensework demonstrate how it directs researchers’ attention to matters of process. First, ethnographers ‘work to make sense of organizational actors’ sensemaking’ (Ybema et al., 2009: 8). This involves adopting ‘an orientation toward the social world – actors, (inter)actions, settings – and the material objects in it which focuses on the centrality of meaning and meaning making to research practices’ (Yanow, Ybema, and van Hulst, 2012: 331–332). Analysis engages the specific language, acts, and/or material objects that, in symbolic fashion, carry and transmit the meanings they represent and which actors create and attribute to social realities. Because ethnographers are oriented towards meaning making, they zoom in on meaning-making processes and the actual meanings made in specific situations. This enables them to detail the processes of reality construction in very concrete ways, even if these are theorized using more abstract concepts (such as culture, identity, power, discourse, etc.). Also central to an ethnographer's work is a sensibility to the ‘complexities of the everyday in organizational settings’ (Ybema et al., 2009: 1). This second sensibility is towards grasping what everyday life is like in the setting under study. To achieve this, ethnography commonly rests on an in-dwelling among inhabitants of that place or that practice, sharing the organizational or practice life, typically in a situation-specific role. Such indwelling requires ethnographers to be there, in the research setting and using all senses, long enough and engaged enough to come to understand the common-sense, everyday, unwritten and unspoken, tacitly known ‘rules of engagement’ that are a second sense to situational ‘natives', moving from being more of a stranger to that setting to being more of a ‘familiar’ in and with it (while rendering it ‘strange’ again in the writing). Much as ‘being there’ in everyday life involves engaging with others who inhabit the same environs (family members, co-workers, bus drivers, shopkeepers, etc.), ethnography itself is more than a set of interviews or observations of organizational behaviour, entailing instead a degree of ‘living with and living like those who are studied’ (Van Maanen, 1988: 2). In-dwelling involves becoming socialized to a world that is meaningful to people on the ‘inside', getting to know ‘the’ organization in similar although not identical ways to how organizational Page 5 of 14

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members know it. In exploring everyday life, ethnographers delve into the dynamics of the day-to-day. Seeing organizing from the inside can help bring out both routine and non-routine processes of organizing that might escape the attention of a researcher who remains on the outside. Third, ethnographic sensework also involves an orientation towards the ‘back stage’ of organizational acts – what organizational actors hope to hide or conceal from public scrutiny – along with an eye for the political and emotional dimensions that underpin everyday organizational life. As noted elsewhere (Ybema et al., 2009: 6–7), ethnographers can access the tacitly known and/or concealed dimensions of meaning making and expose harsh and hidden organizational realities and entanglements with power. This gives them a particular edge when it comes to studying organizing processes and their front- and backstages. For instance, ethnographers may study external appearances, formal policies, and other efforts of organizational actors to establish a particular image of or practice in an organization, while also detailing the underlying unsettledness – e.g., emotional struggles or backstage politicking – of such seemingly fixed organizational phenomena. Alternatively, ethnographers may find dynamic front stages and routine backstages. They may find, for instance, management's articulated claims that they are engaging in radical restructuring, embracing the latest management fad or introducing new policies, while at the same time the backstage data reveal hidden processes working to maintain the status quo. As they bring otherwise covert aspects of organizational life to the fore and enable actors to see themselves through another's eyes, ethnographers may at times challenge organizational actors’ own senses of routine, taken-for-granted ways of thinking and acting, pointing out the perhaps subtle ways in which these have altered or through which actors have fought to retain them. In sum, by being sensitive to both front and backstage realities, ethnographic work brings out different dimensions of organizational dynamics.

Textwork The strength of ethnographic textwork is to ‘see the world in a grain of sand’ (slightly paraphrasing William Blake's poem; Pachirat, 2014), exploring and exemplifying the general through the local and the particular (cf. Geertz, 2000). The combination of specific detail with broader context offers an alternative to static, apolitical writings, what Pettigrew critiqued as the ‘ahistorical, acontextual and aprocessual’ qualities of most organizational studies (quoted in Bate, 1997: 1155). Three features in particular bear on ethnographies of organizational processes. Before we discuss the three features, we first say a few words on the textworker's raw material for describing processes: fieldnotes. Ethnographers in the midst of fieldwork are expected to write lots of detailed notes, a necessary activity for tracing the business-as-usual of everyday organizational life. They might, for instance, document organizational procedures, including how much or how often organizational members deviate from those procedures that at first blush may have seemed strict guidelines. Fieldnotes can also help ethnographers bring into view the improvisations and bricolage that keep organizational procedures running smoothly or prevent them from running into the ground. Later on, these fieldnotes – detailed descriptions of firsthand, field-based observations and experiences – become the building blocks for working up textual reports on the research. The detailed descriptions enable researchers to better ‘identify and follow processes in observed events and hence develop and sustain processual interpretations of happenings in the field’ (Emerson et al., 1995: 14, Italics in the original; cf. Jarzabkowski et al., 2014). Having laid the ground for textwork in fieldnotes, how do we get from these notes to ethnographic texts? Fieldnotes are intended to support thick descriptions of organizations and organizing. As Geertz (1973) used the term, ‘thick description’ goes beyond detail alone to provide sufficient contextualizing background that readers of an ethnographic account may grasp the meanings embedded in what is being described. The ethnographer (re)constructs the (layers of) meaning of what is going on in the field. The various layers may signal the Page 6 of 14

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paths through which organizational realities have gained their present-day shape, the multiple realities that may co-exist at a single point in time, and even both consensus and struggle, stability and change. One might say that ethnographers shoot their ‘fieldnote film’ on location. While the camera is running, they can begin to see how and to what extent organizational activities and their associated meanings are changing, or not. In this way, small changes in organizational actors’ performances come into view, and the ethnographer can thereby see them ‘constantly reweaving their webs of beliefs and actions to accommodate new experiences’ (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002: 508). Ethnographic texts typically situate their descriptive material within the broader social settings and historical and institutional dynamics of which observed life is a part, combining ‘extreme close-ups’ that zoom in on expressions, talk, gestures, and objects with ‘wide-angle’ or ‘long shots’ that zoom out to show panoramic views of the organization, with its history, power relations, surrounding societal discourses, and other layers of meaning (Ybema et al., 2009: 7; cf. Nicolini, 2009). Ethnography may, then, unite ‘Big History’ and ‘small history’ in one text. We summarize this section's discussion in Table 14.1. Table 14.1Some elements of the three aspects of ethnographying which contribute to studying organizational processes Fieldwork

• Extended immersion in the field • Combining methods: conversing/interviewing, (participant) observing, document locating, and reading • Following actors, interactions, and objects • Juxtaposing and confronting data from different sources

Sensework

Textwork

• Sensibility towards processes of meaning making • Sensibility towards the complexities of the everyday • Sensibility towards outside appearances as well as tacitly known and concealed processes

• Thick description • Placing both author and reader at the scene • Focus on situated action and broader context, mixing closeups and long shots • Interpreting objects, actors, and acts as meaningful in a wider context

Two Examples Our distinction between extreme close-ups that show detail and wide-angle or long shots that show panoramic views implies at least two different modes of ethnographying organizational processes: (i) analyzing continuities and discontinuities over a long stretch of time by using ‘long shots', or (ii) studying short-term, situational close-ups. Some ethnographic researchers stretch their fieldwork over many years of present-time work; others include historical analysis and archival data. Both of these allow researchers to follow slow-paced developments or sudden transformations over long periods of time. Rather than offering a helicopter account that flies quickly from, for instance, founding fathers to present-day heroes, these longitudinal ethnographies offer in-depth accounts of organizational life across time (on combining historical analysis and ethnography, see, e.g., Rowlinson, Hassard, and Decker (2014) and Ybema (2014). Other ethnographic researchers have a shorter-term focus, bringing into view, for instance, situational dynamics or organizational bricolage. Page 7 of 14

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We see this distinction between long-term and short-term dynamism, or long shots and close-ups, as partly paralleling the distinction between weak and strong process studies, where the former looks at organizational changes over longer periods of time and the latter sees the continuous improvisations of organizational actors which resemble the calibrating acts of the dancer on the wire (as in the chapter's second epigraph). In this section, we illustrate these two modes with two examples from empirical research.

A Long Shot: Bankers’ Bodies Alexandra Michel's (2011) nine-year ethnography of two American investment banks explores how bankers’ relations with their bodies evolved, the various ways in which the management controls those bodies, and the consequences for the organizations. The author starts from a paradox: U.S. knowledge workers – highly educated and qualified employees who work on intellectual tasks – ‘report autonomy on when and how to work, but their hours are more uniform than a personal-choice model would predict and higher than they are in other times and cultures’ (Michel, 2011: 326). Looking at the literature, she concluded that ‘some controls are not cognitive but bypass the mind – the domain of cognitive control theories – and target the neglected domain: the body’ (2011: 327). During her study, Michel followed four cohorts of bankers who started work in the first and second years of her study. Having worked as an associate at a Wall Street bank, she was treated by her research participants like an in-group member, trusted with sensitive details concerning the ways the bankers changed over time, and invited to join both work and non-work activities. Her research drew on two years – 7000 hours – of observation, 600 formal, semi-structured interviews, informal interviews with about 200 informants, and the analysis of bank documents. A substantial part of the interviews concerned bankers’ recent experiences and changes in their practices. Michel triangulated her data by source, for instance by counting and comparing references to their bodies which bankers made in yearly interviews. Michel found three phases in the working careers of the bankers, in each of which they related to their bodies differently. In the first – years 1–3 – ‘the body’ was treated like an object. In the second – years 4–6 – ‘the body’ became an antagonist, tending to break down. This physical or mental breakdown made the bankers reflect on taken-for-granted actions, noticing the limits of the mind ‘and thus relinquish[ing] its control, and let[ting] the body guide the action’ (Michel, 2011: 353). Organizational control, however, as the bankers experienced it, ‘remained high as the committed bankers fought their bodies’ (Michel, 2011: 353). In the third period – year 6 onward – some of the bankers started to treat their bodies like a subject that could guide action. When it occurred, this phase was marked by a feeling of decreased organizational control, but increased banker creativity, ethics, and judgement. Michel's study gives us an in-depth understanding of an organizational process that is typically hidden from view. This insight was – and could only have been – achieved through an ethnographic study. The long observational time allowed her to see the bigger picture of the bankers’ practices and the ways these evolved, leading her to be able to contextualize and thickly describe embodied career work. Tracing changes over time, she was able to note three different periods in the working careers of organizational members. And finally, her ethnographic engagement and in-dwelling helped her to understand not only the bankers’ views of work, but also their ways of working, and to track changes in those views over time.

A Close-Up: Local Government Storytellers in Action Our second example draws from the first author's seven-month ethnography of a Dutch local government, including deliberations concerning the site planning for a new town centre (van Hulst, 2008a; 2012). Along with analysis of research-relevant documents and interviews with some 50 organizational actors, the fieldwork entailed semi-participant observation in weekly meetings of the town's governing board, whose members were the mayor and aldermen, and in frequent meetings of civil servants and of aldermen, citizens, and other memPage 8 of 14

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bers of civil society. Starting from the observation that actors involved in such processes ‘tell stories to talk about what is going on and what should be done with public spaces’ (van Hulst, 2012: 308), stories were reconstructed from conversations, interviews, documents, and observation notes. The plotline of the main story that actors started out with might be condensed as follows: Our town has a shopping centre, but it lacks a heart. For 25 years we have been planning for such a town centre. Some favour Location 1, others Location 2. Up until now, however, none of the plans has materialized. Due to the failure of prior planning activities, a political gulf had grown between those who preferred one or the other of these two different locations. To move beyond this deadlock, members of the newly elected governing board argued that on their watch, the planning decision would be ‘now or never'. The board, with the help of the municipality's bureaucracy and hired consultants, would prepare a proposal for the municipal council which would include a comparison of various possible locations, along with board members’ own preference. As a first step, research had to be done to determine the suitability of each of them, something the alderman in charge of planning for the centre referred to as determining their ‘DNA'. In an effort to reframe the debate, the board proposed choosing between five locations rather than just two. On the basis of the research, each location would receive a score, and this would help the board decide on their preferred location and assist them in preparing their proposal for the municipal council. In the meantime, that alderman organized public meetings at all five locations, where he told a story about the planning process and the need for a centre that the municipality could afford to build. At the conclusion of the research, one of the two original locations received the best score, the other coming in only in third place. In that moment, the board, whose members had just agreed to support the top-scoring location, wondered whether their endorsement would satisfy those who still favoured the other one. It turned out that they had not considered the other three locations seriously. The alderman in charge and his staff improvised a solution, thinking this might help win over the anticipated opposition: a connection would be built linking the two locations, which were not far apart. In the days and weeks that followed, a new (sub)plot was woven at the town hall; but other actors did not sit still. They, too, were thinking about the stories they could tell on the basis of recent developments. Some continued to hold out their favourite location and the story that went with it. Others adopted the board's new story. To the surprise of the board, however, one of the political parties they had expected would support their new story came up with yet another narrative. This one started from the idea that a new centre had to be built for the coming 100 years. As the town would grow in a westward direction, this made a third location – one of the new ones – much more feasible than the research had suggested. The turmoil that ensued was the unintended consequence of the board's having created competition among five locations. On the final, ‘now or never’ decision night, the members had to threaten to resign in order to win the vote for the location they had endorsed. This ethnography describes an organizing process whose history had unfolded over decades, but it zooms in on a relatively short period of time: the final months of decision making. During this period, in reaction to new developments in the planning process and its related political processes, old stories were reconstructed and retold. None of the central actors involved knew for sure what the others were up to and how that would affect the outcome of the deliberations. At the same time, as knowledge of what was going on was highly distributed among parties to the debates, various actors were still struggling to make sense of the ongoing, collective sensemaking. Even as time was running out, contending actors were working on their new stories, meeting for a final showdown on the night the decision had to be taken. Talking to the various parties enabled the ethnographer to get a good sense of the meanings the prospective town centre and centre planning held for them. But while from the outset the process appeared to be a straightforward fight between two stories, things turned out to be much more complicated – for both decision Page 9 of 14

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makers and ethnographer. The study of front- and backstages revealed the involved process's twists and turns. Observation, conversations, and interviewing while the planning process was in play made it possible to see how new storylines developed and gained momentum and to understand how storytelling related to other activities of organizational and other actors. The research deconstructed the storytelling that took place in the deliberative process, showing how stories are constructed in real time, building on the planning process's long history and reacting to its recent developments. It also contextualized the storytelling as part of broader planning and political organizing in which the question at stake concerned what it should mean, in a normative sense, to have a new town centre. The ethnographer's presence in the field also allowed him to observe and, indeed, experience the struggles, surprises, and improvisations that characterized the organizational storytelling and the contingencies in the ways organizational events unfold. And, indeed, it is not easy to bring out such complexities in a short case description. In the end, because much of what is going on is taking place almost simultaneously and/or hidden from sight, a single picture – a somewhat stable entity – of the process can only emerge after the grand decision is made and the (ethnographer's) report is written.

Reflections We have sought to make the case that ethnography is useful for studying organizational processes. But ethnography, let us not forget, is itself dynamic, ‘a fundamentally creative, explorative and interpretive process’ (Humphreys et al., 2003: 21). Moreover, as we noted in the section on sensework, the person of the ethnographer is a crucial element of ethnographying. Therefore, ethnographers are asked to reflect not just on the research process, but also on the ways in which their own backgrounds, prior experiences, and other aspects of their positionalities were part of that process – specifically, of what they were able to access and not access – thereby enabling the knowledge claims they articulate in the ethnographic texts they produce. That is why this research practice might be called ethnographying (Tota, 2004; de Jong, Kamsteeg, and Ybema, 2013). It is something we do, something that develops along the way, something that is in motion. Ideally and necessarily, ethnographers go with the flow, rather than wedding themselves to preordained research plans; researcher learning is anticipated to take place across the lifespan of the project, rather than being ‘frontloaded’ as in experimental research design (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012). To use more formal methods language, one could say that ethnographic inquiry processes work iteratively or abductively (Agar 2010) and in reflexive cycles (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012), offering room for and even welcoming doubt (Locke et al., 2008) and surprises (Ybema and Kamsteeg, 2009), moving flexibly with events as they unfold (van Hulst, 2008b). Even though ethnographers’ methods are fairly standardized (observing, participating, talking, reading, as noted above), what the study or its results will eventually look like cannot be stipulated in advance. Although ethnography may bring ‘process’ more clearly into view, this is not what organizational ethnographers always do. In addition to exploring what ethnography can bring to process organizational studies, therefore, we also want to consider what a process orientation might contribute to organizational ethnography. Ethnography might make its inherently processual approach more explicit, defining its work as a flow of ethnographying and, for example, developing an understanding of fieldwork as researchers’ acts of ‘following', something which could also be written into research accounts in ethnographic texts. To capture organizational realities ‘on the move', ‘in flight', or ‘in slumber', ethnographers follow actors, interactions, and/or artefacts as these ‘travel’ across social and symbolic boundaries (Yanow, Ybema, and van Hulst, 2012). Instead of offering a static account of organizational settings and structures, or of a team, organization or community in isolation or in two-way interactions, the ‘following fieldworker’ travels along with, or ‘trails', actors, interactions, and/or artefacts, ‘mapping’ over time and across locales, levels, and domains (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012), ‘zooming in’ and ‘zooming out’ (Nicolini, 2009) on everyday practices. Page 10 of 14

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Such a strategy involves, for instance, following actors and their acts by ‘shadowing’ persons (Wolcott, 1973; Czarniawska, 2007) who travel across spatial, social, or temporal boundaries, thereby providing insight into key processes. Research may also involve following interactions, rather than actors, over extended periods of time, focusing on the ‘trading zones’ (Kellogg et al., 2006) where actors – different stakeholders, multidisciplinary teams, or discussion forums on the Internet – meet. Alternatively, in lieu of following actors or acts, ethnographers might follow artefacts and other aspects of the material world travelling through time and/or space, such as ‘the career of information’ (Harper, 1998: 68), tracking the various interpretations and uses made of the information. These three – actors, acts, and artefacts – might also be followed simultaneously, as Hoholm and Araujo (2011) suggest for the ethnographic study of innovations. The two extended examples in the previous section could have been presented as ‘following’ studies: Michel (2011) followed actors and their bodies, van Hulst (2012) followed actors located at different points in the organizational network of a local government. Seeing ethnographic research as pursuing a strategy of following actors, acts and/or artefacts may be further extended, for instance, to following the manufacturing of a product from base material to consumer commodity; following an organization's workflow from dawn to dusk; following a chain of events set off by an incident or an accident (e.g., Christianson et al., 2009); or following the development of discussions among a multiplicity of members of an organization over a particular issue (e.g., Ybema, 2003). Following is also appropriate for the assemblages that increasingly characterize global organizing, whether of products or services. In sum, ethnography fits well with process thinking given that ethnographers typically do one or both of two things. First, they stick around for a long time, which enables them to witness movements over time and/ or space, thereby making visible processes that unfold slowly. The bodies of hardworking employees, for instance, might not start failing in one month, but could be seen to do so over a period of several years (Michel, 2011). Second, ethnographers get close to the action on the ground, typically engaging the complexities, intricacies, and messes of everyday organizational life. In drawing close to subjects and situations and providing detailed accounts of the micro-dynamics of day-to-day organizing, ethnography offers a more complex alternative to the simplification of input-output models of process. Writing this chapter called our attention to the extent to which organizational ethnography might gain from adopting a more explicitly processual approach. Ethnography is inherently, but often implicitly, process oriented; and we would like to see more ethnographies explicitly adopt a process view, one that sees social realities as the product of the here and now (short-term dynamics) and of the then and there (long-term dynamics). Studies of organizational practices, institutions, or identities, for example, might move from treating those phenomena as stable entities towards seeing them as entailing recurrent bricolage, breakdowns, and improvisations (e.g., Brown, 2006; Feldman, 2000; Lok and de Rond, 2013; Nicolini 2009; Schatzki, 2006; Tsoukas and Yanow, 2009; Ybema, Keenoy, et al., 2009) which can best be studied in real time, one of ethnography's strengths as a method of inquiry. In bringing out the processual aspects of ethnography, this chapter might contribute to ‘internal’ methodological developments, in addition to its promise for studying organizational processes in various fields of study.

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Brown, A. D. (2006) ‘A narrative approach to collective identities', Journal of Management Studies, 43(4): 731–753. Christianson, M. K., Farkas, M. T., Sutcliffe, K. M., and Weick, K. E. (2009) ‘Learning through rare events: Significant interruptions at the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum', Organization Science, 20(5): 846–860. Crozier, M. (1964) The Bureaucratic Phenomenon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Czarniawska, B. (2007) Shadowing, and Other Techniques for Doing Fieldwork in Modern Societies. Malmö/ Copenhagen: Liber/CBS Press. Dalton, M. (1959) Men Who Manage. New York: Wiley. de Jong, M., Kamsteeg, F., and Ybema, S. (2013) ‘Ethnographic strategies for making the familiar strange: Struggling with “distance” and “immersion” among Moroccan students', Journal of Business Anthropology, 2(2): 168–186. Emerson, R. M., Fretz, R. I., and Shaw, L. L. (1995) Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Feldman, M. S. (2000) ‘Organizational routines as a source of continuous change', Organization Science, 11(6): 611–629. Fine, G. A., Morrill, C., and Surianarain, S. (2009) ‘Ethnography in organizational settings', in D. A. Buchanan and A. Bryman (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Organizational Research Methods. London: Sage, pp. 602–619. Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic books. Geertz, C. (2000) [1983] Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology ( 3rd ed. ). New York: Basic Books. Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. NY: Anchor Books. Gouldner, A. W. (1954) Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. Glencoe: Free Press. Harper, R. (1998) Inside the IMF: An Ethnography of Documents, Technology and Action. London: Academic Press. Hoholm, T. and Araujo, L. (2011) ‘Studying innovation processes in real-time: The promises and challenges of ethnography', Industrial Marketing Management, 40(6): 933–939. Humphreys, M., Brown, A. D., and Hatch, M. J. (2003) ‘Is ethnography jazz?', Organization, 10(1): 5–31. Jay, J. (2013) ‘Navigating paradox as a mechanism of change and innovation in hybrid organizations', Academy of Management Journal, 56(1): 137–159. Jarzabkowski, P., Bednarek, R., and Lê, J. K. (2014) ‘Producing persuasive findings: Demystifying ethnographic textwork in strategy and organization research', Strategic Organization, 12(4): 274–287. Kaufman, H. (1960) The Forest Ranger: A Study in Administrative Behavior. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press. Kellogg, K. C., Orlikowski, W. J., and Yates, J. A. (2006) ‘Life in the trading zone: Structuring coordination across boundaries in postbureaucratic organizations', Organization Science, 17(1): 22–44. Kunda, G. (1992) Engineering Culture: Control and Commitment in a High-Tech Corporation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Locke, K., Golden-Biddle, K., and Feldman, M. S. (2008) ‘Making doubt generative: Rethinking the role of doubt in the research process', Organization Science, 19(6): 907–918. Lok, J. and de Rond, M. (2013) ‘On the plasticity of institutions: containing and restoring practice breakdowns at the university boat club', Academy of Management Journal, 56(1): 185–208. Langley, A. (2009) ‘Studying processes in and around organizations', in D. Buchanan & A. Bryman (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Organizational Research Methods. London: Sage, pp. 409–429. Langley, A., Smallman, C., Tsoukas, H., and Van de Ven, A. H. (2013) ‘Process studies of change in organization and management: Unveiling temporality, activity, and flow', Academy of Management Journal, 56(1): 1–13. Michel, A. (2011) ‘Transcending socialization: A nine-year ethnography of the body's role in organizational control and knowledge workers’ transformation', Administrative Science Quarterly, 56(3): 325–68. Morrill, C. and Fine, G. A. (1997) ‘Ethnographic contributions to organizational sociology', Sociological Methods & Research, 25(4): 424–451. Nicolini, D. (2009) ‘Zooming in and zooming out: A package of method and theory to study work practices', in Page 12 of 14

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S. Ybema, D. Yanow, F. Kamsteeg, and H. Wels (Eds.), Organizational Ethnography: Studying the Complexities of Everyday Life. London: Sage, pp. 120–138. Pachirat, T. (2014) ‘We call it a grain of sand: The interpretive orientation and a human social science', in D. Yanow and P. Schwartz-Shea (Eds.), Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn ( 2nd ed. ). Armonk, NY: M E Sharpe, pp. 426–432. Pettigrew, A. M. (1990) ‘Longitudinal field research on change: Theory and practice', Organization Science, 1(3): 267–292. Pink, S. (2009) Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: Sage. Rowlinson, M., Hassard, J., and Decker, S. (2014) Research strategies for organizational history: A dialogue between historical theory and organization theory. Academy of Management Review, 39(3): 250–274. Roy, D. (1960) ‘Banana time: Job satisfaction and informal interaction', Human Organization, 18, 156–168. Schatzki, T. R. (2006) ‘On organizations as they happen', Organization Studies, 27(12): 1863–1873. Schön, D. A. (1971) Beyond the Stable State. New York: W. W. Norton. Schwartz-Shea, P. and Yanow, D. (2012) Interpretive Research Design: Concepts and Processes. London: Routledge. Selznick, P. (1949) TVA and the Grass Roots. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tota, A. L. (2004) ‘Ethnographying public memory: The commemorative genre for the victims of terrorism in Italy', Qualitative Research, 4: 131–159. Tsoukas, H. and Chia, R. (2002) ‘On organizational becoming: Rethinking organizational change', Organization Science, 13(5): 567–582. Turner, V. (1974) Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Van de Ven, A. H. and Poole, M. S. (2005) ‘Alternative approaches for studying organizational change', Organization Studies, 26(9): 1377–1404. van Hulst, M. J. (2008a) Town Hall Tales. PhD dissertation. Rotterdam University, the Netherlands/Delft: Eburon. van Hulst, M. J. (2008b) ‘Quite an experience: Using ethnography to study local government', Critical Policy Analysis, 2(2): 143–159. van Hulst, M. J. (2012) ‘Storytelling, a model of and a model for planning', Planning Theory, 11(3): 299–318. Van Maanen, J. (1988) Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Van Maanen, J. (2011) ‘Ethnography as work: Some rules of engagement.' Journal of Management Studies, 48(1): 218–234. Weick, K. (1979) The Social Psychology of Organizing ( 2nd ed. ). New York: McGraw Hill. Wilkinson, C. (2014) ‘On not just finding what you (thought you) were looking for: Reflections on fieldwork data and theory', in D. Yanow and P. Schwartz-Shea (Eds.), Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn ( 2nd ed. ). Armonk, NY: M E Sharpe, pp. 387–405. Wolcott, H. F. (1973) The Man in the Principal's Office: An Ethnography. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Yanow, D. (2000) Conducting Interpretive Policy Analysis. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Yanow, D. (Ed.) (2013) ‘Revisiting the past. Symposium on Nancy C. Morey and Fred Luthans, “Anthropology: The Forgotten Behavioral Science in Management History” (orig. 1987)', Journal of Organizational Ethnography, 2(1): 76–116. Yanow, D. (2014) ‘Methodological ways of seeing and knowing', in E. Bell, S. Warren, and J. Schroeder (Eds.), Routledge Companion to Visual Organization. London: Routledge. pp. 167–189. Yanow, D. and Tsoukas, H. (2009) ‘What is reflection-in-action? A phenomenological account', Journal of Management Studies, 46(8): 1339–1364. Yanow, D., Ybema, S., and van Hulst, M. (2012) ‘Practising organizational ethnography', in G. Symon and C. Page 13 of 14

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Taking a Strong Process Approach to Analyzing Qualitative Process Data

Contributors: Paula Jarzabkowski, Jane L & Paul Spee Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Taking a Strong Process Approach to Analyzing Qualitative Process Data" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n15 Print pages: 237-251 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Taking a Strong Process Approach to Analyzing Qualitative Process Data Paula JarzabkowskiJane LPaul Spee

Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to illuminate different approaches to analyzing process data that are grounded in a strong process approach, which considers phenomena such as strategy or organization to be in continuous flux (Langley, Smallman, Tsoukas, & Van de Ven, 2013). One of the biggest challenges to analyzing empirical research in this approach is the treatment and display of data in order to show processes in an ongoing state of becoming (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). That is, to explain how moment-by-moment enactments shape the flow of experience over time (becoming) and to place those aspects that are enacted in the moment (the ‘doing') into the foreground of the analysis. The longitudinal data typically associated with process studies facilitates the retrospective reconstruction of process into a pattern of actions and may explain particular outcomes of relevance to organizations such as identity formation (e.g., Howard-Grenville, Metzger, & Meyer, 2013) and strategy execution (e.g., Denis et al., 1996; Jarzabkowski, 2008). However, taking a moment of everyday action as the basis for an analysis raises particular challenges. It requires the researcher to treat each moment, even though it is now in the past, as if it is the present, and to display actions as unfolding, even as these actions are accomplishing a particular pattern that is now known. For example, the analysis of the recent global financial crisis has resulted in a plethora of research showing the materialization of visible outcomes such as a drop in share prices, the defaulting of certain companies, or a temporary closure of the NYSE. Yet, scholars working in the tradition of strong process would have a different focus. Rather than starting with the crisis as a visible outcome, they might conduct an analysis of the everyday practices and actions undertaken prior to the demise, showing how these generated the consequential pattern that culminated in crisis – and indeed in the ongoing process that unfolded in the aftermath of any such event. In this chapter, we draw on selected examples of published qualitative process studies as a means of showing different ways of analyzing and presenting strong process data. We begin by briefly outlining what we mean by ‘becoming', then introduce the notion of ‘doing', and finally outline the research implications of adopting such a perspective. We then introduce three empirical approaches to studying process: (1) studying scripted patterns; (2) uncovering an emerging pattern; and (3) researching patterns in the moment. We conclude with some implications of these approaches for process research studies more broadly.

A Doing and Becoming Perspective As much has already been written about the strong process approach (e.g., see also introduction to this book), we only briefly introduce the integral concept of becoming here. In a strong process approach (Rescher, 1996; Langley, 2007; Langley et al., 2013) the focus is on how ‘things’ that may be identifiable as strategy, plans, and decisions are produced and reproduced within the ongoing flux of processes (Chia & Mackay, 2007; Hernes, 2008). Thus, Weick (1979) suggested using verbs instead of nouns to look at processes; for example, examining organizing over organization (Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005), strategizing over strategy (Jarzabkowski, Balogun, & Seidl, 2007), and coordinating over coordination (Jarzabkowski, Lê, & Feldman, 2011). That is, instead of conceptualizing the world in terms of stable entities, which change from time to time, we should think of social order as in a constant flux. In organization studies, scholars such as Chia (1996), Hernes (2008), and Tsoukas & Chia (2002) have embraced this view, arguing that organizational phenomena are in a continuous state of becoming. The becoming perspective assumes an ontological reversal from a focus on the stability of organization and ‘things’ to a study of the processes of organizing through which such things are constituted (Seidl & Becker, 2006; Jarzabkowski, 2004; Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). Stability exists only in the repetitions of activities that are oriented according to the same practices. But even these seemingly ‘same’ activities are never really Page 2 of 16

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the same; every repetition is always slightly different, such that all activity contains the micro mechanisms through which wider ‘change’ events can be observed (Feldman, 2000; Orlikowski, 1996; Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). For example, Feldman (2000) shows how the recurrent patterns of activity that constitute routines are also the source of continuous, endogenous change, while Orlikowski (1996) points to the improvisatory nature of change as situated action. Situated action is central to the analysis of ‘becoming’ as it is constitutive of a phenomena that is brought into being at that moment in time. Situated action ‘is an emergent property of moment-by-moment interactions between actors, and between actors and the environments of their action’ (Suchman, 1987: 179), which we henceforth refer to as ‘doing'. All action is thus situated within the particular, here-and-now context in which it is produced. At the same time, action is not created totally anew each time that actors come together. Rather, social spheres produce repetitive behaviours that are at the heart of organizing (Weick, 1979). Organizing in this sense means reducing the infinite possibilities for variation by generating some fixed points of reference that actors recognize as organization, and in which they carry out their activities. Thus, to truly understand process, it is necessary to go inside the constant flux of those moments of doing within which the unfolding patterns of becoming are constructed (Chia, 1996; Langley, 2007; 2009; Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). In short, it is the accumulation of doings in the moment that constitute becoming.1 These concepts underpin the approaches to process analysis presented in this chapter.

A Note on Data Requirements and Initial Foray into Analysis Working with the concepts of doing and becoming requires a certain type of data. Specifically, it calls for largely observation-based longitudinal data collected at least partially in real time (see Balogun, Huff, & Johnson, 2003, for some alternatives to observational data). This is important as the patterns to be observed are emergent and hence, cannot be fully known. Rather, they must be studied in detail as they are enacted. Comprehensive high-quality data collected through deep and extended immersion in the field is foundational to such a venture. Indeed, datasets collected for a strong processual analysis often comprise hundreds of hours of audio or video recordings, transcripts, and/or observational notes, and tend to be complemented with internal and external documents, interviews, and informal discussions. This produces extremely large datasets, which need to be carefully recorded, catalogued, stored, and organized to preserve temporal order. In the interest of avoiding repetition, we first outline some pointers that are fundamental to conducting rigorous process studies using a doing and becoming approach. While these steps are often skimmed over in published manuscripts, we review them here because they form a critical part of processual analysis. First, process scholars may use scoping interviews and initial observations to confirm that a setting allows access to the phenomenon of their interest. This is not a straightforward feat in the context of strong process because it means that scholars are required to orient towards moments of temporary stability, even as they experience and study ongoing flux (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). Researchers must thus strike a tricky balance between achieving enough empirical stability to study the phenomenon, while retaining the ontological and conceptual fluidity that characterizes strong process work. In short, we have to find potentially obscured patterns rather than artificially impose them. This is particularly challenging because these patterns and their resultant outcomes may not be knowable prior to completing the fieldwork. One way to approach this task is to select theoretically/empirically informed indicators or outcomes that provide a way to initially explore the data. This journey is always necessarily informed by the nature of the phenomenon under observation. It may include, for example, confirming activities as ‘typical’ of a certain phenomenon (see approach 1 below). Thus, if wishing to study a strategic planning process (e.g., Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991; Grant, 2003), the observer must first understand what a standard planning process looks like and then confirm whether the activities being studied follow a strategic planning sequence (see Spee & Jarzabkowski, 2011, Table 1, p. 1233). Second, given the vast datasets process scholars have at their disposal, it is critical that researchers set Page 3 of 16

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boundaries for their analysis, particularly for less scripted activities (see approach 2 below). One way of setting boundaries is to select a subsample of data to work with. This selection is critical, as it orients analysis by zooming in on one or few key areas of interest. For instance, it might involve focusing on a specific set of meetings, a group of actors, a project, or an outcome. While the eventual focus may emerge through the analysis, it is important for researchers to selectively draw on data to provide some focus to the analysis. Third, analysis is grounded in the authors’ deep and ongoing immersion in the field, so reflecting their own unfolding experience of the process that is being explained, which may also, at least in part, reflect their participants’ experience of the emergent nature of the pattern that they are constructing. Tracing the unfolding flow of experience is often done by writing thick descriptions (Geertz, 1994) or rich case narratives (Langley, 1999) during the time in the field. Such narratives are supported by rich quotes and early analytical notes, enabling researchers to access their own emergent understanding of what is happening, who the key participants are, what actions are being taken, what constitutes an event, and so forth. Therein, scholars not only trace the unfolding flow of experience, they also begin, analytically, to gain insight into the theoretical stories that could be told. A researcher may write one or many such narratives, as part of following and generating deeper insights into the iteratively evolving story, revisiting parts of the narrative retrospectively and adding new insights as pattern of activity emerges. Fourth, while a suitable case of the phenomenon may be identified empirically, researchers iterate with theory to provide the basis for analysis. Theoretical tools are a critical part of the journey of orienting and executing analysis. For instance, specific theoretical constructs might help to illuminate and potentially validate the ‘aha’ moments where a scholar notices, often through the writing of narratives above, something that seems of interest in the data (Langley, 1999; Locke, Golden-Biddle, & Feldman, 2008; Mantere & Ketokivi, 2012; Weick, 1989). We offer some specific examples of how this might be done in the illustrative examples that follow. All of these elements are important in many qualitative studies, and particularly process studies that attempt to show how things move over time. In the next section, we outline particular techniques that researchers might employ to study a specific type of process. While we review these techniques in relation to published exemplars and thus present them in an ordered fashion, it is important to note that these techniques can be used in various constellations, and not necessarily in the order that they are presented.

Three Approaches to Studying Strong Process We broadly partition existing work into three approaches to studying process: (1) studying a scripted pattern; (2) uncovering an emerging pattern; and (3) researching patterns in the moment. Each approach places a different emphasis on doing and becoming. Subsequently, we refer to doing as ‘in the moment’ and to becoming as the flow of experience constructed within those unfolding moments. To illustrate each approach, we draw on selected empirical examples from our own work, where we are familiar with the underlying, and often unseen or unexplained, work of developing data into published process studies. However, we also point to the work of other organizational studies’ scholars to offer readers a variety of illustrations to draw on. Using these examples, we identify and differentiate types of processes based on their characteristics, which at least partially depend on researchers’ and participants’ prior understanding of what ‘ought to happen’ and ‘what to do next'. Finally, we show how we were able to craft a theoretical contribution from each type of process analysis. By detailing three different journeys of discovery, we illuminate the ‘creative leap’ (Langley, 1999) researchers take to analyze qualitative process data. While published papers render the phenomena they study clear, significant interpretive and analytical work went into presenting phenomena this way (see also Jarzabkowski, Bednarek, & Lê, 2014). Indeed, presenting becoming fluid phenomena plainly and convincingly takes significant craft and effort – and multiple revisions Page 4 of 16

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at top journals – to delineate and present the published dynamics that we read about. Within the confines of a journal paper, it is often not possible to present the fine-grained micro detail of each element of analysis that helped uncover the process. We therefore use this section to go beyond our original methods description by outlining some of the tools and techniques we used to help uncover process. Critically, multiple iterations of analysis were necessary before we could sufficiently understand the phenomena we were observing or explain them as theoretically compelling process patterns for publication. The credibility of the published findings is directly linked to the use of these techniques, which together facilitate rigorous analysis.

Analyzing a Scripted Pattern The first analytic approach focuses on scripted patterns. Scripted patterns are designed for a particular purpose and are characterized by sequences with a clear beginning, several milestones or specified steps, and a clearly defined end. Thus, scripted patterns comprise a series of distinct tasks and activities that make the process identifiable and recognizable to the participants charged with performing the process. Organizational life at all levels is littered with such scripted patterns, from performance appraisal, to budget allocation to strategic planning processes, each with a recognizable sequence of tasks that makes it relatively transferable across organizational settings. For instance, many profit and not-for-profit organizations engage in similar scripted planning workshops (Johnson et al., 2010) and planning processes across contexts as diverse as oil majors (Grant, 2003) and universities (Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991; Spee & Jarzabkowski, 2011). Scripted patterns are thus fundamental to organizations and, yet, through their sheer ubiquity, are often seen as mundane, and overlooked or taken for granted. On the surface, scripted patterns appear easiest to research. However, the very taken-for-granted nature of scripted patterns makes it critical for researchers to find a way to step inside and better understand these processes. Despite their scripted order, these processes and their various activities still need to be performed or brought into being by organizational participants’ actions or ‘doing’ (Chia & Mackay, 2007; Feldman & Pentland, 2003). For example, not all scripted patterns are performed in precisely the same way or produce the same outcomes; nor is it always clear how these outcomes are produced. Doing and becoming offer a novel way to analyze phenomena in a process tradition by going beyond what is immediately observable, laying bare and critically reflecting upon the assumptions inherent in the way that each specific activity contributes to and constructs the unfolding sequence of largely prescribed activities. In short, it challenges us not to take any task, activity, or the sequence itself as taken for granted. In the next section, we show how particular trajectories of possible actions are continuously created (doing), thereby shaping the unfolding process (becoming) while also being shaped by the process that is under construction. Thus, doing and becoming provide the basis to access the process as it unfolds, focusing on and making sense of those aspects that may be deemed trivial, mundane, or are assumed to be predetermined. Traditionally, organizational scholars tended to assume that actors know what steps to take in order to follow a specific phenomenon over time. Yet, as the analysis we outline next shows, any phenomenon is accomplished only as actors engage in a set of activities. It is thus not as straightforward as simply performing a predetermined sequence of acts in order to reach a desired outcome. Rather, for scholars who want to develop a better understanding of how organizations are constructed within the organizing work of participants (Cooren, Taylor, & Van Every, 2013; Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005), it matters how a scripted pattern is enacted. Introducing our example of studying scripted patterns. We draw on Spee and Jarzabkowski's (2011) study of a formal strategic planning process to illustrate how to analyze the doing and becoming of a scripted pattern. Formal strategic planning follows a well-documented script of establishing vision and mission through to setting goals and objectives and developing specific actions and measures, all of which culminate in the development of a plan that is usually a formal written document (Ansoff, 1965; Grant, 2003). Drawing on the communication-as-constitutive of organization (CCO) perspective (Cooren et al., 2013), the authors examPage 5 of 16

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ined how the moment-by-moment communicative interactions of participants, which constitute multiple acts of doing, unfolded over time to construct the plan as an authoritative document (see also Fenton & Langley, 2011). Their study followed the entire planning sequence in real time from the announcement of the strategic initiative to its completion, as marked by the release of the final plan. By analyzing conversational incidents within meetings, the study illustrated how the sequence of the planning activities, and the requirement to produce a planning document, structured communicative interactions, even as participants’ actual talk in each conversational incident constructed the content of that plan, giving it meaning and, hence, authority within the organization. The plan's authoritativeness increased as it encapsulated and expressed participants’ meanings; even as the process neared completion and the scripted nature of the planning sequence closed down the opportunities for new meaning to emerge or be incorporated. In sum, the study explicated doing (the specific conversations within which various versions of the plans and its terminology were constructed) and becoming (the unfolding strategic planning sequence within which the overall plan was developed), and their interrelationships. We now explain the tools and techniques the authors used to go inside this script. Establishing the script. the researcher has to establish whether the expected or typical scripted pattern is at play. One cannot assume that people know what particular activities or sequences may be required even if they recognize labels such as ‘hiring’ or ‘planning'. We examined the nature of the planning process at the outset of the fieldwork. Specifically, interviews with the vice-chancellor (VC) and deputy-VC explained the sequence of activities that they would follow, describing it themselves as a standard planning process, borne out in the literature on strategic planning (e.g., Ansoff, 1965). Yet, as researchers we cannot take such ‘claims’ of following a script at face value. Participants still need to actually engage in the proposed activities in order to ‘breathe life into’ the planning process and make it happen (Feldman & Pentland, 2003). Thus, in our observations we examined whether and how planning followed a clearly defined planning sequence, noting at the end of the fieldwork that participants had filled the script with meaning, as the conversational interactions in each planning meeting contributed to the construction of the plan. Finding the ‘aha'. While recognizable because of their distinctive characteristics, scripted patterns pose challenges for researchers in identifying an ‘aha’ moment (Langley, 1999; Locke et al., 2008; Weick, 1989) within the data. Should a scripted pattern deviate from, or the actors fail to fulfil, the sequence of activities, this might constitute the sort of ‘surprise’ that signals an important moment of theorizing for scholars. However, the very routine nature of such sequences often means that many things are not overtly interesting. In the case of Spee & Jarzabkowski's (2011) setting, the activities participants engaged in, i.e., the chain of meetings and the creation of a strategic plan, followed the typical sequence and so occasioned little surprise. In order to make a meaningful contribution, the researchers had to step inside the process to unravel the script. Analyzing the doing and becoming of process. To disentangle the scripted order of meetings and understand why they happen as they do, we drew upon a particular theoretical angle of CCO (Cooren, 2006; Taylor, Cooren, Giroux, & Robichaud, 1996), conceptualizing strategic planning as constituted within a communicative process. Our theorizing was inductively motivated when we noted and began to draw associations between two empirical features of the data. First, that participants often voiced different meanings about the terms within the strategic plan during meetings; and second, that the specific terminology of the plan evolved iteratively over multiple meetings, sometimes adopting the actual words used within a specific meeting. As we searched for ways to understand why and how the various meanings discussed during conversational incidences would sometimes lead to textual changes in the document, and yet not always, the CCO perspective offered a means to distinguish analytically between talk and text and how the two are co-constructed. This novel theoretical angle provided a basis to look beyond participants performing known planning activities at each meeting, to focusing more concretely on what was said in particular meetings and how the conversational dialogue both enabled the articulation of different meanings as well as building momentum for, or suppressing, specific meanings that emerged. We then traced how meanings arising in one set of meetings were either reiterated in subsequent meetings, or discarded. This focus on talk could then be mapped to the Page 6 of 16

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evolution of the text, examining how each of the 11 versions of the plan began to reflect the terminology and meanings that gained more momentum. That is, theory enabled us to analyze what lay inside the construction of the script and how it produced an outcome of a plan that constituted joint meaning, by disentangling the moment-by-moment incidents of conversation and their association with the unfolding development of the planning document. At the same time, we found that the scripted nature of planning generated its own closure on the joint construction of meaning. As participants breathed life into the activities within the script through their conversations, they also enabled it to unfold, progressing from establishing objectives to agreeing targets and measures. These unfolding activities subsequently shaped the nature of conversations, so that disputes over meaning had less traction in the later stages of the process, as the very text itself began to congeal into its authoritative form. Our study, by theoretically and empirically disentangling talk and text, and separating the planning activities into conversational incidences in meetings within time, as well as the construction of textual documents across time, enabled us to go inside the script and understand both how it was performed and why that performance gave the outcome of the planning process, the strategic plan, authority with participants. Importantly, we were able to demonstrate this in the paper by showing and drilling down into micro-incidents of conversation, even as we zoomed out to show how these incidents contributed to the unfolding process. Our analytic approach gave us a means of displaying our findings and developing our process theorizing about the way that moments of doing are associated with the becoming of a scripted pattern. Our illustrative example provides one means of going inside scripted patterns. Other studies offered alternative theoretical ways to step inside scripted patterns, in order to elicit how they are enacted and why they generate particular outcomes or consequences. For instance, Gioia and Chittipeddi (1191) identified distinct phases of sensemaking and sensegiving and the way that their amplification shaped the development of a strategic planning process, while Balogun, Jarzabkowski, and Vaara (2011) showed how different discourses evolved throughout a scripted pattern, in the process enabling greater alignment between corporate and business unit goals (see also Aggerholm, Asmuß, & Thomsen, 2012; Vaara, Sorsa, & Pälli, 2010). Other studies have unravelled how the scripts involved in strategy workshops (Johnson et al., 2010) or strategy meetings (Jarzabkowski & Seidl, 2008; Hoon; 2007) are performed and the consequences of these performances for participants. Future studies may go further in focusing on variation to the proposed design of a script or how and why actors deviate from or challenge a scripted pattern.

Emerging Pattern: In Search of a Pattern The very nature of organizations means that not all sequences are scripted, and patterns may thus not be immediately obvious to either participant or observer. Thus, we often find ourselves studying ‘emerging patterns', where the actors themselves are trying to delineate and construct a direction or order within their activities. In such cases, there may be no clear beginning or end (Chia & Holt, 2009). For example, actors may have overarching goals to achieve, with specified desired outcomes, but often do not know how they will achieve these goals until they begin working towards them. Patterns then emerge within their interactions, unfolding as they deal with tasks at hand. Such studies contrast with scripted patterns, as there is no defined sequence that may be enacted. Rather, it is in their practice that activities are designed and aligned, sequences emerge, and – over time – a pattern develops. This pattern is often messy, arising from multiple attempts of at configuring and reconfiguring activity, as actors develop a pattern that (they believe) suits their unique situation and purpose. Thus, this type of process is becoming as it is constructed by actors in their moment-by-moment interactions. As such, two patterns are rarely alike in their specific tasks and sequences. That means there is no obvious way to ‘uncover’ the pattern, either for the organizational actors or for the researcher, making studies of emerging patterns complex and iterative. Indeed, the pattern that is constructed can often only be recognized in retrospect. Struggling towards a pattern may therefore best describe the Page 7 of 16

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focus of actors and scholars working within this type of approach. We now provide an illustration. Introducing our example of studying emerging patterns. Jarzabkowski, Lê, and Feldman (2012) is an example of a process study in search of a pattern. On the basis of a large ethnographic dataset, the authors show that organizational coordination cannot be taken for granted, particularly when large-scale change disrupts it. Rather, they show that coordinating is a dynamic process of continuously creating and modifying activities in the search for ways to fit together and enact continuity of products and services in organizations. Within the case organization, government regulation required major restructuring in which organizational structures, products, systems, and relationships had to be torn apart and reassembled in order to deliver a very different strategy (moving from vertical integration to structural separation). We observed how actors began to perform ‘end-to-end management', going through iterative cycles that enabled them to understand the massive disruption to their organization and to tentatively create new ways of doing things, thereby slowly building bridges for coordinating activities. In doing so, they learnt how to deliver the new strategy and restructuring, through the process that they were constructing in response to it. This method was complex and iterative, without a predetermined blueprint and yet, over time, we found that a pattern emerged within actors’ performances. Specifically, actors went through five cycles; beginning by disrupting existing activities, then orienting towards the absences they experienced from the disruptions, which prompted them to create new elements of coordinating to fill these absences. As these elements emerged, they were arranged to form new patterns for sequencing tasks, which were finally stabilized. These cycles were not linear, unfolding sequentially as a series of phases across the organization as a whole, but occurring in moment-by-moment interactions on multiple different tasks, so that some tasks began to stabilize, even as others were experiencing disruption. Our five cycles illuminated how people seek and develop a pattern of coordinating through moments of activity (doing), while simultaneously enacting the formal processes of coordinating (becoming) that emerged from these multiple iterations of the cycles across many tasks and actors. Uncovering the pattern. This is an example of uncovering patterns as they emerge, as neither our participants nor we as researchers knew how the restructuring would be enacted. While there were some mandated goals, formalized through regulatory requirements and key performance indicators, there was no script for actors to follow. Hence, we as researchers also could not see a clear process within the masses of data we had accumulated over two years of observation (comprising hundreds of recorded meetings, interviews, documents, work shadowing, and numerous additional informal observations). We knew that people in the organization were doing lots of things, that some things were working and others were not, and that they were slowly working towards the desired outcome. However, we did not know how they were doing this within the sea of activities that unfolded before our eyes and were encapsulated in our data. We thus needed to go in search of a pattern. With this type of phenomenon, where patterns emerge in real time, scholars neither know what is emerging nor what to look for. Thus, we began by studying the data carefully and considering what was interesting, unexpected, or unique. We reflected on what actors did, how they spoke, what conclusions they drew, and looked for what was meaningful to our actors in the present, within each meeting at a moment in time, rather than trying to project a retrospective rationality onto what we eventually knew to be the outcome of the restructuring. To do this, we re-read our field notes, revisited meeting transcripts or listened to the audio recordings, and had extended conversations about the case, trying to situate ourselves in our participants’ experiences of the unfolding pattern by revisiting our own engagement with the case at that time. Finding the ‘aha’ moment. Working closely with the data, we noticed that participants repeatedly used one phrase: end-to-end management (E2E). Without any formal mandate or documentation, it started to appear in meetings and interviews. So, while it was not clear to us (or the participants!) what E2E was, it was very clear that it was in some way important to people as they searched for a way to enact the restructuring. Activities were clustered around this phrase, programmes constructed to support it, and it was becoming increasingly central. Hence, our study became about end-to-end management, its emergence, and its evolution. The focus Page 8 of 16

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on E2E became our ‘aha’ moment (Langley, 1999; Locke et al., 2008; Weick, 1989), enabling us to get inside coordinating as an emerging pattern. We then searched for and carefully read all of the data surrounding the use of the E2E term, thinking analytically about what activities were the focal point at each moment in time, allowing us to develop a coding scheme, which we iteratively revised until it fit our data well. We then revisited the literature with these codes in mind, looking for existing theories that might furnish insight into our findings, while beginning to craft our own contribution. For instance, in iteration with the literature on routines, we began drawing on the theoretical categories of ostensive and performative (see Feldman & Pentland, 2003, for an explanation of these terms). These categories enabled us to understand E2E as an ostensive pattern of coordinating that was constructed within the performative actions of actors as they attempted to coordinate tasks, which then guided our subsequent analysis (see Table A2 in Jarzabkowski et al., 2011). Analyzing the doing and becoming of the process. Once we had deconstructed the data into a series of actions at different points on different deliveries (doing), we had an idea of how elements of coordinating came into being at particular moments in time. Next, we looked carefully at how these actions of managers unfolded, which constituted the coordinating process over time, physically mapping actions in a qualitative timeline that enabled us to recognize repetition and change. Specifically, studying the data chronologically helped us to understand that particular cycles of action were repetitively performed in a way that was increasingly enabling the coordinating of activity in different parts of the company. While we noticed many detailed changes in the specific tasks associated with these performative elements of E2E, drawing on our coding scheme, we found that they also had a more patterned character of sequencing types of actions that we began to understand as ostensive shifts. We thus began zooming in on these shifts, building them into a pattern of cycles that shifted each time participants’ concept of E2E expanded to encapsulate new understanding, regardless of the specific task involved. This helped us understand how people drew upon the E2E mechanism they were constructing, developing it into a pattern of how to connect things that enabled them to coordinate the process of organizational restructuring across many different tasks. Having observed that actors followed a pattern of five phases, which they performed repeatedly, we could thus begin ‘scripting’ the process retrospectively, showing how the particular activities and ways of coordinating emerged and were stabilized within the organization, despite the messy, emergent, and unscripted nature of the actual order as it unfolded in real time. This illustrative example showed how doing and becoming interrelate in the construction of an emergent pattern. Specifically, we found that moving to a new coordinating mechanism was not simply a matter of reorganizing, but rather was preceded by two additional steps: enacting disruption and orienting to absence. In short, the pattern was constructed through doing. Other examples of this type of process study include Balogun & Johnson (2004); Barley (1990); Burgelman (1983); Denis, Lamothe & Langley (2001); Jarzabkowski, Lê, & Van de Ven (2013); Jay (2013); and Lê & Jarzabkowski (forthcoming). For instance, Balogun & Johnson (2004) uncover the pattern of schema development during an imposed organizational change. They show how middle managers move through phases of sensemaking, over time, from shared sensemaking to clustered sensemaking, and finally shared yet differentiated sensemaking (see Figure 1, p. 534). The authors thus show that schema change is socially negotiated as middle managers interact in shaping the change. This helps us better understand how doing and becoming relate around the construction of new scripts.

Patterns in the Moment: Studying Everyday Activities as They Happen The above examples of a scripted pattern and an emergent pattern are overtly processual, dealing with how things shift, unfold, or change over time. However, the very nature of a strong process approach means that activity is always in a state of becoming (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002), so that even assumed ‘stabilities’ in the social order cannot be taken for granted but need to be explained as particular achievements (Chia & Mackay, 2007). In strong process research, we thus need to explain not only how things change over time, but Page 9 of 16

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the patterns through which things are constructed and stabilized within time and over time (Chia, 1994; Jarzabkowski & Seidl, 2008; Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). Here we allude to the need to zoom in on how activities are constructed in the moment, and also zoom out to explain how such activities are both shaped by and shape the social order in which they are conducted (Nicolini, 2009; 2013). Studying process in this way raises particular challenges, as it requires us to notice activity in the moment and analytically deconstruct its processual dynamics, even as we join these dynamics to the wider social order. Typically, studies have either been strong at explaining processes as they change over time (e.g., Balogun and Johnson, 2004; Denis et al., 2001; Gioia and Chittipeddi, 1991; Kaplan and Orlikowski, 2013), or at drilling down into micro-instances of process (e.g., Samra-Fredericks, 2003; Thomas, Sargent & Hardy, 2011), but less able to explain the association between the two. Even the examples that we cite above aim to explain phenomena following some change or sequential unfolding of stages over time. By contrast, in this section we wish to illuminate how process is constructed in the moment, within actors’ everyday work, and how that work contributed to the wider social order (Schatzki, 2002, 2006). We do so by drawing on an illustrative example of the practice of reinsurance trading in Lloyd's of London, a long-standing institution that has displayed a remarkable persistence over some 300 years (Smets, Jarzabkowski, Burke, & Spee, 2015). Introducing our example of studying a pattern in the moment. This chapter is based on a year-long ethnographic study of 26 underwriters in seven firms within the reinsurance market in Lloyd's of London. This market is unusual because it involves a number of different companies, each trading as separately listed companies with separate investors, shareholders, and so forth, even as these companies are also members of a common trading market, Lloyd's. Our chapter explains how reinsurance underwriters are able to maintain the balance between the competing demands of their individual companies’ competitive demands, and the community requirements of being a ‘good’ member of Lloyd's, which we conceptualized as competing institutional logics (see Greenwood et al., 2011). We realized that, while this appeared to be a puzzle in terms of the social order of this unusual marketplace, it was not a problem in the everyday practice of the underwriters. Rather, they had many mundane, everyday activities through which they were able to balance these competing demands, even as they were also able to reap commercial benefits and accrue social benefits from being located within the two contexts of their individual firms and in Lloyd's. We were able to explain this by analyzing activities ‘in the moment'. We identified that underwriters enacted particular types of activities through which they were able to segment the different community and commercial logics under which they worked, keeping them apart to avoid slippage between the two, even as they could also bridge different elements of each logic to gain some cross-fertilization benefits between logics, and yet demarcate the boundaries between the two when they felt that one or the other was being violated. Importantly, we developed these three practices of segmenting, bridging, and demarcating into a dynamic conceptual framework that shows how process occurs within the moment, underpinned by numerous examples of how underwriters continuously enact this dynamic inter-relationship between the three in their everyday work. On the basis of our microanalysis of the practice of individual actors and the way this sustained the overarching institutional character of Lloyd's, we were able to show how process occurs within widespread and common everyday practice, in ways that both instantiate and perpetuate the wider social order. That is, we can show how even relatively stabilized social orders are maintained through ongoing dynamic processes and practices (Schatzki, 2006). Uncovering a pattern in the moment. While participants often display repetitive or patterned actions at work, these may not follow any ‘written rules’ or script, and they may be unaware of their patterns, simply performing them as everyday, taken-for-granted practice. Quite often, nobody tells them what to do; they simply know how to go on through their deep socialization into this context, so that they cannot articulate it as a pattern (Giddens, 1984; Lave & Wenger, 1991). Hence, the researcher needs to observe what the pattern is, why it is performed in this way, and generate deep process insights about what are often mundane practices. As it Page 10 of 16

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is difficult to question actors about actions of which they may be unaware, to uncover a pattern in the moment requires deep immersion in the field observing those everyday, patterned ways of doing things that are familiar to the participants, albeit that they may initially seem strange to the researcher. In our case, three researchers collectively spent 180 days shadowing actors within their firms, around the trading floor in London, and at work-related social events, recording everything from dress codes, to the material arrangements of different contexts (see Jarzabkowski, Burke, & Spee, 2015) and the types of work performed in each, so becoming deeply familiar with what constituted everyday work for an underwriter. Through such deep immersion, the taken-for-granted pattern of action that cannot be articulated becomes clear to the observer. Finding the ‘aha’ moment. At the same time, during such immersion, it is important to record what feels unfamiliar to the researcher at the outset, and each little jarring moment of ‘that's interesting', or surprising, or even amusing. Such moments of strangeness, which eventually disappear as the researcher also becomes familiar with the pattern, are critical in generating hunches about what underlies the patterned action and why (Locke et al., 2008). In our case, at the outset we were amused by the way underwriters changed their dress codes, putting on ties and coats and shining shoes (always black) as they moved from their offices to Lloyd's, reversing the dress code and rolling up shirtsleeves as they returned to the office. We went back to these dress codes at a later date, as we began to realize that some types of work were only ever done in one context or the other, while other work was imported across contexts. Our initial amusement was the ‘aha’ moment that became key to understanding how actors segment parts of their everyday work, even as they somehow ‘know’ which bits they can combine and which must be kept apart. From this initial hunch, we tried several theoretical lenses, settling on a practice approach to institutional logics as a way to explain how these everyday practices constituted the wider social order of individual, commercially competitive firms, trading within the social community of Lloyd's. Analyzing the doing and becoming of the moment. Once we recognized that this was a consistent pattern, enacted in the moment, we had to disentangle what exactly was happening in these moments of segmenting some aspects of work. First, we constructed thick descriptions of a typical day in the life of an underwriter, in order to flesh out what they actually do and, drawing on our theoretical framing, how these practices might keep institutional logics apart, while also enabling selective combination of some parts of each logic, according to the situation and at the discretion of the underwriter, who might want to realize benefits from the duality of their social context. From this, we were able to categorize different activities as clustering towards three themes that, in iteration with the literature, we gave the conceptual labels of segmenting, bridging, and demarcating. We thus had our conceptual understanding of what actors do in the moment, but also had to analyze them as processes that instantiated the wider social order in everyday practice. Hence, we examined how the three themes interacted in practice, breaking down the entire day of an underwriter into a series of microincidents that combined segmenting, bridging, and demarcating in dynamic ways to balance the competing demands of the two logics in each specific moment. Simultaneously, their overall pattern of balancing logics continuously in their everyday work, performed by multiple underwriters throughout Lloyd's, helped to sustain the overarching social order in which they all worked. The dynamic conceptual framework developed in this illustrative example enabled us to explain how a pattern in the moment contributes to the ongoing stabilization of social order, which can never be reified or assumed to exist as an entity outside the actions of those who construct it (Schatzki, 2002; 2006). Other scholars with a strong process approach call for further insights into the patterned yet flexible ways in which actors perform practice ‘in the moment’ (Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011; Langley, Smallman, Tsoukas, & Van de Ven, 2013) in order to provide processual insights into organizations ‘as they happen’ (Schatzki, 2006). Such studies are able to show how organizations, their routines, procedures, and wider logics are continuously enacted in specific instances of human action (Feldman, 2000; Lok & De Rond, 2013; MacKay & Chia, 2013). Hence, unlike the prior examples that view process as a pattern unfolding over time, with some sequential shift in actions and activities, those studying a pattern in the moment find that activities are in a continuous and cyclical Page 11 of 16

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process of flux (Langley, 2007; Langley et al., 2013).

Implications Drawing inference from our endeavours to analyze qualitative process data through a strong process approach, we now reflect on what learning they may bring to the field. First, we emphasize that the three approaches to studying process are equally valuable. Second, we note the important role of the researcher in crafting process research. Third, we challenge the artificial distinctions of inductive, abductive, and deductive methods of analysis. Finally, we reflect on the role of authors and reviewers in building strong process scholarship. In organization studies, we are often attracted to grand phenomena. For instance, the strategy of big corporations (Burgelman & Grove, 1996; Sminia, 2003) or top accounting firms (Greenwood & Suddaby, 2006); crises in financial markets (e.g., Millo & MacKenzie, 2009; MacKenzie, 2011); the behaviour of senior executives (Jarzabkowski, 2008); or organizational trajectories (Siggelkow, 2001). Thus, much research in organization studies has examined somewhat obvious processes that are recognizable by their formalized characteristics, including a clear beginning, sequence of activities, and an end. While this has led to many meaningful contributions, our chapter demonstrates that less formal and messier sequences can be equally (or more) impactful. Uncovering emergent patterns and studying patterns in the moment are thus equally worthy ventures as studying scripted patterns, although the latter may be easier to identify at the outset, or to justify as a ‘pattern'. At the same time, we show that studying how scripted patterns unfold in practice is no less complex or interpretive than studying other processes. The context and tools may vary, but the rigour and interpretive focus of the analysis remain the same. The three approaches thus reach across the spectrum of process research, with the latter two introducing phenomena that may not have been on the radar or considered as ‘process’ in the traditional sense. This critically links to our second point about the centrality of the researcher in the analysis of qualitative process data. It is important to emphasize that none of the aforementioned tools or techniques do any of the analysis for the researcher; they solely assist the researcher in his/her task (Lê, 2013). A grounded analysis of process requires considerable interpretive work (see also Jarzabkowski, Bednarek, & Lê, 2014) and depends on a deep understanding of the observed. The researcher must begin his/her journey by narrowing the analytical focus by zooming in on certain focal activities, choosing relevant theoretical frames, and employing specific tools and techniques to direct analysis. Hence, the craft of interpretation needs to be developed, recognized, and appreciated, just as statistical analysis is developed, recognized, and appreciated. While these two crafts may differ, they are equally valuable because they critically underpin the ability to make a contribution. Like an expert statistician, the interpretive process scholar must become exceptionally well versed in his/ her craft because behind the terms ‘rigour’ and ‘trustworthiness’ in qualitative process analysis lies enormous knowledge built up over time and hard work. In particular, the three illustrative examples above expose the often unseen or unexplained ‘aha’ moment and explain how this triggered the theorizing and analysis from which publishable contributions were generated. The capacity to go inside a scripted pattern, to make sense of an emerging pattern, or to understand the significance of everyday patterns as they happen comes from deep engagement with data and much persistence in teasing out its many interesting threads in order to arrive at those that offer the most valuable contributions to process theory. Reflecting on our own work as researchers, particularly the way we iterate between hunches, empirical analysis, and literature makes us challenge the usefulness of the distinction between inductive, abductive, and deductive methods of analysis. The origins of these constructs are noble, highlighting the ontological assumptions inherent in all analytical processes and the restrictions this places (or at least should place) on the researcher and the claims s/he can make (Locke, Golden-Biddle, & Feldman, 2008; Mantere & Ketokivi, 2012). Page 12 of 16

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However, the tools associated with each are not unique to that approach and, consequently, there is considerable overlap in how people actually analyze data in practice. Claiming something is not inductive, simply because it uses a pre-existing theoretical term to label an emergent empirical category in order to acknowledge others’ work, is simplistic, and unnecessarily distracts from the quality of the work. Similarly, the use of frequency counts to visually underpin an interpretive pattern does not make the work deductive or less credible (cf. Langley, 1999). The rigour of analysis lies with the appropriateness of tools for the nature of the data and the nature of the theoretical contribution. Trying to distinguish these three forms of research too strictly or artificially may lead readers, including reviewers, to unintentionally undermine solid interpretive work by failing to recognize and distinguish it from poor interpretive work. Inadvertently, the distinction of inductive, deductive, and abductive may obscure rather than reveal the analytical techniques involved in analyzing research based on process. Indeed, the assumptions within these categories place the skilful practice of the researcher into a black box. Through each of our examples, we illuminate that analyzing process data is as much a process of becoming as the activities that we observed. Building on these reflections, we thus call for process scholars to transcend the categories of inductive, deductive, and abductive research in the writing and reviewing of qualitative process research. We conclude by tasking ourselves as authors, and our colleagues who are working with qualitative process data, to educate other scholars and reviewers into understanding what constitutes good process work, rather than simply ignoring others’ dismissal of qualitative process scholarship or submitting to reviewer requests for imperfect or flawed changes to the manuscript. Ask yourself: ‘If not me, who? If not now, when?’ (Watson, 2014).

NOTE 1We are grateful to Ann Langley for pushing us to clarify this duality.

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Sequential Analysis of Processes*

Contributors: Marshall Scott Poole, Natalie Lambert, Toshio Murase, Raquel Asencio & Joseph McDonald Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Sequential Analysis of Processes*" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n16 Print pages: 254-270 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Sequential Analysis of Processes* Marshall Scott PooleNatalie LambertToshio MuraseRaquel AsencioJoseph McDonald History is just one damned thing after another. (Attributed to Arnold Toynbee, British historian) This quotation aptly describes the basic data that process research must deal with: sequences of events that encode a process and which must be deciphered to explain and to understand the process. Toynbee's quotation is doubly apt because sequential analysis of processes often requires scholars to confront ‘damnably’ difficult analytical tasks due to the quantity and complexity of data they must deal with. The logic and procedures for sequence analysis differ from those most quantitative scholars are trained in because they deal with pattern recognition and testing rather than mean values and simple causal effects. Indeed, the problems these methods address – including ‘bottom-up’ identification of sequence types, comparison of sequences, and characterization of properties of sequences such as their complexity – are likely to seem more natural to those who study processes using qualitative, historical, or ethnographic approaches, even if the methods themselves are initially daunting. The goal of this chapter is to provide an overview of sequence methods in a way that makes them accessible to the entire community of organizational process scholars. Hence, we will not provide a discussion of the details of sequence analysis techniques, focusing instead on general descriptions of ‘what they do’ and ‘what they can tell,’ and leaving interested readers to seek more detail in the documentation of applications described in this chapter. We start with a discussion of the role of sequences in studies of organizational processes. Then we compare formal methods of sequence analysis, the subject of this chapter, with the informal methods common in most organizational process research, and consider how the two types of approaches complement each other. The next section discusses the roles theory plays in sequence analysis and the functions sequence analysis can play in the development of process theories. Then we describe the basic data of sequence analysis and how it is obtained and in some cases constructed by the researcher. Following this, we discuss methods for sequential analysis, including available software to conduct these analyses.

Sequences: A Key to Unlock Processes Nicholas Rescher (1996) offers a succinct and inclusive definition of process as: a coordinated group of changes in the complexion of reality, an organized family of occurrences that are systematically linked to one another either causally or functionally … A process consists in an integrated series of developments unfolding in joint coordination in line with a definite program. Processes are correlated with occurrences or events: Processes always involve various events, and events exist only in and through processes. (p. 38) The analysis of event sequences is a key source of insight in process research. In general terms, an event sequence can be defined as an ordered listing of occurrences or states. Each element in the sequence also commonly has a time stamp associated with it, referencing it to a particular temporal metric. Event sequences are often treated as categorical (nominal) time series (e.g., Brzinsky-Fay and Kohler, 2010), but in some cases the elements of a sequence may also be associated with a variable quantity (ordinal, interval, or ratio). For instance, Murase et al. (2015) counted the number of various acts (protecting a convoy, engaging the enemy) that occurred in each minute of a military simulation experiment to provide a sequence of ratio-level magnitude measures of the acts by minute. This provided a time series of continuous measures that could be analyzed to understand the process by which teams completed their task. Just as historians are concerned with the colligation problem, which requires reconstruction and explication Page 2 of 20

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of the connections among a series of historical events (Walsh, 1967), so a fundamental aspect of process research is to make sense of and to find structure in event sequences. One type of process explanation advances a theoretical narrative for the entire sequence, such as a life cycle model (Van de Ven and Poole, 1995). Life cycle theories of processes such as individual careers, group development, and product development posit that the process occurs in a set series of stages in which stage A gives rise to stage B, which then leads to stage C, and so forth, each building on the one before. The order of stages is explained as a necessary product of logical development (e.g., a group must first identify a problem before it can start working on solutions), natural development (organizations start small at their founding and move to stage of growth and differentiation), or institutional requirements (a person must first earn a medical degree before becoming licensed as a physician). A second type of process explanation identifies short sequences of actions or events that generate the process, such as the cycle variation–selection–retention that constitutes evolutionary and sense-making processes. Short-cycle explanations assume that the larger event sequence emerges from these cycles. A third explanatory approach is to identify causal or functional relationships in the sequence that explain how the process unfolds, such as entrainment (McGrath and Kelly, 1986; Ancona and Chong, 1996). These properties can then serve as independent or dependent variables. As Poole and Van de Ven (2004) note, many process explanations involve two or all three of these approaches, connected across multiple time scales and levels. Sequence analysis can play two roles vis-à-vis these three types of explanations. First, it can be used to provide evidence for (or against) them. Second, it can be used to identify sequences in the data ‘from the bottom up,’ and to characterize their properties. In the first case, sequence methods are used ‘deductively’ to evaluate hypotheses about the process, while in the second, pattern identification and theory development and evaluation occur more or less ‘inductively,’ in a manner typical in qualitative research. Indeed, as we will argue below, sequence analysis is actually more complex than either of these simple alternatives, and combines them in a process of inquiry explicated as retroduction by philosopher Charles Peirce (1955; Chiasson, 2005). Before elaborating the role of theory in process research further, it is useful to define formal approaches to process research and to consider how they relate to the informal approaches used in most current process scholarship.

Formal Approaches for Sequence Analysis The characterization of sequences can be challenging, especially when they are long, when their elements are complex and have multiple properties, and when there are a large number of sequences to analyze. Human beings are efficient pattern recognizers, and this has served us well in qualitative process research (Langley, 1999). Searching for macro-level patterns in event series, writing detailed case histories, and using diagrams or pictorial representations are common modes of qualitative sequence analysis. Human pattern recognition, however, can be insufficient when we have to analyze a large amount of sequence data or when the sequences are complex. In these cases, formal methods based on an algorithm that is systematically applied to sequence data can usefully augment human recognition of qualitative patterns in event sequences. They offer a way to identify patterns in processes and also to test hypotheses about patterns. Two kinds of hypotheses are most common: (1) that a certain type of pattern exists; and (2) hypotheses about generative mechanism(s) driving the process that are indicated by the patterns. Most traditional statistical methods employed in organizational research such as regression, panel analysis, time series analysis, and hazard models have limited utility for formal sequence analysis. These can capture aspects of the sequential nature of processes, but they suffer from two significant limitations. First, they can only tap into simple features of the event sequence, such as regular and uniform relationships among events (e.g., autocorrelation) or the occurrence of specific types of events (e.g., hazard analysis). They are not well Page 3 of 20

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suited for detection of more complex and irregular patterns. Second, using traditional statistical methods requires us to know beforehand features of the timing of the process such as where a ‘break’ or shift in the process occurs and the rate at which the process runs, which are better discovered through exploratory analysis than through hypothesis testing. Flexible pattern recognition and analysis methods for sequential data have been developed over the past 30 years, primarily in the disciplines of computer science, biology, biochemistry, and ecology (e.g., Sankoff and Kruskal, 1983; Gabadinho, Ritschard, Muller, and Studer, 2011; Cornwell, 2015). These formal methods have been applied in sociology to the study of professions (Abbott, 2001) and life course (Aisenbrey and Fasang, 2010), to the study of organizational innovation (Poole et al., 2000), and in the study of group processes (Poole and Holmes, 1995; Murase, Ascencio, McDonald, Poole, DeChurch, and Contractor, 2015). They enable detection of patterns in complex, seemingly irregular process data and provide metrics and tests for characteristics of these patterns such as how predominant they are in the process and their complexity. If there are multiple cases, methods are also available for determining how similar the sequences are across cases, facilitating identification of development typologies. There are also tools for the visualization of sequences, one of the most useful analytical approaches (Langley, 1999). Formal sequence analysis is complementary to informal approaches to process research. Formal and informal approaches are similar in that both start at the level of the data or observation and derive patterns through retroduction (Poole et al., 2000, pp. 115–117). Peirce (1955; Chiasson, 2005) described retroduction as a type of inference in which we note a problem or pattern, advance a theory or substantive hypothesis to explain it, and then evaluate this theory through further observations or testing, progressively refining it through repetitive cycles. Only in later stages of the research process does theoretical thinking solidify into theories or hypotheses that can be tested in the traditional statistical sense, leading to a departure from interpretive approaches. And even then, the tests in question often are designed to assist researchers evaluate qualitative patterns, such as whether a series of developmental stages occurs in the sequence. The similarity of retroduction to the classic hermeneutic circle is striking. Formal methods have two distinct benefits. First, they provide useful discipline for our thinking about sequences in particular and about process in general. Once we recognize what seems to be a promising qualitative pattern in a complex process, it has a tendency to reshape how we observe the process in favor of picking out this pattern again. This in turn tends to limit our ability to recognize other patterns or anomalies in the pattern we are focused on. Formal methods enable us to interrogate sequence data in a structured manner that can minimize (though never fully eliminate) this type of inadvertent self-sealing bias. Second, formal methods, especially computational methods, enable us to handle large amounts of process data. They can uncover common sequences in massive amounts of data that cannot be comprehended by the human mind owing to limited cognitive capacity or in data sets that are more complex than human interpreters can handle. They enable scholars to capitalize more fully on the large amounts of data they typically accumulate when studying processes. There are some rough rules about when to use formal versus informal analysis. Formal methods are most useful when there are multiple cases with a degree of complexity or when a single case has hundreds or thousands of events. Informal approaches are more appropriate for relatively simple and short cases or for a single case that is exceptionally complex. Formal methods are also useful when a hypothesis or theory has been posited, because they provide systematic means of evaluating the hypothesis or fit of the data to the theory.

Process Theories: The Reference Point for Sequential Analysis As we have noted, sequence analysis does not occur in a theoretical vacuum. This section aims to flesh out Page 4 of 20

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the points made previously in order to show how theory serves as a key reference point for sequence analysis. Theoretical perspectives play a role in defining the units of analysis, guiding methodological selection, and shaping interpretation of results in sequence analysis. Theory often specifies the units of analysis that constitute the sequence. For example, on the basis of theories of group decision making, Poole and Roth (1989) developed coding rules to classify events as orientation, problem analysis, solution development, and evaluation acts. They then used sequence analysis methods to identify the ordering of these events in a sample of group decision episodes. Theories can also inform analysis of ‘short-cycle’ subsequences that constitute part of the longer event sequence. Key drivers of processes are often ‘localized’ cycles such as evolution, which is indicated by repetitive sequences of variation, selection, and retention events (Weick, 1979); problem solving, indicated by sequences of orientation, problem analysis, solution, and choice events (Poole and Roth, 1989); and action regulation, indicated by sequences of planning, action, and evaluation events (Tschan, 1995). It is also possible to identify short-cycle sequences through retroduction. In a study of multiteam systems engaged in a military performance task, Murase et al. (2015) used sequence mining methods (described below) to identify a large set of short sequences of elementary actions (e.g., movement, finding information, passing information on to others, neutralizing enemies) that were automatically captured in game logs. Mining identified dozens of distinct short-cycle sequences, and theories of teamwork were used as reference points to define six basic types of activity in the multiteam system based on theories of teamwork, including coordination within and between the teams and between-team protection. Theory can also be used to generate hypotheses about the generative mechanism that drives the entire process over the whole sequence or a significant portion of it. Van de Ven and Poole (1995; Poole and Van de Ven, 2004) distinguished four basic types of generative mechanism: life cycle, teleological, dialectical, and evolutionary, summarized in Table 16.1. In this case, sequence methods can be employed to test the fit of the model to the event sequence. For example, Tuckman's (1965) group development model is an example of a life cycle model, which posits a unitary sequence of developmental stages for all cases. Sequence methods designed to identify these stages and to determine whether they occur in this order can be used to evaluate whether the developmental sequence in one or more groups is consistent with Tuckman's model.

Table 16.1Four generative mechanisms for processes

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The final account of a process is typically complex. It involves not only generative mechanisms such as those short-cycle or longer-term ‘motors’ just described, but also contingencies, such as critical events or environmental shocks to the system (Gaddis, 2002, pp. 30–31). Contingencies, as well as extraneous events that do not reflect the generative mechanisms (historical accidents), complicate the event series and must be identified and sorted out from indicators of continuously operating generative mechanisms. These continuous motors can be distinguished in terms of those that focus on transitions (linkages of successive acts or local series of acts, with an emphasis on traditionally employed efficient causality) and those that focus on trajectories (holistic patterns over time, with an emphasis on final or formal causation as the source of longer-term temporal patterns) (Poole et al., 2000, Chapters 3 and 4). At present, there are no standardized methods for linking sequential analysis and theories of organizational or group processes, similar to the way in which the design and analysis of experiments articulates with causal theories in the behavioral and social sciences. Improvisation in data generation and analysis is required for each process study. As these methods are applied more frequently, routines will no doubt emerge. The foundations for an overarching model for sequential analysis are currently being laid in conceptualizations of process data, methods for generating them, and analytical techniques, which will be discussed in the next two sections.

Process Data: The Stuff of Sequence Analysis Figure 16.1 illustrates sequence properties and how sequences relate to data (Cornwell, 2015). The top row of Figure 16.1 shows the basic data from which sequences are derived, events. Events are undertaken by or happen to the organizations, actors, and other entities that are the subjects enacting the process. These Page 6 of 20

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events are then coded into meaningful categories (in this case A, B, C, and D), which are the elements of the sequence. Each event and element may also be associated with a time, as indicated in the bottom row of the figure; this timestamp orders the elements and may also be used to determine duration. The timestamp in the bottom row corresponds to a ‘Newtonian’ conception of time, in which time can be divided into equal units and proceeds linearly into the future. The top row of the figure portrays a different conception of time, ‘event time,’ in which the occurrence of events marks the units, regardless of how long they were or the intervals between them.

Figure 16.1Sequences and sequence data

Sequence properties are indicated in the second row of Figure 16.1, including elements that appear in a set of possible positions, and transitions from one element to the next. Substrings (or subsequences) are significant short-term patterns of acts; they may be defined structurally by repeated sequences of elements or theoretically by specification of meaningful sequences of elements (e.g., variation::selection::retention). An n-gram is a substring of a specific length. A spell is a series of the same or related elements in sequence, and corresponds to phases or stages in the process. Characterization and analysis of sequences may occur through a series of hierarchical steps. As the third row of the figure indicates, each spell can be represented as a single occurrence or phase of its element; in this case, the phasic sequence is ABABCDCDC. This can be reduced to a still higher-order pattern, as shown in row four, in which repeating AB substrings are reinterpreted as E phases and CD substrings as F phases. Poole and Roth (1989) employed this type of hierarchical coding in a study of group decision development: The lowest level of events were transcribed utterances, which were recoded into basic decision functions such as identifies problem, elaborates, and agrees; these were then recoded into decision phases such as problem analysis, solution development, and critique; these in turn were recoded into even higher-order phases, such as ‘solution elaboration,’ represented by a combination of solution development and critique. As this example indicates, events are derived through observation and interpretation (coding). Abbott (1984) makes a useful distinction between an incident (a raw datum) and an event (a theoretical construct). An incident is an empirical observation, while an event is a construct that makes sense of or captures the meaning of Page 7 of 20

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the incident. Incidents can be derived in a variety of ways, including direct capture of digital data, field notes, recording and transcription of audio, annotation of video, archives and historical records, and interviews. The most complex process studies use a combination of data sources. Events are then distilled from the incidents using coding systems. The particular set of event categories and the structure of relationships among them embody a theory about what is significant in the process and shape how the process can be studied. In some cases, this theory is a priori, and in other cases, the theory underlying the category system may be derived inductively through ‘grounded’ coding of incidents, as they were in a study of new product innovation by Van de Ven, Venkatraman, Polley, and Garud (2008). Figure 16.2 shows some modified entries from one Van de Ven et al. (2008) database of over 400 events, which exemplifies how complex process data can be used to generate event sequences. As the figure shows, events were derived from a variety of sources, including interviews, journal articles by innovators, and historical accounts (the researchers also used direct observation and analysis of project documents in constructing their event sequence). Prior to entry into the database, each event was distilled from a stream of incidents by extracting information deemed significant in the development of the innovation. In this case, events are rich, and several codes related to different tracks of development (idea, people, resources) may be assigned to events.

Figure 16.2Example event descriptions (adapted from Van de Ven et al., 2008)

One assumption of the discussion to this point is that all events are single-point occurrences. However, it is Page 8 of 20

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also possible for events to extend over longer periods and for events to overlap one another. In this case, conceptualization and analysis of the sequence is more complex. Van de Ven et al. (2008) addressed this problem by explicitly defining events as changes in the product or process, thus demarcating only the starting point of long events. As we observed in a previous section, formal sequence analysis methods are most useful with complex process data. Process data may be complex in two ways. First, even if there are relatively few types of events, there may be a large number of cases. For example, Poole and Roth (1989) studied decision development in a sample of 47 decisions. Formal methods reduce the complexity of large samples through rigorous analysis and classification of large samples of sequences into meaningful types. Second, there may be only a few sequences, but they may be very long and complex with hundreds or even thousands of observations. Williams, Contractor, Poole, Srivastava, and Cai (2011) studied network evolution and team processes in a massive online multiplayer game with 80,000 players, treating it as one long, exceptionally complex sequence. Data were logged at hundredth-of-a-second intervals for five months of play time for several hundred variables representing different activities and attribute changes in players’ characters. Formal methods enable researchers to sift through massive datasets, mining sequences of activities and state changes.

Analyzing Sequential Data The main objectives of sequence analysis are (1) to identify sequences, (2) to find relationships among sequences (e.g., typologies, synchronization), and (3) to characterize their properties (e.g., complexity) The nature of the sequence(s), relationships among sequences, and sequence properties can be used to understand (and in some cases to test for) the process generating the sequence.

Sequence Identification The complexity and limitations of process data means that sequence analysis generally starts with a ‘discovery’ phase in which we conduct exploratory analysis to identify potentially meaningful patterns and progressively refine our understanding until we are able to validate our findings and test hypotheses about the sequence in a ‘confirmation’ phase of inquiry. In terms of meaningful patterns, as the discussion on process theories suggests, two types of sequences are relevant, short-cycle subsequences (substrings) that drive a process through repetitive operations and the whole sequence from beginning to end. Generally, the whole sequence is understood in terms of the shorter sequences that make it up, so we will first turn to the problem of short-cycle sequence identification, first in the discovery phase, and then as it can be applied to the confirmation phase of inquiry.

Methods for Subsequence Identification As we have noted, in some cases subsequences are regarded as subunits of longer sequences, forming a hierarchy of short sequences that are subsumed by longer sequences, while in other cases, the subsequences themselves are the focus of analysis. Three approaches for subsequence identification can be distinguished: theoretically driven approaches, sequence mining, and stochastic modeling.

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In some cases, subsequences are defined theoretically. Tschan (1995), for example, explored communication cycles in teams. Communication cycles were defined as subsequences of utterances in which the team is focused on the same part of a task (Tschan, 1995, p. 374). Tschan hypothesized that ‘ideal communication cycles,’ which begin with orientation or planning and end with evaluation, would result in higher levels of team performance than other types of cycles. Tschan identified cycles and coded each for type, quality (the degree to which it matched the ideal cycle), and complexity.

Sequence Mining We start this section with an example of sequence mining employed by Murase et al. (2015). They were interested in the impact of group process on team performance for a simulated military task conducted in a virtual environment. They mapped process by identifying subsequences of task-related actions within the larger performance episode on the assumption that sequences of actions were more meaningful indicators of process than individual acts. The sequence data consisted of a time-stamped record of team members’ activities captured in the server log for 75 sets of teams. The logs were quite long, consisting of hundreds of thousands of records. They defined events based on log information captured by the game software, yielding sequences of thousands of events such as moves vehicle and shoots at enemy (a first-level recoding of the log data into events). Using the TraMineR program (described later in this section), they derived subsequences between two and four events long based on the stipulation that each step in the sequence must consist of a change in activity (i.e., the steps could not be repetitions of previous activity). This resulted in identification of 148,000 subsequences, which were aggregated and reduced to about 80 unique and meaningful short-cycle sequences (a second-level recoding of subsequences into short cycles). These were further grouped into six activity classes that represented different types of coordination and action within and between teams (a thirdlevel recoding of short cycles into classes). The resulting classes were derived by interpreting the derived subsequences through the filter of teamwork theory and research (i.e., through retroduction). These classes then became the basic units of analysis in their study. Sequence mining involves identifying the subsequences in a sequence and characterizing their properties. Like text mining and exploratory factor analysis, sequence mining is a ‘dustbowl empiricist’ method that identifies the large number of subsequences in a given whole sequence and leaves it to the researcher to sort out what the results mean through retroduction. Sequence mining algorithms are available in several ‘off-the shelf’ applications, including the R package TraMineR (Gabadinho, Ritschard, Müller, and Studer, 2011) and STATA (e.g., Brzinsky-Fay, Kohler, and Luniak, 2006). Most sequence mining algorithms are designed to search through the data for all unique subsequences that contain up to a specified number of events. Table 16.2 shows the entire set of subsequences of the sequence ABCABABCA, which a sequence mining application would generate if the maximum number of events in the subsequence was not specified. Typically, the length of the subsequences requested is short, five events or less, because longer subsequences are difficult to interpret. The cycle plan–act–evaluate is easy to understand; act–plan–act–plan–evaluate–act–act–evaluate is not as straightforward (unless we break it into shorter units). These subsequences can then be further analyzed and reduced to a smaller set of subsequences types, or they can be used as indicators of characteristics of the whole sequence. Table 16.2Complete list of subsequences for the sequence ABCABABCA Subsequence

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It is most natural to think of sequences and subsequences in terms of temporally consecutive events, but Page 11 of 20

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they may also be composed of nonconsecutive events. In Tschan's plan–act–evaluate subsequence, it is not necessarily important that the events be consecutive, but rather that a plan event precede the act event and that evaluate come after act; there may be unrelated events between the three. The three events and their ordering have special significance in this case, and other events between them are assumed to be part of other subsequences or to be ‘error.’ In this case, the sequence mining algorithm searches for occurrences of the subsequence by skipping over irrelevant events. The number of subsequences in Table 16.1 would be much larger if nonconsecutive subsequences were counted. Another approach to sequence mining is to extract ‘hidden patterns’ of events that occur together within given intervals at a greater frequency than would be expected by chance (Magnusson, 2000 and 2005, calls these T-patterns). The assumption behind this approach is that significant events and ‘noise’ often occur together in sequence data. Imagine that the hidden pattern underlying the process is an AB subsequence. In many cases, it is difficult to recognize this specific pattern as stable and meaningful because noise events (C, D, or E) could occur along with the events A and B (e.g., ACB, ADB, or AEB) and bury the AB patterns in longer sequential combinations. Therefore, the challenge is to accurately detect which events should be grouped together as part of the hidden important pattern, and which are not relevant or should be simply considered noise. Magnusson developed an algorithm for identifying T-patterns that is implemented in the software THEME (Patternvision Ltd, Iceland; Noldus Information Technology, Netherlands).

Stochastic Modeling Stochastic modeling identifies short sequences based on an underlying model that predicts the probabilities that various short sequences of events will occur in an event sequence. The most straightforward model is the homogeneous Markov chain, which predicts the probability distribution of a set of events (in this case, occurrence of event types) at time t + k based on the probability distribution of the same set of event types at time t (see Poole et al., 2000 for a more in-depth description of Markov chain analysis). The structure of this model, as represented by a transition matrix that models the probabilities of transition from one interaction type to another over time, depicts temporal dependencies among interaction types. So, in Table 16.3, which illustrates a transition matrix T for a Markov chain model, the entry .15 in the first row represents the probability that A is followed by B, while the entry .30 in that row represents the probability that A is followed by a second A. Thus, this model describes sequential interdependencies among units, a description of the local structure of the process in terms of which events tend to lead to (or be responded to by) other events. The Markov chain describes how the series of events is generated over time based on a probabilistic process captured in the transition matrix. Markov models can be fit and tested using using loglinear modeling, following procedures outlined in Poole et al. (2000). Models predicting the occurrence of events based on the previous one, two, or three events can be generated from most sequences, provided that the number of event types is fairly small.

Table 16.3Example of a first-order Markov transition matrix, predicting probability of transition from event at time 1 to event at time 2

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Another stochastic approach is relational event modeling (REM) (Butts, 2008). Relational event modeling allows us to assess whether specific subsequences of events occur more often or less often than would be expected by chance in a sequence. Unlike Markov modeling, it requires the researcher to specify the sequences of interest (e.g., Tschan's ideal communication cycle) beforehand and build terms into a probabilistic model that is then fit to the sequence data. Hence, it is more dependent on theory of sequence ordering than sequence mining or Markov modeling. Software for conducting REM is available in the Statnet application for R.

Whole Sequence Analysis All three methods for identification of subsequences can be used to define ‘units’ that compose whole sequences. Theoretically defined short sequences are logical units for analysis of whole sequences. Short sequences identified through sequence mining can also be used to characterize whole sequences. Murase et al. (2005), for example, used profiles of the activity classes they derived through sequence mining to describe team processes. The transition matrix T of a Markov chain model describes the probabilistic structure of the whole sequence, and can give us some important information. The number of acts that best predict subsequent acts provides an indication of the approximate subsequence length that should considered in identifying subunits in the holistic sequence (Cornwell, 2015). The structure of the Markov transition matrix is also informative. Those event types that have a high probability of being at the end of a transition are candidates to be ‘absorbing states’ (Matthews 1970). From the perspective of event sequence analysis, absorbing states are events that are dominant in the process. One way to identify such acts is to sum all the transition probabilities in each Page 13 of 20

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column; columns with high sums and a high probably that the event will follow itself (e.g., high pii probabilities) are likely candidates to be absorbing states. In the first order matrix shown in Table 3, event C is likely to be an absorbing state. Another class of methods for the analysis of whole sequences are network sequence methods (Cornwell, 2015). Temporal ordering is one property that links events, but there may be other properties as well, including cause-effect relationships, people, or organizations involved in events, and outcomes of the events. Network methods consider both temporal and other linkages among events and utilize two-mode network analysis to understand the relationships among events. They enable more complex sets of relationships to be taken into account.

Methods for Identifying Relationships among Sequences Two general types of relationships among sequences are of interest. First, when we have multiple cases of the same process, we may ask how similar various cases are in terms of sequential development. It may be that all cases unfold in the same way sequentially, supporting the hypothesis that there is a single, universal pattern in the process and explanations consistent with a single pattern such as a life cycle model, or it may be that there are multiple sequences, which suggests different explanations such as a teleological or dialectical model or local generation through short cycles. Addressing this question can shed light on the nature of both whole sequences or sets of subsequences. Second, we may have more than one event sequence (representing more than one ‘track') within a given process, such as the five tracks used by Van de Ven et al. (2008) to describe start-up innovation processes. In this case, the question we ask concerns the nature of the relationship between the sequences (tracks). Identifying the relationship between two or more tracks can shed light on what drives the process. It is also one way of getting a handle on the complexity within the process.

Sequence Comparison and Typology Building When we have more than one case of the process we are studying, we have the opportunity to compare sequences to determine whether they all unfold the same way or whether there are multiple paths. In the latter case, we can develop typologies of sequences, such as Poole and Roth's group decision development typology. The most straightforward way to derive typologies is to prepare standard narrative, visual, or numerical representations and group them according to similarity of appearance. Poole and Roth (1989) used this approach, preparing a diagram of each sequence along a timeline of the same length, which allowed them to group visually similar diagrams into preliminary types. Cornwell (2015) describes several other types of diagrams that can be used for sequence comparision, including transition bubble diagrams, sequence index plots, event distribution graphs, and network diagrams (see Cornwell for detail). In addition to this informal approach to typology development, sequences can be compared formally using algorithmic methods. Optimal matching (OM) is the most commonly used sequence comparison technique in social scientific research (Brzinsky-Fay and Kohler, 2010). It generates measures of ‘distance’ between pairs of sequences in a set: similar sequences have low distance values, and the more dissimilar a pair of sePage 14 of 20

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quences is, the greater the distance. These distances are based on the number of transformation operations – substitution, insertion, and deletion – required to turn one sequence into another (Kruskal, 1983; Cornwell, 2015). Suppose we attempt to transform sequence ADE into ABC. We can do this in three steps: (1) replace D at the second position of ADE with B, which makes it ABE; (2) insert C between B and E in the sequence ABE, which transforms it into ABCE; (3) delete E at the last position of ABCE to turn it into ABC. In this case, the difference between ADE and ABC is 3. This represents only one way in which ADE can be turned into ABC (see if you can work out another). The number of different ways of ‘morphing’ one sequence into another increases exponentially as the length of the sequence increases. Moreover, it also may be that not all transformation operations are equivalent, so weights may be often assigned to different operations. For example, if A and B are rather similar events, the cost would be set low, while if C was quite different from A and B, then the cost of C for A substitutions, deletions, or insertions would be high. Optimal matching is a method for comparing all possible ways of transforming one sequence into another and selecting the one that optimizes the transformation processes to generate the lowest cost. This cost represents the distance between the pair of sequences. The result of OM is a matrix of distances between pairs of sequences that can then be further analyzed. OM has become the primary method of sequence comparison in the social sciences, so much so that OM is almost considered to be ‘synonymous with sequence analysis in general’ (Aisenbrey and Fasang, 2010, pp. 426; Elzinga, 2003). However, OM is not without its critics. One criticism of OM is that decisions on setting the operation cost values are too often arbitrary and atheoretical (Cornwell, 2015). The criticism leveled at OM has stimulated sequence analysis researchers to develop better algorithms to alleviate difficulties in setting the operation cost values (Aisenbrey and Fasang (2010). Elzinga (2003) presents a method for sequence comparison that derives distances without using optimal matching (it is implemented in TraMineR). Once we have a matrix of distances between sequences, we can analyze it to develop typologies of sequences. This is typically done by conducting cluster analysis and/or multidimensional scaling of the matrices to define clusters of similar sequences. If there is one large cluster, then this is consistent with the unitary sequence representation, and if there are several clusters, it is supportive of the multiple sequence model. Poole and Holmes (1995) present one example of the application of this approach OM and similar sequence comparison techniques can also be used to compare empirical event sequences to ideal sequence models. For example, if ABCD represents our ideal model and we have two observed sequences AABBD and DDACB, we can use OM to calculate the distance between the two empirical sequences and the ideal sequence.

Relationships Among Two or More Sequences In some cases, we have two or more related sequences in the same process, and we want to explore the interconnections and influences between event sequences. For example, as previously described, Murase et al. (2015) identified six basic short sequence activity units that tapped within team and between team coordination (two types of each), engaging the enemy, and moving the convoy the soldiers were escorting. They derived a sequence of these events for each of the four players of the game, divided the event sequence into one-minute intervals and calculated the total number of times each player engaged in each of the six acts per minute, resulting in a continuous time series of amounts of activity for each player. They were interested in the degree of coordination between the activity tracks across the four players and thus wanted to find relationships among 24 sequences of event measures (six activities for each of four players). Page 15 of 20

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One approach for identifying relationships among sequences is synchrony analysis. In general, terms, synchrony refers to stable patterns among two or more event sequences, but there are many ways to measure synchrony. Most time series analysis packages have measures of synchrony, but the R package Synchrony (Gouhier and Guichard, 2014) is particularly well suited for assessing relationships among event sequences. It includes measures for directly assessing time series synchrony, but also for the offset of events to provide indices of how members complement one another's behaviors by performing them at different times throughout the time series (harmonic entrainment). There are a number of synchrony measures, but two in particular are promising for organizational process research. Community-wide synchrony is a coarse measure, indicating how multiple event sequences reflect similar frequencies of events across a time series. Essentially, community-wide synchrony provides a measure of the correlation between members on the frequencies of a given activity over time. If the patterns between two event sequences are completely random, they would receive a community-wide synchrony score of 0, but if they had exactly the same event frequencies at exactly the same points in time, they would receive a score of 1. Murase et al. calculated community-wide synchrony using all 24-event sequences in each of their teams. Phase lock can be defined as the extent to which members fall in and out of synchronization with one another throughout the series. Phase lock is indicated by an index indicating the stability of the relationship between two event sequences over time. These measures are based on ‘cycles’ of activity that characterize individual event sequences, and are defined by a rise and fall of activity in the behavior of interest. In this way, if two event sequences begin and end at exactly the same time points within the series, they are assigned a phase lock score of 1:1. If the cycles in the event sequences begin to drift from one another, their phase lock ratios will reflect this shift away from synchrony. An interesting property of the phase lock measure is that two sequences can receive high scores if they are either perfectly in synch with one another or if they are highly coordinated but complementary in that their peak values alternate so that when one is at maximum the other is at minimum and vice versa. To distinguish between these two cases, additional metrics can be calculated, including the degree to which ‘peak’ values of the two series are simultaneous. Measures of synchronization of event time series provide an additional resource beyond typologies for process research. They enable us to tease out relationships among tracks within a process that have the potential to address questions such as which tracks are ‘leading’ others, the impact of coordination among parties, and the degree to which ‘timing’ impacts the process.

Sequence Characteristics When we have distilled and represented one or more event sequences, the next step is to describe their properties. Several different kinds of properties may be captured, either of the entire sequence or of segments of the sequence. In the previous section, we discussed the properties of synchronization and complementarity, and this section introduces additional useful characteristics of sequences. The sheer magnitudes or proportions of events of various types in a sequence can tell us a good deal about the sequence. A strategic planning process with a large number of conflict events is quite different from one with very few. The profile of magnitudes of their activity classes was used by Murase et al. (2015) to compare teams in terms of their processes. Turbulence captures the number of unique states in a given sequence, the number of transitions between states, and the distribution of time spent in the states (Elzinga, 2003). Turbulence gives us insight into the dePage 16 of 20

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gree of organization in the process. High degrees of organization (low turbulence) suggest a relatively stable and slow-developing process, while lower degrees suggest rapid changes in the process and also shifts in the underlying generative mechanisms. In their study of decision development, Poole and Roth (1989) found that group decision paths varied in terms of complexity, which represents variation in turbulence. Measuring the amount of disorganization, or entropy, in a sequence is a useful tool for understanding the stability of the data as well as the degree to which one can predict future data points. Specifically, high entropy values indicate high disorganization (or unpredictability) within a sequence of data points. For example, Eagle and Pentland (2006) used patterns of home/work transitions to identify episodes characterized by established routines, which the authors referred to as ‘ruts.’ Furthermore, the authors were able to predict with 90% accuracy when a participant could be found given their current location, but only for ‘low-entropy’ participants. We can also use entropy indices to infer the stabilization and destabilization of meaningful social patterns over time. Van de Ven et al. (2008) found different degrees of organization in their long event sequences for new business development processes, suggesting that turbulence values might vary over time during this process. Another characteristic of sequences is their similarity to a hypothesized sequence, such as Tschan's plan–act–evaluate sequence. In the previous section, we described the use of optimal matching to calculate distance (deviation from) hypothesized or ideal sequences. The most straightforward use of sequence characteristics is as variables in statistical models. Poole and Roth (1989b) tested hypotheses regarding the causal impacts of decision task and group properties on sequence complexity and similarity to the unitary sequence. Murase et al. (2015) tested a causal model of the effects of magnitudes of the six activity cycles and synchronization within and between teams on the development of shared mental models and ultimately, team effectiveness. Profiles of sequence characteristics can also be used to compare sequences. Levels of synchronization, complementarity, and entropy, for example, could be used to identify different types of coordination among sequences within a process.

Conclusion This chapter has attempted to present an overview of sequence analysis methods for process research. Its primary focus has been formal, algorithmic methods, while acknowledging the utility of informal approaches that have been the primary methods used in organizational process research. We have argued that informal and formal approaches are complementary and that they share the same ‘core’ operations because in the end understanding of formal results must be accomplished through the same interpretive process that underpins informal approaches. Because sequential data for process research are both complex and contextually constrained, most sequence analysis projects commence in an initial discovery stage, where analysts find out what sequences there are and what they can tell them about the process. Early on, sequential analysis is often primarily concerned with pattern recognition and interpretation. Once patterns have been discerned, the analysis becomes progressively more structured as sequence types and characteristics are defined and measured. At this stage, hypotheses regarding the generative mechanisms driving the process, the factors that affect the process, and the impact of various sequences or sequence properties on outcomes may be tested using more traditional quantitative methods. This movement from discovery to confirmation is guided by retroduction. Sequence analysis consists of three operations: sequence identification, sequence comparison and classification, and sequence characterization. In all three of these areas, there have been huge improvements from the relatively crude methods employed in earlier sequence studies (Poole and Roth, 1989; Van de Ven et al., 2008) to the current generation of sequence analysis methods and packages, developments reviewed in Page 17 of 20

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the previous sections. These developments offer the promise of advances in process research and research methods. Van de Ven and Poole (1995; Poole and Van de Ven, 2004) argued that many process theories combine two or more generative mechanisms. For example, a life cycle of organizational growth on the macro level might be driven from stage to stage by an evolutionary or dialectical model on the micro level. Empirical research to establish the plausibility of this combination of theoretical models is quite challenging and complex. Methods for identifying sequences and for sequence comparison discussed above can contribute to sorting out these mechanisms and how they interact. However, they will need to be supplemented by approaches for identifying and testing relationships among motors. Further, it is often argued that processes are emergent in the sense that they give rise to higher-level constructs that emerge from complex interactions among lower-level components. In areas of process research such as team research, researchers have long been interested in unpacking the mechanisms that lead to the emergence of team states (e.g., cohesion, identity, cognition, motivation). However, research on process has largely measured emergence indirectly through the aggregation of constructs from the individual level. Sequence analysis offers researchers the ability to observe the emergence of higher-level phenomena from the interaction among the lower-level constituents, particularly short-cycle sequences. If additional methods for modeling this emergence can be developed, insights into complex processes could be multiplied. Organizational processes often yield data that initially appears to be ‘just one damn thing after another,’ and formal sequence analysis methods offer a means to organize, characterize, and make sense of this data. They can make important contributions to organizational process research by setting the stage for theory building and for theory testing. In turn, organizational process research has the potential to spur advances in formal sequence methods by providing a new application context. As a complement to existing informal techniques, formal sequence analysis methods have a bright future in organizational process research.

Note 1Preparation of this chapter was supported by National Science Foundation grant #BCS 0941268 and Army Research Institute Grant W5J9CQ-12-C-0017. The contents of this chapter represent the opinions of the authors and not of these organizations.

References Abbott, A. (1984) ‘Event Sequence and Event Duration: Colligation and Measurement', Historical Methods, 14: 192–204. Abbott, A. (2001) Chaos of Disciplines. University of Chicago Press. Aisenbrey, S. and Fasang, A. E. (2010) ‘New Life for Old Ideas: The “Second Wave” of Sequence Analysis: Bringing the “Course” Back into the Life Course', Sociological Methods and Research, 38(3): 420–462. Ancona, D. G. and Chong, C. (1996) ‘Entrainment: Pace, Cycle, and Rhythm in Organizational Behavior'. In L. L. Cummings and B. M. Staw (Eds.), Research in Organizational Behavior (Vol. 18). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, pp. 251–284. Brzinsky-Fay, C. and Kohler, U. (2010) ‘New Developments in Sequence Analysis', Sociological Methods and Research, 38: 359–364. Brzinsky-Fay, C., Kohler, U. and Luniak, M. (2006) ‘Sequence Analysis with Stata', Stata Journal, 6(4): 435–460. Butts, C. T. (2008) ‘A Relational Event Framework for Social Action'. Sociological Methodology, 38(1): 155–200. Chiasson, P. (2005) ‘Abduction as an Aspect of Retroduction', Semiotica, 153: 223–242. Page 18 of 20

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Cornwell, B. (2015) Social Sequence Analysis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Eagle, N. and Pentland, A. (2006) ‘Reality Mining: Sensing Complex Social Systems', Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 10(4): 255–268. Elzinga, C. H. (2003) ‘Sequence Similarity: A Nonaligning Technique', Sociological Methods and Research, 32(1): 3–29. Gabadinho, A., Ritschard, G., Müller, N. S. and Studer, M. (2011) ‘Analyzing and Visualizing State Sequences in R with TraMineR', Journal of Statistical Software, 40: 1–37. Gaddis, J. L. (2002). The Landscape of History. New York: Oxford. Gouhier, T. C. and Guichard, F. (2014) ‘Synchrony: Quantifying Variability in Space and Time', Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 5: 524–533. Kruskal, J. B. (1983) ‘Sequence Comparison', in D. Sankoff and J. B. Kruskal (Eds.), Time Warps, String Edits, and Macromolecules: The Theory and Practice of Sequence Comparison. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, pp. 1–21. Langley, A. (1999) ‘Strategies for Theorizing from Process Data', Academy of Management Review, 24: 691–710. Magnusson, M. S. (2000) ‘Discovering Hidden Time Patterns in Behavior: T-Patterns and Their Detection', Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers, 32(1): 93–110. Magnusson, M. S. (2005) ‘Understanding Social Interaction: Discovering Hidden Structure with Model and Algorithms', in L. Anolli, S. Duncan, M. S. Magnusson, and G. Riva (Eds.), The Hidden Structure of Interaction: From Neurons to Culture Patterns. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: IOS Press, pp. 2–22. Matthews, J. P. (1970) ‘A Central Limit Theorem for Absorbing Markov Chains', Biometrika, 57(1): 129–139. McGrath, J. E. and Kelly, J. R. (1986) Time and Human Interaction: Toward a Social Psychology of Time. New York: Guilford Press. Murase, T., Asencio, R., McDonald, J., Poole, M. S., DeChurch, L. and Contractor, N. (2015) ‘The Effect of Synchronization of Group Processes on Multiteam System Effectiveness', paper presented at the National Communication Association Annual Conference, Las Vegas, NV. Peirce, C. S. (1955) Philosophical Writings of Peirce. J. Buchler (Ed.). New York: Dover Publications. Poole, M. S. and Holmes, M. E. (1995) ‘Decision Development in Computer-Assisted Group Decision Making', Human Communication Research, 22: 90–127. Poole, M. S. and Roth, J. (1989) ‘Decision Development in Small Groups IV: A Typology of Decision Paths', Human Communication Research, 15: 323–356. Poole, M. S. and Roth, J. (1989b) ‘Decision Development in Small Groups V: Test of a Contingency Model', Human Communication Research, 15(4): 549–589. Poole, M. S. and Van de Ven, A. H. (Eds.), (2004) Handbook of Organizational Change and Innovation. New York: Oxford University Press. Poole, M. S., Van de Ven, A. H., Dooley, K. and Holmes, M. E. (2000) Organizational Change and Innovation Processes: Theory and Methods for Research. New York: Oxford University Press. Rescher, N. (1996). Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Sankoff, D. and Kruskal, J. B. (Eds.), (1983) Time Warps, String Edits, and Macromolecules: The Theory and Practice of Sequence Comparison. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Tschan, F. (1995) ‘Communication Enhances Small Group Performance If It Conforms to Task Requirements: The Concept of Ideal Communication Cycles', Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 17: 371–393. Tuckman, B. (1965) ‘Developmental Sequence in Small Groups', Psychological Bulletin, 63: 383–399. Van de Ven, A. H. and Poole, M. S. (1995) ‘Explaining Development and Change in Organizations', Academy of Management Review, 20(3): 510–540. Van de Ven, A. H., Angle, H. L., & Poole, M. S. (Eds.), (2000). Research on the Management of Innovation: The Minnesota Studies. New York: Oxford. Van de Ven, A. H., Polley, D., Garud, R. and Venkataraman, S. (2008) The Innovation Journey. New York: Oxford. Walsh, W. H. (1967) Philosophy of History. New York: Harper. Weick, K. E. (1979) The Social Psychology of Organizing. Reading: Addison-Wesley. Williams, D., Contractor, N., Poole, M. S., Srivastava, J. and Cai, D. (2011) ‘The Virtual Worlds Exploratorium: Page 19 of 20

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Using Large-Scale Data and Computational Techniques for Communication Research', Communication Methods and Measures, 5(2): 163–180. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n16

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Narratives and Processuality

Contributors: Anniina Rantakari & Eero Vaara Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Narratives and Processuality" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n17 Print pages: 271-284 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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© 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Narratives and Processuality Anniina Rantakari and Eero Vaara

Introduction Narratives and stories have become increasingly popular in organizational research in general (Boje, 2014; Czarniawska, 2004; Gabriel, 2004; Vaara, Sonenshein & Boje, 2016) and in process organization research in particular (Cooren et al., 2014). Narratives owe their key role in process organization research to temporality: they provide descriptions of sequences of events (Ricoeur, 1984). While the main themes of process organization research involve becoming, change, flux, as well as creativity, disruption, and indeterminism (Langley & Tsoukas, 2010), the temporal ordering of narratives provides a structure through which the past, present, and future connect (Feldman & Almquist, 2012). Because narrative constructions relate consequences to antecedents in event sequences over time, they are essential means to understand the processual nature of organizing and of the unfolding of complex organizational change processes (Buchanan & Dawson, 2007). Narratives play a key role in process organization research since they provide richness and detail to our understanding of processuality (Langley, 2007). In this chapter, we use the concept of narrative and define it as a temporal discursive construction that provides means for individual, social, and organizational sensemaking. However, we do not restrict our definition of narratives to linguistic constructions, but also include other forms of semiosis such as visual presentations. Furthermore, we regard narratives as multifaceted means of sensemaking and sensegiving that are not always complete stories with a clear beginning and end, but are often articulated only in fragments as part of organizational discourse (Boje, 2008). From the process perspective, organizations are sites of immanent flux and continuous change (Langley et al., 2013; Tsoukas & Chia, 2002), and narratives mirror this process by creating meaning through continuous defining and ordering of events. There are, however, various narrative traditions and definitions of narrative. Narratives can be understood as mere data or as a method of data collection. They can also be used to examine different interpretations of organizational processes, and these constructions are interesting objects of study in their own right. Moreover, narratives can be seen from the ontological perspective, where organizations are sites of storytelling (Boje, 2014). In this chapter, we first explore how narratives and storytelling are understood and defined in the social sciences in general and in organization research in particular. We then elaborate four narrative perspectives, each of which is relevant for process organization research: narrative representation, narrative construction, narrative deconstruction, and narrative agency. We then go on to provide directions for future research with a discussion of narrative temporality, intertextuality, multimodality and sociomateriality, and mediatization.

Narratives in Organization and Management Research Narrative approaches have played a key role in the humanities for a long time (Bakhtin, 1981; Greimas, 1987; Propp, 1928; Ricoeur, 1984), but they have become increasingly popular in the social sciences as part of the so-called linguistic turn (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2000; Deetz, 2003). While the narrative approach originated in literary criticism and semiology (Bruner, 1990), its meaning and use have taken different forms in various disciplines. In sociology, narratives are a way of organizing our experience of time and identity construction (Ezzy, 1998; Somers, 1994). In history (Carr, 1986; White, 1987), the ‘impluse to narrate’ is seen as ‘natural.’ In psychology, narrative cognition is seen to underlie our thinking and emotional life (Sarbin, 1986; Rappaport, 2000). In communication studies, narratives provide temporal sequencing, meaning, and structure for those who live, create, or invent stories (Fisher, 1984) that have enabled researchers to study organizational reality through discursive action (Cooren, 1999). In anthropology, narratives provide the cultural memory of experience (Geertz, 1988; Levi-Strauss, 1963), and in philosophy, they are the means to make sense of temporality Page 3 of 16

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from the human perspective (Ricoeur, 1984). Collecting stories in organizational context started in the 1970s. Early studies of this perspective (Clark, 1972; Mitroff & Kilmann, 1976, 1978) focused on conceptualizations of the ideal organization by collecting short stories from managers. However, in recent years we have seen a proliferation of the narrative approach within different fields of organization research. These studies cover fields such as strategy (Barry & Elmes, 1997; Fenton & Langley, 2011), organizational change (Bryant & Cox, 2004; Whittle, Mueller & Mangan, 2009), identity (Humphreys & Brown, 2002; Ibarra & Barbulescu, 2010), organizational development and learning (Patriotta, 2003), gender (Murgia & Poggio, 2009), and entrepreneurship (Martens et al., 2007). Many of these studies involve explicit processual elements. In organization studies, narrative perspectives gained ground primarily in interpretative or social constructionist research on topics such as culture and identity (Czarniawska, 2004; Gabriel, 2004). This interest has also brought multiple methodological, epistemological, and ontological approaches to the examination of narratives and storytelling in organizational contexts. Reviews of narrativity have already been conducted in organization studies (Boje, 1995, 2001), also from the perspective of process organization studies (Rhodes & Brown, 2005) and temporality in organizations (Cunliffe, Luhman & Boje, 2004). In his analysis, Boje (2001) distinguished seven types of narratologies – realism, formalism, pragmatism, social constructionism, poststructuralism, critical theory, and postmodernism – each of which has its own underlying assumptions. In their review, Rhodes and Brown (2005) identified five areas of inquiry in organization research in general and process organization studies in particular to which narrative approaches have made significant theoretical contributions: sensemaking, communication, politics and power, learning/change, and identity and identification. In their recent review paper, Vaara et al. (2016) in turn distinguish between realist, interpretive and poststructuralist forms of organizational narrative analysis. While narratives are seen as part of the discursive perspectives on organization research, definitions of the interrelations between discursivity and narrativity vary to some extent, but we emphasize the key role of temporality in narratives. At its most basic level, a narrative is defined as the representation of an event or series of events (Abbott, 1992). It is this core feature of the narrative that makes it an indispensable part of process studies. According to Gabriel (2004: 63), four terms – text, narrative, story, and discourse – are essential to narrative analysis. Even though these terms are frequently used interchangeably, Gabriel stresses that not all discourses or all texts are narratives, emphasizing the role of (temporal) plot in narratives. Czarniawska (2004) in turn has defined narratives as texts that involve temporal chains of interrelated events or actions undertaken by characters. There has been further discussion in discourse studies on the variable and interchangeable use of the concepts of narrative and story. While narratives are representations in a narrow sense, they in fact consist of two components: story and narration. They are first a story in the form of a plotted series of events and, second, a narration in the form of storytelling (Czarniawska, 1997). However, this categorization has not exhausted the topic. As Boje (2008) puts it, a narrative is a retrospective ‘whole telling,’ with a linear beginning, middle, and end. As a concept, ‘stories’ open up possibilities for envisioning the future and prospective sensemaking. Thus, Boje (2001; 2008) adds a conceptualization of antenarrative to Gabriel's four key concepts, includes a double meaning. First, antenarrative can be understood as storytelling that is fragmented, nonlinear, incoherent, collective, unplotted, and improper (Boje, 2001: 1–2). Second, antenarrative can be understood as a bet that a fragmented polyphonic story will make retrospective, narrative sense in the future (Boje & Saylors, 2014: 202). Consequently, narratives and storytelling play a powerful role in organizing because individuals use them to determine, justify, and guide our lives (Fisher, 1984; Weick & Browning, 1986) by ordering events into temporal sequences (Pentland, 1999). Narratives therefore give meaning to separate occurrences by capturing how individuals understand sequences of events over time (Gergen & Gergen, 1997).

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Narrative Perspectives on Process Organization Studies In the following, we will elaborate four alternative narrative perspectives on process organization studies: narrative representation, narrative construction, narrative deconstruction, and narrative agency. The first focuses on narratives as representations and understanding organizational processes that exist independently of the narratives. Such research is based on realist or post-positivist perspectives on organizational processes. The second perspective is an interpretive one and concentrates on narrative constructions as objects of study by focusing on the various kinds of constructions of organizational processes and the differences between them. Relatedly, the third perspective also focuses on narratives, but draws on critical management studies to challenge narrative constructions and focus on narrative deconstructions. The fourth perspective concentrates on the agentic role of narratives in organizational processes and follows the so-called strong process view by offering an ontological view of narratives. These are ideal types, and although we treat them as separate perspectives, many studies combine their features.

Narrative Representation: Narratives as Means for Organizational Process Descriptions When narratives are examined as means of accessing organizational processes, they are regarded as a particular form of data, and narrative methods are regarded as a means to analyze this data (Abbott, 1992). This perspective coheres with the realist and positivist understanding of organizational phenomena and treats narratives as if they were reflections of reality. From the perspective of process organization studies, the main contribution of this approach is the use of process conceptions that attribute ‘causality to agents and social actors’ (Abbott, 1992: 428). In other words, these studies have focused on ‘revealing’ the causal logic of organizational processes through narratives. While the empirical focus in process research is on the temporal progressions of activities as elements of explanation and understanding (Langley et al., 2013), narratives can be seen as representing these evolving organizational phenomena by providing explicit incorporations of the sequential nature of events. In particular, studies of narrative representation have had a major impact on examining the dynamics of organizational change. By using narratives to produce causal sequences of organizational events, studies of this type treat the world as an objective social entity that exists outside of our own perceptions. Accordingly, it is possible through formal qualitative analysis to produce explanations that contain explicit causal reasoning that allows both study replication and theory generalizability (Griffin & Ragin, 1994). This may involve methods such as event-structure analysis (Griffin, 1993). For instance, in their study of nonprofit organizations and government departments, Stevenson and Greenberg (1998) adopted an event-structure analysis to reveal the concrete dynamics of organizational change. By following Abbott's (1992) notion that narratives are able to capture the processes of social reality, they argue that narrative representation, as a formal analysis of building descriptions of events, enables a rigorous examination of the processes of organizational change. In their study of software development projects, Sabherwal and Robey (1993) produced a generalized taxonomy of six ‘archetypal’ processes for software implementation. By collecting stories and coding them into events to produce chronological sequences, Sabherwal and Robey's objective was to classify the sequences of activities that produce social and technical change as outcomes. From a broader perspective, most longitudinal or processual organization studies involve this kind of approach to narratives (Langley, 1999) – even if the term narrative is not always used explicitly. Indeed, most qualitative process research builds on interviews and other types of accounts as a source of data, and most of these studies provide the researchers’ narratives of the unfolding processes in question.

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Narrative constructionism in turn more clearly reflects the traditions of narrative analysis in focusing on the features of the narratives per se. Thus, studies have examined the underlying formal structure, coherence, sequencing, and purpose of stories. This perspective has focused on the ways in which sensemaking relates to shared cognitions of organizational narratives (Boyce, 1996 Weick, 1995). These approaches typically draw from traditions in literary studies such as Greimasian structural analysis of narratives (Greimas, 1987) or social psychology such as Bruner's (1987) work on how individuals use narratives to socially construct reality for themselves. In organization studies, these have been often linked with sensemaking (Weick, 1995) as an overall theoretical framework. Thus, several studies have elaborated the role of narratives in organizational sensemaking processes (Martin, Feldman, Hatch & Sitkin, 1983; Sonenshein, Dutton, Grant, Spreitzer & Sutcliffe, 2013). A significant part of narrativity as social construction has focused on how organizational sensemaking is linked with identity (Helms & Mills, 2003; Taylor, 1999; Sonenshein, Dutton, Grant, Spreitzer & Sutcliffe, 2013). These studies treat identity as a product of narratives that people construct – it is a key theme of narrative analysis in social science more generally (Bruner, 1987; Gergen, 1999; Ricoeur, 1984; Sacks, 1985). In this view, narratives and storytelling are seen as crucial part of individual identity work (Bruner, 1987; Martin & Wajcman, 2004; Watson, 2009). This links individual identities to organizational storytelling since stories are a means for both interpreting collective events (Gabriel, 2000) and for generating collective social action by constructing collective interests and mobilizing resources (Quinn & Worline, 2008). Many if not most narrative analyses of organizational processes have been constructionist in orientation. In an early analysis, Sköldberg (1994) uncovered three modes of narrative conventions in his study of Swedish local government change programs: tragic, romantic comic, and satirical narratives. In his analysis, he strove to discover the hidden pattern, the deep structure underlying the reorganization, by constituting a story about stories. In an article on the discursive construction of success and failure in narratives on post-merger integration, Vaara (2002) identified four types of discourse – rationalistic, cultural, role-bound, and individualistic – that narrators employed when (re)constructing success and failure. He argued that central to the narrative approach is the fact that it highlights the narrator's ability to describe organizational change in different ways. In particular, his analysis highlighted the use of specific discourses to deal with attributions of success and failure. In their study of technological change, Whittle, Mueller, and Mangan (2009) focus in turn on identity in examining the role of stories in the temporal development of images of the self at work. Their aim was to explore the role of storytelling in the ongoing process of moral accounting and the development of characters over time. They crafted stories in the form of a number of conversational fragments; the purpose of the stories was to explain why a change project was not working as planned. They argue that stories in which we present ourselves in a positive light are a key component of face-saving strategies designed to maintain our social positioning. On this basis, they suggested that stories can be used by social protagonists to develop their sense of moral standing, overcome onslaughts on the self, and ideally, emerge victoriously with pride still intact. Sonenshein's (2010) study of strategic change narratives provides another illuminating example of a constructionist narrative analysis of organizational change processes. In his analysis, he uses narrative and sensemaking lenses interrelatedly. Thus, narratives are seen as tools for shaping individual understanding (sensemaking) and for influencing the understanding of others (sensegiving), and also as an outcome of the collective construction of meaning. Sonenshein builds on Lewin's (1951) model of change to illustrate how narratives influence change implementation over time. More specifically, he follows Gergen and Gergen (1997) to identify three types of narratives: progressive, stability, and regressive narratives. On this basis, Sonenshein highlights the ambiguous nature of both perspectives of change, which occur through a set of simultaneous processes, and promotes the view that strategic change is co-constructed. In their article on the narratives of business leaders, Maclean, Harvey, and Chia (2012) explore how business Page 6 of 16

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elites make sense of, narrativize, and legitimate their experiences of building careers within and beyond large organizations. From interview data, they make a twofold contribution. First, they identify three sensemaking processes: locating, meaning making, and becoming. Second, they examine how business leaders present themselves in life-history narratives by using storytelling as a vehicle for self-legitimation; they (re)frame their accounts of their own success and thereby justify their position to themselves and others. They highlight the role of stories as primary sensemaking devices within life-history narratives that help individuals make sense of change. They follow De Certeau by noting that storytelling is part of locating the self across time, space, and context. In other words, stories are spatial trajectories and every story is a travel story – a spatial practice. Finally, in their study of narrative identity in the context of knowledge-intensive work, Mallett and Wapshott (2012) adopt a Ricoueurian perspective to explore how narrative identity work mediates between multiple and contradictory personal and social identities in the workplace to mold plausible accounts of ‘who I am.’ They argue that narrative identity processes mediate the dialectical tensions between idem and ipse identities, thereby embedding contradictions and multiplicity within viable plots that embrace the remembered past, the experienced present, and the anticipated future. They conceptualize identity as multiple, conflictual, and polyphonic. According to Mallett and Wapshott, narrative processes provide a bridge between past, present, and future, and thus emphasize the need to be sensitive to the potential for contradiction and the importance of a temporal understanding of identity.

Narrative Deconstruction: Alternative Narrative Constructions and Deconstructions Other studies have then taken a more critical perspective on narrative constructions and aimed at a deconstruction of prevailing or dominant narratives. The starting point is a postmodern or post-structural view that problematizes dominant narratives and narrative authority (Boje, 1995; Buchanan, 2003; Buchanan & Dawson, 2007; Collins & Rainwater, 2005). Instead of looking for coherent storylines, shared meaning, and common values, narrative deconstruction focuses on multiple meanings, contradictions, and how narratives privilege some and exclude others (Brown, Humphries & Gurney, 2005; Cunliffe et al., 2004). As Näslund and Pemer (2012) note, storytelling has a double-edged potential. While storytelling may lead to increased polyphony within organizations, it can equally serve as a tool for achieving hegemony by strengthening dominant stories and established truth claims in organizations (Currie & Brown, 2003; Geiger & Antonacopoulou, 2009). Thus, studies that have focused on the polyphonic and polysemic nature of organizational storytelling have strived to unravel and deconstruct monological accounts of organizational narratives (Humphreys & Brown, 2002). In this way, by deconstructing organization as a manifestation of one dominant story, studies focusing on organizational polyphony highlight the contextual and processual nature of organizational storytelling from multiple perspectives. This has led to a twofold analysis of change narratives, especially within studies of organizational change. It has meant deconstructing the prevailing and dominating narratives. Equally important is the fact that an increasing number of studies have focused on organizational stories and narratives that appear to hinder or prevent change in organizations (Brown, Gabriel & Gherardi, 2009). In his seminal study, Boje (1995) used the metaphor of ‘Tamara-land’ to deconstruct the collective and historical dynamics of Disney as a storytelling organization. In this deconstruction of the official grand narrative of Disney, Boje conducted a postmodern analysis of narrativity to conceptualize organizational storytelling as a discursive struggle. According to Boje (1995: 1007), to deconstruct is to ‘actually analyze the relations between the dualities of stories … to show the ambiguity embedded in them and to show the storytelling practices used to discipline meanings.’ With this conceptualization, Boje depicted organizational processualPage 7 of 16

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ity as a nonlinear struggle, as a multiplicity of different discourses and narratives, where different modes of narratives emerge simultaneously. However, this does not mean that all narratives are equivalent; instead, storytelling is always an act of power, domination, and marginalization – a language of discipline. By offering a ‘sideways look’ into corporate transformation at Sears, Collins and Rainwater (2005) focused on polyphony and polysemy in order to make space for perspectives and narratives that are normally edited out of managerial narratives. By uncovering bottom-up stories of change, they sought to reveal the rich, complex, and equivocal nature of change management. In the same vein, Buchanan and Dawson (2007) examined change as a multi-authored process that consists of competing accounts. They demonstrated how narratives can shape the nature and sequence of the events that they describe and how both respondent and researcher narratives are crafted to persuade, influence, suggest lines of action, and make things happen; in short, caveat lector. Thus, Buchanan and Dawson developed an approach that combines existing ideas from narrative and processual perspectives in order to open up the seemingly innocuous claim that change is multi-authored. Driver (2009) in turn draws from a Lacanian perspective to examine how stories serve a dual function in allowing the storytellers to construct the organization, work, and self in imaginary ways but more importantly, to encounter the failure of such constructions. She argues that organizational change does not bring the inherent inadequacies of organizations, work, and self to the surface and that stories of change are therefore lived experiences in and through which storytellers construct fantasies of work, self, and organization but also disrupt them. Finally, in yet another type of study of change, Beech, MacPhail, and Coupland (2009) examine how the stories people tell about themselves incorporate and react to the stories told by others adjacent to them in the situation, and suggest the possible consequences of such incorporation and reaction. They distinguish between monological stories, which are told from a singular perspective, and dialogical, or less certain and more interactive ones. They introduce an interruption to the story and discuss the possibility of challenging anti-dialogic positioning in change stories.

Narrative Agency: Narratives as Part of Organizational Ontology Fourth, narratives can also be seen as key parts of ongoing organizing activities. Accordingly, narratives not only represent organizational phenomena but also play a key role in their ongoing social construction. While constructionist and deconstructionist approaches already emphasize social constructions, agentic approaches link these constructions to organizing and organizational phenomena as they happen. According to this view, narratives have ontological power in relation to organizations in that their use produces results or real consequences in extra-linguistic organizational reality. This perspective resonates with the so-called strong processual perspective on organizing (Chia, 1999; Tsoukas & Chia, 2002) according to which organizations are in an ongoing state of becoming and flux. This view has often been called ‘ontological,’ and it draws on Boje's extensive work on storytelling organizations and antenarratives (Boje, 1995, 2001, 2008, 2014), which has highlighted the intimate linkages between storytelling and organizing and their ontological implications for our understanding of organizational phenomena. According to the ontological view on narratives, organizations can be seen as spaces full of unconstructed and fragmented stories, which have not yet been told (narrated) (Boje, 2001: 3). Hence, the definition of antenarrative has two faces: the fragmentation of storytelling and a bet on the future. In their antenarrative analysis of the Enron scandal, Boje, Rosile, Durant, and Luhman (2004) used the metaphor of spectacle to reveal the antenarrative fragments of marginalized and back-grounded stories. In their analysis, they follow Debord's (1967) theory of spectacle to explore how theatrical spectacles are produced, distributed, and consumed in ways that attract and retain investors, and theorize about ‘spectacle thePage 8 of 16

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atrics’ as the work of contemporary organizations. With their study, Boje et al. provide an example of an ontological account of narratives. They argue that we live in a theater of corporate spectacle and show how organizational spectacles follow their own theatrical practices, which both rationalize and legitimize organizational power and at the same time cast the public in the role of passive spectators. This means that both corporate power and resistance can be understood through critical dramaturgy analysis, where corporate power follows the logic of heroic storytelling and resistance follows the logic of carnival; together, they form the practice of the organization. In another application of the antenarrative approach, Vaara and Tienari (2011) elucidate the use of narratives as central discursive resources in times of change. They draw from antenarrative analysis (Boje, 2001, 2008) to examine the cultural constitution of organizational change. In their analysis, Vaara and Tienari distinguish three types of antenarratives that provide alternative ways for making sense of merger: globalist, nationalist, and Nordic. They argue that their analysis helps us to comprehend the dialogical dynamics of organizational storytelling, that is, how alternative and competing narrative constructions are linked together in organizational sensemaking. This in turn should increase our understanding of how narrative constructions of identities are used to legitimate and resist change. Musca, Rouleau, and Fauré (2014) provide an ethnographic study that illustrates the central role of a particular narrative chronotope, a space-time configuration (Bakhtin, 1981) that proved to be central in making sense of an expedition that failed to meet its original objective in Patagonia. Their detailed analysis shows how the expression ‘a crow's flight’ became a key construction with which the members of the expedition could deal with the failure, to reorient the expedition, and to retrospectively see it as a meaningful experience. In another type of analysis, Deuten and Rip (2000) draw on actor network theory to develop a ‘narrative infrastructure’ perspective in product creation processes. In their view, narrative infrastructure is understood as constitutive for organizing since narratives provide organizational landscape by creating coherence into complex organizational processes. Thus, narratives occur in interaction, they inform and shape action, and make action into something memorable.

Future Research In this chapter, we have identified four perspectives on narratives and processuality in organizational research and discussed some examples of each perspective: narrative representation, narrative construction, narrative deconstruction, and narrative agency. We now reflect on some directions that warrant attention in future research: temporality, intertextuality, multimodality and sociomateriality, and mediatization.

Narrative Temporality Narratives involve temporality by definition, and as the previous review section demonstrated, this temporality can mean representations of ‘real’ processes (representation), constructions of temporal understanding (construction), critical analysis of dominant temporal constructions (deconstruction), or analysis of how narratives contribute to temporal flows of events and experiences (agency). Future studies can elaborate on these different aspects of narrative temporality and develop new frameworks to advance our understanding of narrative temporality. One interesting avenue of future research is provided by Bakhtinian notions of time and chronotopes. In particular, Pedersen (2009) provides an illuminating reflection on time as a narrative concept. She defines narrative time as open time that can be looked at in different ways: as historical time, as living time, as foreshadows Page 9 of 16

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of time, or as time bound to space. Pedersen uses two narrative time concepts: shadows of time and chronotopes to reveal how change is explained as foreshadows, sideshadows, and different chronotopes. Chronotope is a Bakhtinian (Bakhtin, 1981) unit of analysis according to which the temporal and spatial aspects are intertwined in language. Pedersen's analysis of narrative time demonstrates how understandings of space and shadows capture time as a meaningful phenomenon that is linked with sensemaking. With her findings, she illustrates how using narrative time can create new understandings of organizational change. In a subsequent paper, Vaara and Pedersen (2013) focus on the processes through which understandings of time and space are constructed in strategy narratives. They argue that strategy narratives need to be linked with the conditions of their production. They focus on chronotopes to elucidate the temporal dimension of strategy narratives in their textual form. Thus, specific chronotopes characterize particular literary genres, which can each serve as bases for different organizational narratives. They argue that the concept of chronotope enables researchers to elaborate on the role of time and temporality in various types of narratives and genres, as well as the linkage to literary forms of presentation and enabling and constraining features of strategy. Others such as Boje (2011, 2014) have then argued that narrative flows in general and temporality in particular can take different forms. Boje distinguishes between linear, cyclical, spiral, and rhizomatic antenarratives as basic forms of emerging narratives. The insight in terms of temporality is that in addition to linear sequences (that have a beginning, middle, and end parts), antenarratives and the temporality expressed in them can take other forms. Studies following process philosophy (Hernes, 2008; Hernes, Simpson & Söderlund, 2013; Nayak & Chia, 2011) have challenged the linear perception of time and temporality. These studies have argued that instead of focusing solely on a chronological ‘over time’ conceptualization, time can be examined as an ongoing present, as an ‘in time’ perception, that entails the past and future as immanent (Bakken, Holt & Zundel, 2013; Dawson, 2014; Schultz & Hernes, 2013). New pathways for understanding this kind of ‘in time’ temporal experience could be opened with the notion of antenarrative. Empirical analyses of these different forms of temporality are, however, scarce.

Narrative Intertextuality Narratives are typically considered stand-alone elements or examples of a particular type (even myth, legend, or saga) or genre type. In empirical studies, researchers have in turn typically uncovered story types that characterize sensemaking or dominant narrative representations. Less attention has been focused on the networks of narration or narrative intertextuality, that is, on the various kinds of interlinkages between specific narrative fragments or acts of storytelling. Analysis of narrative intertextuality can involve unraveling the bases on which any narrative or narrative-inthe-making is constructed. Such analysis can take different forms. In a rare example, Pentland and Feldman (2007) have outlined a network-based approach to study the interlinkages between narratives in networks of texts. The narrative network is a method for representing and visualizing patterns of technology in use. They offered airline ticketing as an example of constructing a narrative network and focused on the series of events that make up the core story, which is seen to bring action and agency into focus and positions these important phenomena for further analysis. They used narratives to indicate a coherent progression of sequence of events with a purpose or goal. In a recent paper, Dailey & Browning (2014) in turn focus on narrative repetition, which is also related to intertextuality. They identify three dualities (control/resistance, differentiation/integration, and stability/change) that facilitate understanding of the inherent complexity of narrative as a mode of interpretation. They argue that narrative provides a lens through which changes to organizational structures over time can be explained, and suggest that more in-depth analysis would be possible by using narrative repetition to explain stories that have multiple meanings across time and place. Bakhtinian-inspired analysis of dialogicality can furthermore help us to understand the dialogical processes Page 10 of 16

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through which narratives come into being. Boje (2008) has, for instance, distinguished between the following dialogisms as a basis of antenarratives: polyphony in the form of multiple voices, stylistic dialogisms in terms of various modes of representation, chronotopes as space-time configurations, and architectonic dialogisms in the form of interplay between various cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical discourses. Boje's (2008) analysis also highlights the role of heteroglossia, another Bakhtinian concept (Bakhtin, 1981; Boje, 2008), which refers to the multiplicity of voices evident in a dialectic between centripetal and centrifugal forces in storytelling. The study of Vaara and Tienari (2011) reviewed above provides an example of such empirical analysis.

Multimodality and Materiality Narrative analysis typically focuses on text and discourse, while the roles of other modes of semiosis and materiality have received less attention. This, however, limits our understanding of the role of narratives in general and as part of organizational processes in particular. In addition to written texts or verbal communication, narratives involve visuality and other forms of semiosis (Meyer et al., 2013; Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001). For instance, the folkloristic tradition is based on sound in terms of music and visual presentation of narratives as much as the verbal accounts that have only later become textual. This is also the case with organizational narratives and storytelling, which involve more aspects than our typical narrative models and methods allow us to capture. Furthermore, narratives and related sensemaking processes are in many ways linked with the sociomaterial environment. In an illuminating paper, Cunliffe and Coupland (2012) elaborated on sensemaking as an embodied narrative. They argued that we make our lives, ourselves, and our experiences sensible in embodied interpretations of others and interactions with them. In other words, they suggest that sensemaking is more than discourse and communication. Instead, sensemaking involves polyphonic, responsive, and embodied struggles of meaning. Barad's (2007) agential perspective on sociomateriality provides another source of inspiration for developing more postmodern insights into sociomaterial narrativity (e.g., Boje, 2014; Shotter, 2013). The key idea in her framework is that materiality and discourse are ‘intraplay,’ that they are mutually constitutive as a flux of experience. For narrative analysis in process organization studies, this entails focusing on how narratives come into being when confronted with material and nonmaterial objects in and around organizations. This view resonates with the strong process view in organizational process studies in that it focuses on the becoming in intra-activity rather than assuming the prior existence of entities. While acknowledged by narrative theorists, these ideas have led to few empirical studies in process organization studies.

Mediatization and Narratives Linked with the idea of sociomateriality, it is important to focus attention on mediatization in narratives studies. Mediatization in its broader sense implies a focus on the media used in the production and consumption of narratives. Recent technological development, especially in ICT, has fundamentally altered these production and consumption practices. However, research on narratives has not kept abreast of development, for example, by examining the enabling and constraining effects of mobile communication and/or social media on organizational narratives and storytelling. In a more specific sense, media refers to the mass and communication media, both of which are inherent parts of contemporary society and play a fundamental role in all kinds of organizations, internally and externally. There are a few studies that have already analyzed the role of mediatized narratives in shaping organiPage 11 of 16

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zational processes. The study by Boje et al. (2004) on Enron reviewed above provides an illuminating study of the role of narratives in the rise and fall of the company. In addition to mass media, future studies could focus attention on social media and how narratives and storytelling impact various intra- and extra-organizational processes or are part of them.

Conclusion This chapter has focused on the role of narratives and narrative analysis in process organization studies. In particular, we have distinguished between and elaborated four narrative perspectives, each of which is relevant for process organization research: narrative representation, narrative construction, narrative deconstruction, and narrative agency. While highlighting differences between these approaches, we maintain that theoretical and empirical studies can, of course, also combine them. Nevertheless, given the multiplicity of traditions and definitions surrounding narratives, we maintain that it is important to be clear about the narrative approach taken and what it implies in terms of ontological, epistemological, and methodological understandings of organizational processes. In addition, we have identified specific areas for future research: temporality, intertextuality, multimodality and sociomateriality, and mediatization. Temporality is a key part of process organization studies, and the four perspectives outlined in this chapter have the potential to uncover specific aspects of temporality. In this way, narrative analysis can significantly advance and enrich process organization studies. As the discussion about intertextuality, multimodality, and sociomateriality shows, recent narrative analyses provide a number of theoretical and methodological insights that open up new avenues for future research. Moreover, there are areas and topics related, for example, to media that are still covered relatively poorly in narrative analysis despite their importance. In these and other areas, narrative analysis can also significantly add to process organization studies more generally.

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Composing a Musical Score for Academic–Practitioner Collaborative Research

Contributors: Stuart Albert & Jean M. Bartunek Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Composing a Musical Score for Academic–Practitioner Collaborative Research" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n18 Print pages: 286-302 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Composing a Musical Score for Academic–Practitioner Collaborative Research Stuart AlbertJean M. Bartunek BELMONT – Two psychiatrists, a psychologist, and a neuroscientist prepared to present the key facts about their patient, who had tried to commit suicide after experiencing bouts of depression, hallucinations, and insomnia. But first, the quartet raised their instruments, set bows on strings, and filled a cafeteria at McLean Hospital with music that conveyed melancholy and angst. The ‘patient’ was 19th-century German composer Robert Schumann, and the stormy music was an exploration of the brilliant yet sometimes troubled mind that created it. (Johnson, 2014) This excerpt from a newspaper article suggests how people with multiple sets of skills may collaborate, using music, to convey understandings of a patient's experience. Imagine using music not only to convey the patient's experience, but also to describe the ongoing interactions of the psychiatrists, the psychologist and the neuroscientist as they work together to understand the patient. Our purpose in this chapter is to show how music can provide a valuable approach to process theorizing. To accomplish this aim, we are trying something new and admittedly experimental: we are exploring how music (its notation and performance) might describe the process of academic– practitioner collaboration. More specifically, we propose a Four Step method that scholars may use to move from static to dynamic descriptions of such collaborative research. This method uses the structure and organization of a musical score to add to the understanding of the temporal dynamics involved in academic–practitioner collaboration. We will build on it to show how musical scores, including one largely composed for this chapter, can present such dynamics in ways that enable different types of understanding than those conveyed simply by written texts. Academic–practitioner research collaboration (described by Bartunek and Louis, 1996, as insider–outsider, or I/O collaboration) – occasions when academics and practitioners jointly plan, conduct, act on, and publish the results of research (e.g., Bartunek and Louis, 1996; Marcos and Denyer, 2012) – has received considerable attention as a way to foster academic–practitioner relationships (e.g., Amabile et al., 2001; Bartunek, 2008; Bartunek and Louis, 1996; Van de Ven, 2007). A few authors have focused on processes likely to occur during such collaboration. For example, Amabile and her coauthors (2001) described the types of conflicts that arose between academics and practitioners when they collaborated on a complex research project. Marcos and Denyer (2012) discussed how ways of thinking and acting, of knowledge and practice, evolved during a collaborative academic–practitioner research project. While their focus on process is important, these studies, and studies like them, are limited because the description of the temporal dynamics involved is incomplete. The most fully elaborated description of processes that unfold over time during academic–practitioner collaborative research is the stage model shown in Table 18.1 that was proposed by Bartunek and Louis (1996). In addition to presenting the stages of this collaboration, it shows key events at each stage. Bartunek and Louis acknowledge that the term ‘stage’ is an artifice because the processes involved are more complex than can be captured in a strictly sequential model. They note (p. 23): For the sake of discussion, we will discuss activities and events associated with conducting joint I/ O work as if they occurred in chronological sequence and as discrete stages. It is rarely the case, however, especially in qualitative research, that stages proceed in discrete steps or in the exact sequence presented. For example, activities begun at certain stages, such as developing the working relationship between insiders and outsiders, may continue throughout the research effort. Formulation of specific research questions may occur after or as initial data are collected and examined. In Page 2 of 19

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some modes of inquiry … action taking is pervasive throughout the project Table 18.1The stages of insider/outsider (I/0) research (Bartunek and Louis, 1996, p. 26) Stages

Key Issues

I.Composing the 1/0 research team

Those who initiate the research choose insider or outsider partners. Criteria for choosing insiders include wide access in the setting, interest in the research, and ability to appreciate others’ perspectives. Criteria for choosing outsiders include trust, ability to work jointly, and research skill.

II.Developing a Mutual respect and influence are essential in the development of the working relationworking relaship. The research addresses the goals of both parties. tionship III.Formulating Insider and outsider researchers develop questions to orient the study. Together, they research quesmay decide on a common set of questions. One group may have more say than the othtions to orient er, or they may have equal say in this decision. the study IV.Designing data collection procedures

Insider and outsider researchers design the data collection process. Insiders may give an external researcher guidance in methods and specific questions to be addressed, or the groups may jointly design these.

V.Collecting data

Insiders and outsiders may collect the same types of data or complementary data. Insiders, with guidance from outsiders, may collect the data. Outsiders may collect the data.

VI.Analyzing and interpreting data

Insiders and outsiders may analyze the data together. One party may provide a tentative interpretation, and the other may critique and advance the interpretation.

VII. Writing reports and presenting results

One party may write the report and obtain comments on drafts from the other party. Insiders and outsiders may author the report jointly, or parties may write separate reports.

VIII. Taking action

Action is undertaken based on the research and aimed at benefiting participants in the setting.

IX. Making scholarly contributions

The research makes a contribution to scholarly literature in some area.

X.Tracking outResearchers assess the extent to which project goals were achieved. comes

What Is Process? The most prominent early model of process research in organizational behavior was that of Mohr (1982), who suggested that its main purpose was to understand, in sequence, the events and processes through which a particular outcome came about. Recently, however, process thinking has expanded considerably. For example, Langley, Smallman, Tsoukas, and Van de Ven (2013: 1) describe process studies as addressing ‘questions about how and why things emerge, develop, grow, or terminate over time.’ Hernes (2014: 39–40) describes process thinking as concerned with the ‘becoming of things, meaning that things (a human being, a machine, a routine, a goal) are not to be considered as existing in a final state, but rather in a continuous state of becoming through their changing relationships with other things.'

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Contemporary process models also include other dimensions: dynamism (Langley, 1999; Langley et al., 2013); timing and pacing (Pettigrew et al., 2001); and rhythm and polyphony (Albert, 2013; Amis, Slack, and Hinings, 2004; Ancona and Chong, 1996; Bingham and Kahl, 2013; Bluedorn, 2002). Langley et al. (2013) and Hernes (2014) show that time and temporal phenomena are central to understandings of process, which means that all processes, including collaborative ones, describe events that are continually changing. This limits the ability of simple diagrammatic concepts like boxes and arrows (the latter are implied in Table 18.1) to fully capture the intricacies and complexities of a dynamic process (Langley et al., p. 8). In the next section, we suggest a more adequate way forward.

Temporal Processes and Academic–Practitioner Collaborative Research To develop a dynamic process model of academic–practitioner collaboration, we start by considering four of the five Ws that journalists use to describe events: who, what, where, when, and why. Who is involved? What is going on? Where (in what context), and when (at what time)? (We omit Why, which is no doubt important for collaborators, but not directly relevant for our discussion). These W's define the minimal set of categories needed for descriptive completeness. We begin understanding any domain of action by asking Who is involved. For academic–practitioner collaborations, this includes (minimally), an academic and a practitioner. We then address: What is going on, or could go on? These are content questions. In the case of academic–practitioner collaborative research, their answers are in the second column of Table 18.1. Notice that the answer to a ‘What’ question only becomes temporal when we add the phrase ‘is going on’ and ‘when.’ Otherwise the answer would simply be the type of process occurring, e.g., a political process, rather than anything about its dynamic nature. Without paying attention to what is going on and when, we are left with a static description. A complete dynamic description also needs to include the context: ‘Where' the action is taking place, inside an organization, within an industry, etc. The context of action, which itself can change over time, influences ‘What' can and does take place. In Table 18.2, we present a Four Step method for moving from a static description of academic–practitioner collaboration to a more dynamic one. Each step adds temporal elements, bringing us closer to a truly dynamic description of how the process of collaboration develops, changes, and evolves over time. Table 18.2Four step method for moving from static descriptions of academic–practitioner collaboration to more dynamic ones Stage

Brief description and role of time.

STEP 1: THE ATEMPORAL

In this step, time is not specified. We can talk about how something is organized, structured, or functions without bringing time into the picture.

STEP 2: Single point perspective

Time enters when we consider when something is going on. We specify a point in time, a date in history. If we expand the point into an interval, we create room for describing what is going on during it.

STEP 3: Multiple point perspective: Longitudinal research

Time is added to our descriptions by incorporating a timeline which allows us to describe the state of a particular situation at different times.

STEP 4: The Score Expansion

Adding six elements – sequence, punctuation, interval, rate, shape, and polyphony – and the horizontally and vertically organized patterns that they form with each other in order to create a dynamic description of time by way of a musical score.

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Movement to a Temporal Perspective Step 1: The a-temporal. In this step, equivalent to the answer to the question about ‘what,’ time is not specified. We talk about how something is organized, structured, or functions, what it is and does, without bringing time into the picture. Thus, Table 18.1 portrays some of the organization, structure, and functions of academic–practitioner collaboration, including choosing research partners, addressing goals of both parties, developing research questions, designing data collection processes, collecting data, analyzing data together, writing reports, undertaking action, contributing to the scholarly literature, and assessing the extent to which goals were achieved. A model that describes the events that are going on, but not (at a minimum) their sequence, is essentially a-temporal. Step 2: Single point perspective. Implicitly at least, virtually all process models have temporal characteristics (cf. Hernes, 2014). We do not decide when to do something until after we have decided what to do; we do not collect data until we have designed a study's research questions (in theory, at least; the garbage can model gained popularity by showing that ‘when’ sometimes dominates questions of ‘what’ (March, Olson & Christensen, 1976). The next three steps move toward a more dynamic description that brings time into the picture. Time enters a description when we consider when something is going on. We specify a point in time, a date in history. If we expand that point to an interval, we create room for a discussion of what is going on during that interval. Clearly, the length of the interval matters. If it is too short, we are left with a fragment. If we describe what occurred during the third inning of a baseball game, but do not include what happened during the rest of the game, including who won, our account of the game is incomplete. Similarly, if we discuss only what data collection methodology academics and practitioners used and nothing else, that too is an incomplete description of their work together. It is not unusual, however (cf. Bartunek, 2008) to find that descriptions of academic–practitioner collaboration focus on only a few stages of their collaboration. Step 3: Multiple point perspective: Longitudinal research. A more complete description of a temporal process is accomplished by adding a timeline, which allows us to describe the state of the collaboration at different points in time. We can then study change by comparing one time period with another. A timeline is a normal component of process studies (e.g., Bresman, 2013, Fig. 1 and 2; Howard-Grenville, Metzger and Meyer, 2013, Fig. 2). By convention, timelines are on the bottom of graphs, which metaphorically gives us firm footing in a world in flux. Thus, we study change over time, as if change is somehow happening above the firm ground defined by the timeline, up in the air, where things are uncertain and potentially threatening. Timelines are drawn straight and level, without bumps or cracks that might trip us up. We like the stability of timelines for the same reason that the ancients put the earth at the center of the universe: it helps us cope with change. The universe moved around the center, but the center itself did not move, and being the center it did not have to. The same is true of the timeline; it creates a fixed platform, or uniform reference metric, from which to observe the potentially unsettling dynamics of the world – which is why, in Table 18.1, we often use a timeline to describe the dynamics of academic–practitioner collaboration. In Steps 1, 2, and 3, time is either absent or treated as an inert container or surface. The irony is that time functions as a constant against which to observe, record, and measure change. Step 4: The musical score. Suzanne Langer (1950: 221) famously suggested that ‘Music makes time audible, and its continuity sensible.’ To add time to descriptions of actions and events, and thus to move from a static description to a more dynamic one, suggests that we analyze what is going on as if it were a musical score (Albert, 2013). That means looking for six music-like elements and the vertically and horizontally organized patterns that they form with each other. Describing collaboration as a musical composition will bring us closer to a more dynamic description of ‘what is going on’ and ‘when.'

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The Elements of a Musical Score Five elements of a musical score – sequence, punctuation, duration, rate, and shape – define and describe its horizontal dimension. A sixth, polyphony, which refers generally to many voices or sounds, adds multiple layers and hence the vertical dimension, which creates the possibility for chords and chord progressions, for harmony and dissonance. To move from a static to a dynamic description requires that we treat every element of a situation as a component of a vertically and horizontally organized music-like pattern. It means treating time as a constituent of our actions and not simply an empty container for them. It recognizes that nothing can exist – no person, object, process, entity, etc. – without having these six time-related characteristics. The first is sequence: Everything has a ‘before and after,’ a time before something has begun and a time after which it has ended, as well as a ‘before and after’ for each step in its unfolding, development, or change. Second, everything has temporal punctuation, when it begins and ends, or at a minimum, pauses. Nothing goes on nonstop forever. Third, everything takes time (duration) and, fourth, changes at a particular rate, which can be zero. Fifth, everything has a temporal shape, some defining or central characteristic that varies or remains constant over time. Sixth, no action, process, or event occurs in isolation: everything has a context, each dimension or component of which will have its own temporal trajectory (polyphony). We describe each of these elements more fully below, illustrating them with examples from academic–practitioner collaboration. Sequence: This element refers to the order of events, like the notes in a melody. As we noted above, any stage model such as that in Table 18.1 describes a sequence. Forming a research team, Stage I, presumably occurs before any of the next steps in I/O team research. Temporal Punctuation: This element marks when events or processes begin, pause, or end. Temporal punctuation functions like linguistic punctuation by inserting commas, periods, etc., into what would otherwise be a continuous stream of action. With regard to academic–practitioner collaboration, punctuation identifies where one stage ends and another begins, and how definitive the ending is. Bartunek and Louis (1996) pointed out that developing a good working relationship between insiders and outsiders is a continuous process, with periodic pauses or breaks (commas), rather than an event completed at the end of Stage II, which Table 18.1 implies. Duration: This element describes how long an action or event takes, as well as how much time elapses between actions or events. Some of the stages of academic–practitioner collaboration described in Table 18.1 take longer than others. Collecting data, particularly if the data are qualitative, will usually take longer than designing the data collection. Sometimes publishing the results can take longer than conducting the entire study. Rate: This element refers to how quickly events occur or actions are taken. Some may be fast paced; others develop more slowly. For example, most researchers prefer to begin data collection soon after a research question has been formulated and decided. Once results begin to come in (or even before), practitioners may want and need to take action, while academics are more likely to wait for the data to be completely analyzed before starting to write a scholarly article. Shape: Shape refers to the pattern or curve that results when we plot any property of interest on the Y-axis and time on the X-axis, for example, the rise and fall of a melody or the varying amount of effort in each step of a sequential process. In the course of working together, there may be conflict, valleys (e.g., Amabile et al., 2001), as well as times of extraordinary accomplishment, peaks, that result from cooperative effort. The shape of collaboration also includes the varying strengths of different emotions as these change over time. Polyphony: Polyphony is ‘a form of composition in which multiple melodies are performed at the same time, each retaining its own individuality as it harmonizes with others’ (Albert, 2013, p. 155). This is a crucial component of temporal pacing, and is sometimes discussed in terms of counterpoint. Barenboim (2008: 17) commented that Page 6 of 19

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Music is always contrapuntal, involving an interplay of independent voices, in the philosophical sense of the word. Even when it is linear, there are always opposing elements coexisting, and occasionally even in conflict with each other. Music accepts comments from one voice to the other at all times and tolerates subversive accompaniments as a necessary antipode to leading voices. Conflict, denial and commitment coexist at all times in music. … In a spoken dialogue between two human beings, one waits until the other has finished what he has to say before replying or commenting on it. In music two voices are in conversation simultaneously, each one expressing itself to the fullest, while at the same time listening to the other. In academic–practitioner research collaboration, there are always ‘two voices in conversation,’ as well as differing ‘elements coexisting and occasionally even in conflict with each other.’ Each partner may have his or her own process for tackling the tasks required by the collaboration. Data collection and analysis may mean different things for academics and practitioners and, consequently, require different actions. Further, there may be times when the actions of one partner are harmonious or consonant with those of the other, and times when they are in conflict or dissonant (Amabile et al., 2001).1

The Music of Collaboration On the basis of these elements, we will develop the music of academic–practitioner research collaboration in two ways. First, we will use Bach's Art of Fugue Number 7 to show how the six elements described above are present in an existing musical score. Second, we will present a score largely composed for this chapter to illustrate the dynamics associated with the stages of academic–practitioner collaboration described in Table 18.1.

Elements of Academic–Practitioner Collaboration Brought Forward In the Art of Fugue We begin with Bach's Art of Fugue (Number 7), shown in Figure 18.1.

Figure 18.1The music of academic–practitioner collaboration

Imagine in this figure an academic and a practitioner each performing a sequence of actions (like notes in Page 7 of 19

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the melody) at the same time that other actors (who define their context) play their ‘own tunes.’ Academics and practitioners must communicate and respond not only to the notes (actions) played (enacted) by their collaborator, but also to what is going on outside their collaboration, which we label Context A and Context B, respectively. Context A might be events within a collaborator's academic department. Context B might include what is going on in other parts of his or her organization. The sequence of the music in this fugue is shown by in the arrow in Figure 18.1. This arrow describes the order(s) in which (all) the notes are played, both those in and not in the primary melody line, or subject, which is shown in Figure 18.2.

Figure 18.2The primary melody line of Bach's Art of Fugue

With some exceptions (e.g., Denis et al., 1996; Stensaker and Langley, 2010), process models often resemble Figure 18.2 more than Figure 18.1. Implicitly, if not explicitly, they present one subject line or sequence (Figure 18.2), and everything follows it in the order presented without significant variation or imitation. In contrast, a fugue such as in Figure 18.1 (a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts) shows that there are likely to be many variations in a core sequence. There are multiple ways that sequences may occur within an academic–practitioner collaboration. For instance, Bartunek (2003) and several different insider collaborators (e.g., Bartunek, Galosy, Lacey, Lies, and Wood, 1991; Bartunek, Lacey, and Wood, 1992; Bartunek, Walsh, and Lacey, 2000) undertook academic/ practitioner studies of a group called the Network Faculty Development Committee (NFDC). Composition of the research team (Stage I) took different forms in the various studies, as did the processes of developing a working relationship with varying groups of people (Stage II). The research questions differed, data collection and data analysis happened in different ways, as did the types of action taken. In other words, although the sequence was the same in each of the studies, components varied within each phase of collaboration. The music in Figure 18.1 has multiple punctuation marks. Bars divide the composition into different measures that serve as signals to go on to the next measure, repeat the current one, or end the composition. Rests indicate times to pause. In fact, it is impossible for music not to be punctuated, since every note either pierces silence or inserts itself into the soundscape of other notes already playing. Similarly, academic–practitioner collaboration is punctuated by the boundaries (bars) that separate different stages (measures). Sometimes decisions are repeated, such as which research questions deserve more study or it is unclear how best to collect data. But nothing in Table 18.1 (or in most process models) suggests punctuation, except in a rudimentary form. Most process models do not include the equivalent of specific arrangements of notes and rests, staccato or legato articulations. Most omit transitions from one stage to the next. In academic–practitioner collaboration, though, it is common for some activities to slide into others, or to pause, such as when trust must be repaired before continuing. Data collection can merge and overlap with data analysis, and vice versa. Relationship building may repeat over and over again, as can discussions about the best way to frame a research question or collect data. Two studies of the NFDC (Bartunek et al., 1991; Bartunek et al., 2000) that focused on leadership succession Page 8 of 19

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illustrate the importance of temporal punctuation. The Bartunek et al. (1991) study, which occurred early in the life of the NFDC, described its first, successful leadership succession process. The second study (Bartunek et al., 2000), described the leadership succession processes that occurred over five years, which were less and less successful. Conducting the second study required additional relationship building among academic and practitioner coauthors. Data analysis had to be paused as the authors considered the implications of the complete set of data. Some analyses had to be repeated. While the activities that the collaborators engaged in were similar the second time around, they were punctuated differently. Musical notation commonly indicates duration, the length of each note, as well as the time between notes. In the excerpts from Art of Fugue (Figures 18.1 and 18.2), there are no whole notes, and only a few half notes or long rests (pauses). The process being described was a more or less a continuous series of very short actions. Of course, most music includes notes and rests (pauses) of longer and shorter duration. What organizational process models should include, and often do not, are the equivalent of combinations of eighth notes and whole notes; some steps and stages proceed quickly, others do not. In addition, there may be rests of varying lengths when the collaborators struggle to find the proper framework for a qualitative dataset, or when one partner waits for a co-author to respond to a draft. Music is also characterized by its rate or tempo, how rapidly notes are played over time, and whether that changes. Tempo is often specified in Italian at the beginning of a score, for example, allegro (briskly) or lento (slowly). A numerical metronomic value may also be given. But tempos can also change in different parts of a musical composition. There were different tempos in the various contrapuncti in the Art of Fugue (https://www.academia.edu/384041/Johann_Sebastian_Bachs_The_Art_of_Fugue). Collaborative teams often follow multiple tempos. Gersick (1988) showed that the tempo of many teams changes at the midpoint of a project, often speeding up or slowing down. Within academic–practitioner collaborations, a change in tempo is common. For example, the I/O research team composed of Bartunek, Trullen, Immediato, and Schneider (2007) found that the pace of writing speeded up considerably just before the deadline for submitting their paper to a special issue of a journal. A tempo that begins as lento may switch midway to allegro, and then slow down again. The shape of music is ‘the literal geometric line that could be made if the notes were joined together as in a dot-to-dot puzzle’ without constraining this pattern to be linear or even curvilinear (http://www.essortment.com/four-elements-music–melody-harmony-rhythm-dynamics-62012.html). It includes arches and spikes, ascending and descending scales of a melody line. As Figure 18.1 shows, shapes may differ for different melody lines. The insider/outsider collaborative paper co-authored by Giorgi, Guider, and Bartunek (2014) had a largely positive or upward trajectory that was occasionally interrupted by conflicting commitments on the part of the coauthors, and by the challenge of determining how best to frame the results. If one plotted the shape of the insider/outsider collaborative paper by Bartunek et al. (2000), one would find dips in energy during data analysis when the insider and outsiders disagreed about the meaning of particular findings. Finally, as noted above, polyphony is a texture consisting of two or more simultaneous lines of independent melody, as opposed to just one voice (monophony) or one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords (homophony). Polyphony is shown in Figure 18.1; the melodic lines in the treble and base clefs are written in harmonious counterpoint. When a collaborative process works well, all is in harmony. In the Giorgi et al. (2014) study, the coauthors maintained a positive relationship, data relevant to the focal research question were easily obtained, and the analysis, while complex, was straightforward. The challenge was that the situation the collaborators were studying was ongoing, and hence there was a constant stream of new data. At some point, data collection had to be terminated, so that a scholarly paper could be written (and ‘the musical composition’ completed). Page 9 of 19

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Most polyphonic compositions assume some degree of coordination among the different parts or voices. Imagine, however, if two very different kinds of music are playing at the same time. Figure 18.3 combines a fugue with a jig, an Irish folk dance. The timing of the jig is different from the fugue; its shape is different; and there is much more dissonance rather than harmony between the two.

Figure 18.3The Art of Fugue and Legacy Jig in unharmonious polyphony

Disharmony and conflict are a frequent occurrence in academic–practitioner collaboration, as Amabile et al. (2001) showed in their depiction of the conflicts that arose in their collaborative research project. Sometimes academics and practitioners differ so much that they are doing the equivalent of playing the Art of Fugue and Legacy Jig at once.

Composing a Musical Score for the Stages of Academic–Practitioner Collaboration The score of Bach's Art of Fugue shows how the six elements we discussed are present in any musical score and makes visible the presence of parallel lines of development (polyphony) that characterize processes. What it does not fully display or capture are the dynamic processes associated with the ten stages in Table 18.1, such as how one stage may continue in the background while another stage is more salient, or how some stages have much more energy associated with them than others. It also does not display or capture what a specific academic–practitioner collaboration might look like. We commissioned Mark Maleri (then an undergraduate student at Boston College), who has studied music composition, to compose a score depicting the dynamics of a particular instance of an academic–practitioner collaboration. We told him some of the dynamics that occurred during the collaboration (e.g., when there was conflict; which stages were prominent at different points.) Other than that, we gave Mark few guidelines exPage 10 of 19

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cept that the ten stages in Table 18.1 needed separate melody lines to show how all of the stages might play a role throughout the entire collaboration even when in the background (cf. Bartunek and Louis, 1996). Mark used as a foundation the melody of a popular children's lullaby ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ because the melody repeats and allows for different variations. With some assistance from Josh Bartunek, a nephew of one of the authors who also has training in music composition, he composed melody lines to be played by 10 different instruments, each representing one of the Table 18.1 stages. The score is shown in Figure 18.4. It can be accessed and played at http://bartunek.wix.com/collaborativemusic.2 The stages each melody line stands for and the musical instruments Mark and Josh chose for each stage are shown in Table 18.3. Table 18.3The stages of academic–practitioner collaboration shown in the Figure 18.4 composition, along with the reference for each stage according to melody line and the musical instrument playing it Stages

Reference in music

I. Composing the 1/0 research team

Staff Line I (Piano)

II. Developing a working relationship

Staff Line II (Electric Piano)

III. Formulating research questions to orient the study

Staff Line III (Flute)

IV. Designing data collection procedures

Staff Line IV (Bass)

V. Collecting data

Staff Line V (Guitar)

VI. Analyzing and interpreting the data

Staff Line VI (Xylophone)

VII. Writing reports and presenting results

Staff Line VII (English Horn)

VIII. Taking action

Staff Line VIII (Clarinet)

IX. Making scholarly contributions

Staff Line IX (Violin)

X. Tracking outcomes

Staff Line X (Alto Saxophone)

Figure 18.4A musical score for academic–practitioner collaborative research

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In the particular instance of academic–practitioner collaboration Mark illustrated musically, activity associated with Stage I, composing the I/O research team, was vigorous in the earliest measures and then quiet after that. This melody line is played by the piano. To depict heightened activity, in the initial measures Mark changed the quarter and half notes that typically predominate in the melody into eighth notes that counter the traditional melodic pattern of the score. He also added a fortissimo notation to emphasize the importance of activity and speed in the opening measures. After the research team was chosen, as collaboration continued after Stage I, Mark used half notes to provide background harmony and to complement other notes being played. Composing the research team started as fortissimo (very loud), and eventually went to mezzo-piano Page 15 of 19

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(very soft), and maintained that same low volume throughout the song. Stage II, developing (and then maintaining) a working relationship, was prominent throughout the collaboration in the instance of academic–practitioner research described here. The electric piano plays the primary melody line throughout the composition to signify the importance and persistance of this stage. Stage III is concerned with formulating a research question. This activity peaked about one third of the way through the collaboration. Mark chose to have this stage played by a flute. He added activity one third of the way through the composition by incorporating eighth and sixteenth notes at this point. He also made these stand out by having the notes in a higher octave than the main melody line. Further, part of the melody line of this stage repeats about halfway through, indicating that the research questions needed to be rethought. Mark accomplished repetition by having measures five and six in this melody line repeated in measures seven and eight. Stage IV, Designing Data Collection Procedures, is played by a bass. For the first several stanzas, the bass created a low-level hum, to signify that it was in the background. But the bass's sound became more intense and active when this stage became the focus of attention at measures four through eight, as indicated by the eighth notes. Mark accomplished this by having the melody in stanzas five and six repeated once in the subsequent two stanzas, and then silent (rests), indicating that the design of data collection procedures was now complete. Stage V, Collecting Data, is played by a guitar. Its beginning was very quiet, while no data were being collected. Then, however, it became very active during data collection, before reverting to a low hum after data collection is complete. Mark depicted the initial quiet by chords playing whole or half notes. These notes blend together and are a standard element within background music. The activity of data collection itself is conveyed musically by moving from the chords to multiple quarter notes and eighth notes. Once this stage is complete, the composition returns to background chords composed of half notes. Stage VI. Data Analysis and Interpretation is played by a xylophone. This stage was silent during the first three measures (indicated by rests). The start of data analysis began as a low sound. The heightened activity of the analysis proper was conveyed musically by moving from a single note to a series of chords composed of two, three, and then four notes, which in measure seven, are primarily eighth notes. The ending phase was conveyed musically by using quarter notes and half notes. Since there were always additional analyses to be run, this stage continued as a low hum. Stage VII, Writing Reports and Presenting Results, is played by an English horn. This stage was silent during the first several measures, as conveyed by rests. Once writing started, Mark used eighth notes tied to each other to suggest a process that begins slowly and sixteenth notes interspersed with occasional brief rests to show how it accelerates and becomes more intense, with short bursts of quiet. This timing purposefully contrasts with the notes in the Stage II melody line. Stage VIII, Taking Action, is played by a clarinet. In the collaborative instance described here, this stage was absent during the opening measures (indicated by rests). It began musically during the measures associated with the sixth and seventh stages, becoming pronounced at measure nine. Mark used the same music he had composed for Stage I for this measure. The fortissimo notation associated with the ninth stanza reinforced the emphasis on activity at this point, just as it emphasized activity in the first staff line for Stage I. Stage IX, Making Scholarly Contributions, is played by a violin. This stage was not present during the first several measures, and so was expressed musically in rests. The activities associated with this stage began near the middle of the composition, and became prominent near the end. Mark used multiple eighth notes to Page 16 of 19

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convey musically how the pace of writing sped up in the tenth and then eleventh measures, as scholarly contributions were prepared for submission. In the 11th stanza, the activities of this stage began to slow down. Mark placed a whole note in the last measure as the authors wait to see how their contribution is received. Finally, Stage X, Tracking Outcomes, is played by an alto saxophone. Mark used generic half notes played at mezzo-piano to convey the quiet of this stage, until the end when he used eighth and quarter notes to suggest an increase in activity as outcomes were determined. This composition was polyphonous, in that there were many voices, multiple melodies retaining their own individuality to some extent. For the most part, it was also harmonious; the notes fit together. Collaborations, however, are rarely completely harmonious, and this one had its share of conflict. Thus, Mark added some discord, especially in the seventh stanza for Stage VI, analyzing and interpreting the data. He added extra notes to some chords to suggest times when participants disagreed about the data analysis. Musically, what he added sounds off, and this is intended. As is evident, Mark's composition incorporates all the elements we discussed above. His composition described a sequential process, as indicated by the flow of its melody lines; it has many punctuation marks, indicated by the measures and the rests; the notes and rests have multiple durations, from whole notes to sixteenth notes, and the shape differs for the different melody lines. The fact that there are ten melody lines designed to (largely) complement each other means that the melody is polyphonous. Discord and concord are illustrated by the particular combinations of notes. By using multiple musical elements, Mark's score shows ways of expressing temporal dimensions in processes not included in textual descriptions. In the example we gave at the beginning of this chapter (Johnson, 2014), the psychiatrists, psychologist, and neuroscientist at McLean Hospital used music to convey the melancholy and angst that Robert Schumann experienced in ways that conveyed these feelings better than words could express. The work that Mark composed was also designed to convey aspects of the experience of academic–practitioner collaboration that are not easily expressed in words or even in process timelines, such as repetition, disharmony, silence, rapid and slow activity, pace, and polyphony, among others. This work expands the potential for understanding dimensions of processes in organizations. For many listeners, the melody of ‘twinkle, twinkle little star’ may override the other dynamics included in the music, with only the occasional disharmony (consciously embedded in the score) to evoke attention. The melody may be so familiar that we miss many of the aspects required for its successful accomplishment at any given time. As an analogy, many people see a basketball game as five players on each team running up and down a basketball court in apparent harmony and scoring points. Others (such as basketball coaches, and undoubtedly the players themselves) recognize results of thousands of hours of individual and team practice that focuses on multiple identifiable small movements. It is only when there are errors in performance that many observers begin to realize how much goes into creating what seems on the surface to be straightforward. A value of the score included here is that it lets observers see some of the complexity that of necessity underlies what might seem on the surface to be straightforward collaboration.

Coda By treating academic–practitioner research collaboration as a musical process and composition, we have chapter added many elements – sequence, punctuation, duration, rate, shape, and polyphony – that existing process models often fail to include. To paraphrase Stravinsky, whenever we observed something interesting about the dynamics of collaboration, we made a note of it. Page 17 of 19

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The language and structure of music, in so far as it can be (imperfectly) captured and represented by a musical score, moves us in the direction of a time-rich description of the dynamics of collaboration. It prompts us to notice important elements of any collaboration: how long each activity lasts, what rhythms are being played and by whom, what must be speeded up and what must slowed down and when, how loud or intense a series of actions (a melody) must be to be heard given what else is co-occurring at the same time, which actions and events are compatible (harmonious) and which are not, when collaborators might be mistaken in thinking that their joint project is ending (a false cadence), and so on. All these elements can be easily included in a musical score. They can also be modified to reflect a particular collaboration. Further, because music can be played, it can help us feel the emotional quality of a particular collaboration, even if those feelings cannot be put into words (Johnson, 2014). The language of music may be unique in its ability to capture co-presence in the form of a polyphonic composition or as a series of chords and chord progressions. To say that two processes are simultaneous is not the same as experiencing their overlap with whatever moment-to-moment harmony or disharmony their sustained co-presence creates. We are as serial creatures in a massively parallel world. Language, whether spoken or written, places one word after the other. Music, at least for those who can hear its nuances, lets us hear and experience what is happening at the same time it is happening. And that fact can be essential in explaining what is going on as well as predicting what might come next. This chapter is only a beginning step in exploring the ability of music to describe the process dynamics of collaboration, or indeed of any situation. But it is a start. The example in this chapter was limited by the fact that the composers were told what to express in the music. The composers were neither part of the interaction, nor able to observe it in real time. Future research can overcome these limitations by directly involving those with musical knowledge as participants and/or observers in any ongoing process. What the language of music can ultimately say, evoke, recall, describe, suggest, provide an experience of, or even explore that prose, a set of equations, or a simple time line cannot, is just one of the interesting issues awaiting further thought and composition.

Notes 1Some approaches to data collection and analysis allow for polyphony. Quantitatively, event history analysis traces what happens to different types of patterns over time. Qualitatively, narrative analyses allow the tracing of multiple storylines present at once (cf. Denis, Langley and Cazale, 1996; Langley, 1999; Stensaker and Langley, 2010) 2Go to the URL and click the ‘play’ button. Both authors contributed equally to this manuscript and are listed in alphabetical order. We are very grateful to Mark Maleri for his composition of our musical score and to Josh Bartunek for his skilled assistance on it. We are also very grateful to Ann Langley and Mary McGann for their helpful comments and suggestions.

References Albert, S. (2013). When: The art of perfect timing. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Amabile, T. M., Patterson, C., Mueller, J., Wojcik, T., Kramer, S. J., Odomirok, P. W., and Marsh, M. (2001). Academic–practitioner collaboration in management research: A case of cross-profession collaboration. Academy of Management Journal, 44, 418–431. Amis, J., Slack, T., and Hinings, C. R. (2004). The pace, sequence, and linearity of radical change. Academy of Management Journal, 47, 15–39. Ancona, D. G. and Chong, C. (1996). Entrainment: Pace, cycle, and rhythm in organizational behavior. In L. L. Cummings and B. M. Staw (Eds.), Research in organizational behavior (pp. 251–284). Greenwich, CT: JAI Page 18 of 19

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Press. Barenboim, D. (2008). Music quickens time. Verso: London. Bartunek, J. M. (2003). Organizational and Educational Change: The life and role of a change agent group. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Bartunek, J. M. (2008). Insider/Outsider team research: The development of the approach and its meanings. In A. B. Shani, N. Adler, S. A. Mohrman, W. A. Pasmore, and B. Stymne (Eds.), Handbook of collaborative management research (pp. 73–91). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Bartunek, J. M., and Louis, M. R. (1996). Insider-outsider team research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Bartunek, J.M., Galosy, J., Lacey, C., Lies, B., and Wood, D. (1991). Leadership succession in a group formed to empower its members. Hartford: Proceedings of the Eastern Academy of Management, 252–255. Bartunek, J.M., Lacey, C., and Wood, D. (1992). Social cognition in organizational change: An insider/outsider approach. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 28, 204–223. Bartunek, J. M., Trullen, J., Immediato, S., and Schneider, F. (2007). Front and back stages of the diminished routinization of innovations: What innovation research makes public and organizational research finds behind the scenes. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 1, 295–314. Bartunek, J. M., Walsh, K., and Lacey, C. A. (2000). Dynamics and dilemmas of women leading women. Organization Science, 11, 589–610. Bingham, C. B. and Kahl, S. J. (2013). The process of schema emergence: Assimilation, deconstruction, unitization and the plurality of analogies. Academy of Management Journal, 56, 14–34. Bluedorn, A. C. (2002). The human organization of time: Temporal realities and experience. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bresman, H. (2013). Changing routines: A process model of vicarious group learning in pharmaceutical R&D. Academy of Management Journal, 56, 35–61. Denis, J., Langley, A., and Cazale, L. (1996). Leadership and strategic change under ambiguity. Organization Studies, 17, 673–699. Gersick, C. J. (1988). Time and transition in work teams: Toward a new model of group development. Academy of Management journal, 31(1), 9-41. Giorgi, S., Guider, M. E., and Bartunek, J. M. (2014). Productive resistance: A study of change, emotions, and identity in the context of the Apostolic Visitation of U.S. Women Religious, 2008–2012. In N. Phillips, M. Lounsbury, and P. Tracey (Eds.), Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 4, 251–300. Hernes, T. (2014). A process theory of organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Howard-Grenville, J., Metzger, M. L., and Meyer, A. D. (2013). Rekindling the flame: Processes of identity resurrection. Academy of Management Journal, 56, 113–136. Johnson, C. Y. (2014). Diagnosis music: Quartet plays at the intersection of medicine and music. Boston Sunday Globe, Sunday, September 21, B1. Langer, S. K. (1950). The primary illusions and the great orders of art. The Hudson Review, 3(2), 219–233. Langley A. (1999). Strategies for theorizing from process data. Academy of Management Review, 24, 691–710. Langley, A., Smallman, C., Tsoukas, H., and Van de Ven, A. H. (2013). Process studies of change in organization and management: Unveiling temporality, activity, and flow. Academy of Management Journal, 56, 1–13. March, J. G., Olsen, J. P., and Christensen, S. (1976). Ambiguity and choice in organizations. Bergen: Universitetsforlaget. Marcos, J., and Denyer, D. (2012). Crossing the sea from they to we? The unfolding of knowing and practising in collaborative research. Management Learning, 43, 443–459. Mohr, L. B. (1982). Explaining organizational behavior. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Pettigrew, A. M., Woodman, R. W., and Cameron, K. S. (2001). Studying organizational change and development: Challenges for future research. Academy of Management Journal. 44, 697–713. Stensaker, I. G., and Langley, A. (2010). Change management choices and trajectories in a multidivisional firm. British Journal of Management, 21, 7–27. Van de Ven, A. H. (2007). Engaged scholarship: A guide for organizational and social research. New York: Oxford University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n18 Page 19 of 19

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies History in Process Organization Studies: What, Why, and How

Contributors: Matthias Kipping & Juha-Antti Lamberg Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "History in Process Organization Studies: What, Why, and How" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n19 Print pages: 303-320 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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History in Process Organization Studies: What, Why, and How Matthias KippingJuha-Antti Lamberg

Introduction There is great potential for an historical approach to process organization studies. On a general level, both historians and process scholars study processes that unfold over time. Despite these similarities and the possible advantages of combining history and process analysis, the literature that actually does this is limited. Thus, in-depth analyses of organizational processes and even the broader notion of ‘process’ are almost entirely absent from the work of business historians (but see, e.g., Carter and McKinlay, 2013). Similarly, process management scholars in general and organization theorists in particular have only rarely used history, in the sense of looking at past events and their outcomes. And the few exceptional cases are generally based on published data and/or retrospective interviews rather than primary sources drawn from the archives of the organizations studied (see, for a rare exception of a process study based on archival sources, Wright and Zammuto, 2013). This has also been highlighted by Kipping and Üsdiken (2014) in their review of history in organization and management theory. While finding that history – either as data or as a theoretical construct – was used more extensively than widely assumed, they pinpointed process theorizing as a kind of blind spot – a research programme with significant but largely unfulfilled potential for combining history and theory. What explains this apparent scarcity of historical approaches to process organization studies? For business history, the reasons seem related to the predominant research questions, which tend to focus on what happened and why – rather than examining how it happened, which is central to process organization studies. Many business historians still aim to produce what Rowlinson, Hassard, and Decker (2014: 260) refer to as a ‘holistic objectivist narrative', ‘conceptualized as a contribution to the totality of history, filling an important gap'. The result is apparent in a recent analysis of the articles published in two major business history journals – Business History and Business History Review – where the vast majority were descriptive case studies without explicit theory or methodology (de Jong, Higgins, and van Driel, 2015). Overall, it is rare to find papers adopting process perspectives in these journals. By contrast, the scarcity of historical studies among process organization scholars seems to have its roots in methodological choices. Through their training, process organization scholars are more familiar with other methodologies – in particular, interviews and ethnography (e.g., Mueller et al., 2013; see also Chapters 14 and 15 in this volume). These also have the advantage of being widely accepted as legitimate within the community of management scholars and therefore make it easier to publish in the main journals of the management and organization field. Moreover, methodological handbooks in management and organization studies either completely ignore historical methods or offer little practical guidance. But despite this apparent reticence on both sides, there have actually been a number of studies based on a range of ontological and methodological approaches that do examine processes. The following section will briefly and systematically survey these studies, providing illustrative exemplars for the various approaches. Next, we make suggestions about when such historical studies might be particularly helpful for studying organizational processes, while also identifying potential pitfalls. Subsequently, we propose specific research strategies for implementing the historical approach to process organization studies.

What Has been Done So Far? Extant Literature Structuring the Review: Ontology and Methodology Page 2 of 18

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Historical research is not a unified methodological approach that organizational scholars can simply activate and use. On the contrary, there is a long tradition of debate between different streams of historical research similar to the paradigm heterogeneity in organization studies in general (Burrell and Morgan, 1979). This is also reflected in recent discussions and overviews of business and organizational history as fields of study (see, e.g., Clark and Rowlinson, 2004; Decker, Kipping, and Wadhwani, 2015; Ericson, Melin, and Popp, 2015; Rowlinson, Hassard, and Decker, 2014). To simplify the variety and complexity of these approaches, we suggest that their fundamental differences can be characterized along two dimensions. First, there is a distinction in terms of onto-epistemological paradigmatic differences between historical realism and constructivism, with the former considering historical evidence as a reflection of reality, while the latter sees narratives and discourses as the only or dominant form of reality. For a long time, different varieties of realism dominated the field, but at least since the 1970s, history has increasingly been written using varying degrees of social constructivism, with some taking a rather radical ‘narrative’ or ‘linguistic’ turn (e.g., White, 1975). What should be noted here is that a large number of historians, and especially business and social science historians, remain ‘some sort of realists’ (Steinmetz, 1998: 69), despite what certain management and organizational historians believe or want to make believe about the constructivist and narrative nature of historical research (e.g., Clark and Rowlinson, 2004; Durepos and Mills, 2012; McLaren, Mills, and Weatherbee, 2015). The second dimension reflects variations in the methodological techniques being used. Many historians, and especially business historians, conduct research in a way that could be called ‘interpretative', in the sense that the most important skills are related to source criticism and to the reasoning necessary to impose a logic that combines existing historical sources. While taking a different stance at the onto-epistemological level, many of those following a more constructivist approach also tend to conduct their research in an ‘interpretative’ way. At the other extreme of the methodological dimension, both the realist and constructivist approaches to history have attracted more formal, but not necessarily quantitative, techniques, albeit drawing on different disciplinary origins. Hence, in realist research, formal methods have tended to come from historical sociology, while for constructivism, they have drawn on the formal analysis of texts in literature and critical studies. Figure 19.1 summarizes the origins and main features of the four resulting combinations. Each of them will be discussed in some more detail in the following subsections.

Figure 19.1Four basic historical approaches

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When conducting process organization research from an historical perspective, it is fundamental to keep all of these combinations and options in mind rather than reducing discussion to a single onto-epistemological position or one particular methodology. We believe this is important for a number of reasons. First, it correlates with the overall philosophical multi-vocality of process research (Langley, 1999; Rantakari and Vaara, 2016; Vaara and Lamberg, 2016). Importantly, it also reflects the above-described philosophical dichotomy among historians and social science historians between realism and constructivism. Second, by highlighting the fact that there exists more than one alternative for conducting historical research, we continue a tradition in qualiPage 4 of 18

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tative inquiry to match problems with methods (Langley, 1999), evoking different sets of opportunities for theoretical and historical work in process studies. Third, although the approaches are to some extent incommensurable and offer competing worldviews, they are also complementary with some authors even combining different methodologies.

Narrativist Approaches Narrativist approaches combine a constructivist or post-structuralist (Kellner, 1987) ontology that sees historical sources as a reality in their own right with an interpretative, nonformal – often implicit rather than explicit – methodology. Among business historians, such approaches have remained relatively rare – despite a number of studies, positing themselves as exemplars, such as the work by Hansen (2007) on the role of historical narratives in the organizational transformation of Danish savings banks. In management and organization studies, some management scholars, usually looking at field level changes (e.g., David, Sine, and Haveman, 2013), have also used historical sources and made reference to historical methodology, namely, to the work of Hayden White (e.g., 1975). On the basis of a similar narrativist view of historical research, Clark and Rowlinson (2004) have called for a more broad-based ‘historic turn’ in organization studies – a call that has been answered so far only by a limited group of scholars in management and organizational history (see McLaren, Mills, and Weatherbee, 2015). While the narrative view promoted by Clark, Rowlinson, and others (Clark and Rowlinson, 2004; Hansen, 2012) treats historical stories and narratives as the focal unit of analysis, mainstream historians would see ‘proper history’ as the result of an interpretative process where the researcher's role is conceived as a link between the original sources and the resulting text that typically has a strict narrative structure – a process that would, for instance, rely on Collingwood (1946) as a philosophical starting point. Collingwood's main idea was to see the researcher as reconstituting historical events both as a narrative description of past events and, more importantly, as reenacting the ‘inner thoughts’ and psychological processes of past actors (see, for a more extensive discussion, Vaara and Lamberg, 2016). A more recent methodological literature has promoted micro-history (i.e., studying processes by focusing on the smallest analytical units and their social dynamics; see Ericson, Melin, and Popp, 2015; Vaara and Lamberg, 2016) as a promising avenue to revitalize ‘nontechnical’ narrative research. However, while the rare examples of such research (e.g., Quinn, 2001) provide descriptions of events and structures, they show much less, if any, interest in the thoughts, motives, and logics of past actors. And not only do many of these studies examine processes in a rather broad sense, the vast majority also rely on limited historical evidence, often building on second-hand accounts and/or secondary sources (e.g., Haveman, Habinek, and Goodman, 2012; Raff, 2000). Neither do they generally follow the suggestion by Vaara and Lamberg (2016: 4) of examining ‘the ways in which strategic processes and practices and our conceptions of them are embedded in, and defined by, socio-historical environments'. Another potential source of inspiration for historical narrativist research is Foucault's work, although again, most Foucauldian studies also do not draw on original archival sources. One exception is McKinlay's (2013) examination of the largely invisible processes of accommodation or contestation by bank clerks in Victorian England based on a series of self-made cartoons.

Structuralist Approaches In the context of historical process studies, structuralist approaches, sometimes framed as narratological methods and defined as ‘the stucturalist study of narrative plots’ (Macey, 2001: 263), are rare, especially in business history. In organization studies, structural research designs are more common (e.g., Thomas, WilPage 5 of 18

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son, and Leeds, 2013) but by no means dominant. Structuralists are interested in objective and value-free structural analysis of texts on the basis of an assumption of universal narratological principles. Structuralist approaches include a variety of semantic and narratological methods, with (French) structuralism, formalism, and (critical) discourse analysis being the most prevalent. As this Handbook includes specific chapters on narrative method (Chapter 17) and discourse theory (Chapter 12), we focus here on the few exemplary historical studies that use structuralist and formalist techniques, and especially on the opportunities such approaches might provide. There are a few historical studies that use critical discourse analysis (e.g., Mueller et al., 2013; Thomas, Wilson, and Leeds, 2013), typically challenging and problematizing power structures and clashes of ideology (e.g., Çakmakçı and Oba, 2007; Vaara, 2002). Yet, process studies are rare. One example is the work by Moerman, van der Laan, and Campbell (2014), who analyzed the change in the narrative framing of asbestos on the basis of annual reports, identifying several distinct phases during which the meaning of asbestos turned from positive to negative. Formalist and structuralist methods differ from discourse analysis in their search for the universal semantics of texts. Todorov, Propp, Greimas, and Levi-Strauss – the most influential figures in the formalist study of literature – argued for the ‘existence of universal grammar of narrative which generates the individual stories’ (Macey, 2001: 382). Although formalist methods were developed originally to characterize literature and other art forms (Dundes, 1997), they can also be used to arrange historical material and to question historical accounts by ‘milling’ materials through the formal processes designed by the above-mentioned theoreticians. While structuralist methods and historical studies have been at odds for a long time, the more recent literature provides some examples of the opportunities and constraints of formalist analyses. Lamberg and Pajunen (2005), for instance, draw on Propp's (1928/2000) folktale schema as ‘a rich resource in explaining and understanding the underlying structure in the process of organizational decline and turnarounds’ (p. 972). The authors use Propp's model as an effective tool to find a deep structure in the historical process they studied; at the same time, they also show that the popular turnaround literature has the same basic structure of narrative as Propp's folktale model. Similarly, Monin and Monin (2005) found a folktale structure in a popular management book. While the above examples assume a shared deep-level structure in all texts presented in narrative format, another methodologically interesting structuralist approach is to identify formal semantic structures from specific historical texts in contrast to historical narratives that researchers have created. Reveley's (2010) formal analysis of Australian entrepreneur Jules Joubert's autobiography is a good example. Overall, while structuralist analyses remain marginal compared to other approaches, the formal analytical techniques and corresponding theoretical logics make it possible to use materials unsuitable for causalist or (con)sequentalist analysis. Moreover, the increasing digitization of historical material allows automated coding of texts (Malec, 2010), which might further motivate the use of structuralist approaches to historical analysis.

(Con)sequentialist Approaches (Con)sequentialist approaches combine a realist ontology with an interpretative methodology. They originated in the first wave of scientific historical research in the 19th century and have remained prevalent, especially among business historians – albeit in an implicit rather than explicit fashion (Kipping, Wadhwani, and Bucheli, 2014). We refer to these approaches as (con)sequentialist drawing on Stinchcombe (2005), who placed historical research on an equal footing with quantitative, ethnographic, and experimental methods for ‘addressing causal questions in social science', with the former particularly apt at studying ‘sequences of conditions, actions, and effects that have happened in natural settings’ (p. 5) and at achieving a ‘penetration of the details of processes and sequences’ (p. 230; emphasis added). He himself was an early proponent of an historical perspective in studying organizations with work on foundation conditions (Stinchcombe, 1965) that came to Page 6 of 18

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serve as an inspiration for a much wider literature today referring to ‘imprinting’ (Marquis and Tilcsik, 2013; Simsek, Fox, and Heavey, 2015). While these studies give a place to history as an integral part of their theoretical framing (Kipping and Üsdiken, 2014), they often rely on secondary literature and take a stylized view of the past and the conditions imprinting different types of organizations rather than examining specific organizations and the processes that took place (but see the Johnson, 2007, study of the origins of the Paris Opera). In these studies, one of the potential problems is that the past is seen from the present and attributed a high level of determinism in shaping current behaviour. This is even more visible in studies of ‘path dependence', where individual or organizational choices are seen to be increasingly reduced or eventually nullified by prior choices (Sydow, Schreyögg, and Koch, 2009). The tendency to focus in particular on ‘effects’ and the urge to establish causality between prevailing conditions and these effects – rather than look at the actions and processes leading to these effects – can be illustrated with the large body of work on the emergence of the so-called multidivisional organization or M-form, widely seen as the most important organizational innovation of the 20th century (see Kipping and Westerhuis, 2012). The first to describe this decentralized organizational structure and its functioning, on the basis of a multi-year observation within General Motors (GM), was Drucker (1946). A more systematic analysis was conducted by Chandler (1962) on the basis of an historical and comparative study of four pioneering firms: GM, DuPont, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and Sears Roebuck. Chandler looked in detail at the conditions and actions that led these companies to introduce the M-form in the 1920s – a process study that ultimately prompted its author to suggest that this organizational innovation was the most efficient response to a series of exogenous and endogenous challenges. Chandler's study inspired a wide range of follow-on research reaching beyond explicitly processual or historical approaches. Thus, Oliver Williamson (1971) developed a testable M-form hypothesis that dominated much of the subsequent literature on this topic. There were also more descriptive studies tracing the subsequent diffusion of the M-form in the United States and elsewhere (e.g., Whittington and Mayer, 2000). By contrast, only a few tried to replicate the original process-type studies. Freeland (2001) conducted in-depth archival research to examine the emergence and transformation of the M-form at GM, and used neo-institutional theory to derive broader insights regarding the shifting balance of power between middle and upper management and its consequences for the organizational structure. A recent archive-based study analyzed the introduction of the M-form in banking organizations (Kipping and Westerhuis, 2012), looking at the role of internal actors as well as external consultants in a process conceptualized on the basis of Pettigrew's (1985) earlier work on the history of the British company Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI). Pettigrew's (1985) study also used archival material combined with retrospective interviews, which subsequently prompted him to advocate a more extensive use of history in studying organizational change (Pettigrew, Woodman, and Cameron, 2001).

Causalist Approaches On the realist side, in addition to the (con)sequentalist tradition, there is what we call the causalist perspective. The formal analytical techniques used here tend to originate in the models created by historical sociologists such as Ragin (2000) and Mahoney (e.g., Mahoney and Rueschemeyer, 2003), including process tracing (Mahoney, 2000), set analyses (Zimmermann, 2001), event structure analysis, and other methods based on the formalization of the research process (Mahoney, 2004). The use of these techniques in business history is still in a nascent phase, although there are general calls for more formalization (de Jong, Higgins, and van Driel, 2015). Some studies already exist, including in particular Pajunen's (2004) dissertation and subsequent journal publications (Pajunen, 2005, 2008). In these studies, Pajunen used event structure analysis Page 7 of 18

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and other qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) techniques to study turnaround processes in Finnish forest industry firms. These studies were among the first attempts to integrate history, process perspectives, and formal methodological techniques borrowed from historical and comparative sociology; and thus provide an example of how and why formal analytical methods might work in the context of historical process studies. While the less formal methods help uncover historical ‘truths’ or anomalies and develop new, innovative theories, the formal methods of causalists allow scholars to identify patterns that are a/typical across a variety of cases and build more precise theoretical models. For process studies, causalist historical approaches potentially offer many benefits. First, the basic character of these methods is relatively close to realist case studies as conducted and reported in management journals. However, causalist approaches strengthen the basic case study methods by allowing increased transparency in terms of how sources are used and reported, providing more complete and more authentic sources, and knowledge of the whole life cycle of the particular processes in focus. Second, causalist methods make systematic comparisons across cases possible (e.g., Pajunen, 2004). This use of historical source material combined with process tracing techniques, fuzzy set analyses, and other qualitative comparative methods seems of particular value and warrants further consideration.

Why Study Organizational Processes Historically? Worlds of Possibilities As shown in the previous section, there is a small corpus of research located at the intersection of process organization studies and history, and it counts some prominent management scholars as authors and advocates. However, these studies have ultimately remained marginal. More can and should be done. Taking an historical approach to studying organizational processes, we would argue, offers a number of possibilities, which are more difficult, if not impossible to achieve through other approaches. In particular, historical research allows scholars to 1. Examine processes located in the past by definition, such as imprinting or field creating events. 2. Understand the relationship between processes and their outcomes by studying whole processes with a beginning and an end. 3. Identify other outcomes that were possible at the time and examine why they did not materialize and, in a kind of counterfactual analysis, examine what their consequences might have been if they had materialized. We now briefly examine these alternatives, including their advantages and potential pitfalls.

Focusing on Past Processes The first and fairly obvious advantage of an historical approach derives from its ability to study processes located in the past by definition, such as imprinting, field creating events, or path dependencies – i.e., in research where history probably has its most natural place. These studies belong to what Kipping and Üsdiken (2014) have referred to as ‘history in theory', where the past is a constitutive element of the theoretical model itself. A good example of this is Djelic's (2013) research on the social dynamics preceding the legitimation of the concept and institutional form of limited liability. The analysis takes place in a context where limited liability was not (yet) taken for granted, but was a contested concept, which enables in-depth examination of the debates at the time about the role of corporations in society and identification of the rationale for the eventual introduction of limited liability. Another example is Marquis’ (2003) study of the longevity of business Page 8 of 18

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community networks in the United States, where he demonstrates the strong influence of historical conditions on network dynamics even though major technological changes could potentially allow different and more efficient structures. Studying such processes has problems of its own, owing to the difficulty of obtaining data that are akin to observations. Historical data tend to be less comprehensive and may only reflect the parts of the process that have been documented in writing, usually by certain actors for certain purposes. This is why, whenever possible, researchers have looked at processes that took place in the recent past, often relying on retrospective interviews, which however have their own limitations due to selective memory (Golden, 1992). For those that did take place in a more distant past, it is important to properly contextualize them and avoid imposing concepts from the present, as was done, for example, in the above-mentioned study on the origins of the Paris Opera, where King Louis XIV is characterized rather incongruously as a powerful ‘stakeholder’ (Johnson, 2007). The historical literature has developed methods to address these biases in the available data that we will discuss below, making it possible to examine formative events that are located in a more distant past, where interviews are no longer an option.

Learning from Complete Processes with Known Outcomes The second advantage of historical studies in comparison with contemporary studies of organizational processes is that an historical approach allows the examination of complete processes from their origins to their (final) outcomes. This is especially important for research that tries to make claims about the ‘quality’ of decisions and organizational actions, i.e., assessing whether or not the processes achieved the intended outcomes, or, more broadly, about the underlying causal structures of processes in terms of how they are unfolding and lead to certain outcomes, intended or not (e.g., Kipping and Cailluet, 2010). It is also helpful for cases where changes are incremental, which helps explain why they were difficult to detect for actors at the time, while the outcome is only clear with hindsight. This is a possibility not always considered in current process organization studies, because it requires both a long-term perspective and the benefit of hindsight. One example is Jacobides’ (2007) research of the near-war conflict between Turkey and Greece, in which he elaborates on the process dynamics between equally possible outcomes during the political crisis. Another example, also from military history, is Stewart's (1959) pioneering study of the micro-history of one day in the 1863 Gettysburg battle. This study offers a detailed, minute-by-minute account of a process in which different outcomes were likely along the process. The author ultimately concludes that the outcome was not determined by its imprinting conditions but by the active agency of relevant actors. The advantages of this focus on past processes become evident when contrasting them with the predominant approach of research on contemporary processes. Since the latter are ongoing and unfinished, they are subject to what Rosenzweig (2007) has dubbed the ‘halo effect', i.e., drawing conclusions on the basis of evidence drawn from a particular moment in time, which subsequent developments reveal as biased or inaccurate. A good example of these problems is Siggelkow's (2001) case study about Liz Claiborne's apparent strategic and organizational turnaround after a period of decline. Two or three years after the completion of the original research, the results would have been very different because the company's performance deteriorated rapidly during this period. This reveals the original conclusions to be questionable, opening the case to alternative interpretations (Graebner, Martin, and Roundy, 2012). These potential pitfalls are being addressed in some process research by tracking strategic change processes over longer periods, generally using a combination of published sources and interviews (e.g., Mintzberg, 2007) or by revisiting earlier research sites at more or less frequent intervals – a procedure sometimes built into the original research design (e.g., Clark and Soulsby, 2007). Using historical cases addresses these linPage 9 of 18

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gering issues in a more comprehensive way. Such historical process studies allow the identification of causal mechanisms in a way that resembles Sawyer's (2004) idea of tracing a process back to the original imprint conditions. One could even argue that by selecting past research contexts with reduced or somewhat controlled variation, these historical cases can work like quasi-experiments – and particularly so if the range of variation across carefully selected comparative cases allows causal inferences, for instance, about the influence of certain contextual factors on process outcomes (e.g., Haveman, Habinek, and Goodman, 2012). At the same time, it is important to note that an historical approach to process organization studies is not totally devoid of periodization problems: When does historical causality end? That is, when can the past no longer be made responsible for subsequent outcomes? What about about potential biases, often inherent in the historical sources themselves? Historical methodology has developed tools to address these issues that we discuss later.

Identifying Alternative Process Outcomes Relatedly, studying the history of whole and complete processes allows researchers to understand which elements were crucial to achieving that particular outcome rather than other possible outcomes, some of which, at the outset might have seemed more plausible. In an in-depth archive-based case study, for instance, Kipping (2002) has shown how the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in the 1950s was the unlikely result of a stalemate between various other options, including a state-backed European steel cartel, and engineered in part by the French planning commissioner Jean Monnet, who managed to leverage the resistance of the French car and machine tool industries against such a cartel and also won the ideological debate by contrasting American-style competitive markets with the cartelized and stagnant European economy of the inter-war period. Identifying such cases where the outcome is surprising is actually a good approach to sampling. One could take these rich case studies with alternative outcomes further, and pursue a counterfactual analysis in terms of what might have happened had the process led to a different outcome. This approach has been promoted, for instance, by Ferguson (1997), who speculated what might have happened had the United Kingdom stayed out of the First World War or had Germany won the Second World War. While the study of such questions is no longer grounded in empirical evidence, it may provide some inferences about the possible thought processes of actors at the time weighing these different alternatives (e.g., Magee, 1997). Staying more within the realm of the real options available at the time, the difficulty lies in finding all the documentary evidence necessary for a comprehensive consideration of all alternatives; and to separate postures intended for public consumption from those underpinning actual decision making and coalition building. While lacking the benefit of hindsight in terms of the outcome, process studies based on observations can identify and make visible the competing positions taken by various protagonists (e.g., Kaplan 2008). Historians, by contrast often write the history of the winners, which is partially a function of the latter determining what evidence is preserved. In these cases, retrospective interviews do not provide much help either, because those who might have supported alternative solutions will perhaps ‘remember’ having supported the winning outcome. In sum, an historical perspective has much to offer to the study of organizational processes and can redress some of the shortcomings and biases prevalent in research focusing purely on the present or the very recent past. However, studying the past is made difficult by the availability and nature of documentary evidence and requires deliberate research strategies and a careful, systematic analysis of the historical sources, as we see next.

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How to Do Historical Process Organization Studies? Research Strategies While the reasons for the lack of interest in process organization studies among business historians are mainly related to the predominant research questions being asked, the scarcity of historical studies among process organization scholars has its roots partly in their training. They are often more familiar with other methodologies – in particular interviews and ethnography, which also have the advantage of being widely accepted as legitimate within the community of management scholars. Most methodological handbooks in management and organization studies indeed offer limited guidance on historical research and also sometimes represent it in simplistic ways. Take, for instance, the following dichotomy presented by Murmann (2013: 5; emphasis added): ‘The historian tries to read every document that can help piece together the most accurate presentation of what really happened. The social scientist strives to obtain representative samples and create numerical representations of the phenomenon'. While many historians probably would not recognize their work in these descriptions (see above), such an image will do little to entice process organization scholars to attempt, let alone embrace, an historical approach. Overall, those who want to conduct process organization studies on the basis of historical cases and historical data other than interviews are left with little, if any, help in existing handbooks. And historians, trained through an apprenticeship-like approach since the 19th century, have only recently started to close this gap by offering some general suggestions to management scholars on how to deal with ‘the silence of the archives’ (Decker, 2013; Kipping, Wadhwani, and Bucheli, 2014). We attempt to provide some elements of guidance here, to help the process researcher better grasp the historical approach.

The Nature of Historical Sources – and Their Critical Analysis The key difference for those wanting to study past processes using historical methods is the need to rely on historical sources. This implies the use of ‘fragments’ (Ginzburg, 1989) or ‘relics’ (Bryant, 1994) of the past in contrast to ‘evidence’ as defined by most other social science scholars. Historical sources are not constructed, controlled, or manipulated by the researcher. Instead, they ‘are, for the most of the part, natural or authentic elements of past social worlds […] from potsherds and pollen deposits to trash heaps and bureaucratic inventories’ (Bryant, 1994: 8). As such, they ‘represent either the meaningful creations or by-products of social activity […] as residual “traces” or “objectifications” of past human actions and existential conditions’ and ‘bring us into rather immediate or direct contact with our subjects, “their worlds as experienced”’ (ibid.). This means they tend to be highly authentic, yet seldom fully comprehensive (see also Lipartito, 2014). Professional historians have dealt with this by critically scrutinizing each relic of past organizational activity at the moment they are read in order to determine their reliability (Grigg, 1991). No source is treated as a trustworthy sign of the past before its origin, the information it contains, and its relation to other information is scrutinized (e.g., Howell and Prevenier, 2001). But trustworthiness in itself is not sufficient: As one of the founders of the micro-historical genre, Carlo Ginzburg (1989: 123), has stated, ‘though reality may seem to be opaque, there are privileged zones – signs, clues – which allow us to penetrate it'. Thus, historians typically look at a variety of sources to find ‘clues’ on which to build their reasoning and verbalization of the processes studied. This sounds easier than it is. High authenticity means that sources do not cover issues systematically: While the relevant ‘signs’ and ‘clues’ might be abundant in some historical sources, they are sparse or entirely absent in others. Moreover, these sources do not have a narrative structure that would generate easily usable insights or that could be manipulated by ‘asking the right questions'. Consequently, working with historical material requires the researcher to embed the historical relics found in their historical context; compare the documents with other sources carrying the same or similar information; and engage in logico-theoretical thinking processes, where the researcher actively works with different historical interpretations and counterfactual reasoning (Bloch, 1953; Kuzminski, 1979). Below, we briefly discuss two of the most pertinent methods used by historians in this respect.

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The Core of Historical Methodology: Triangulation and Hermeneutics In addition to source criticism, historians have developed other tools to increase the validity of their findings (Howell and Prevenier, 2001). These include two methods that, in their essence, should already be familiar to most management scholars: triangulation, to check and confirm (or question) the findings obtained from one source; and hermeneutics, to place and interpret sources in their context (see also Kipping, Wadhwani, and Bucheli, 2014). Triangulation can take many forms, including the independent examination of the same sources by different researchers, who then compare their findings, the use of different theoretical or conceptual lenses to the same object of study, or the application of mixed (quantitative and qualitative) methods. More commonly, it refers to the use of some combination of different observations, say interviews and documentary evidence. For most historians, it would simply mean obtaining and comparing various texts covering the same event, or, if such texts are not available, the recourse to oral history and artefacts. What should be noted is the tendency of historians to put most faith in written primary sources, whereas management scholars, in a similar situation, would probably privilege interviews despite the pitfalls of reflective and biased recollection (Golden, 1992). Two illustrative examples of the use of triangulation can be drawn from our own work. Examining the pathways of organizational change in the UK management consulting industry, Kipping and Kirkpatrick (2013) used multiple triangulation by examining quantitative and qualitative sources from the trade association archives combined with material from consulting firms and industry observers as well as secondary sources and selected retrospective interviews. Moreover, they interpreted part of the material independently and applied two theoretical lenses: the sociology of professions and neo-institutional theory. This approach enabled them to study change processes over half a century and propose a novel account of their underlying drivers. Similarly, examining industry-level changes among major Finnish retailers, Lamberg and Tikkanen (2006) built their study on a triangulation among a wide variety of different published and unpublished sources as well as interviews, which not only increased the validity of their findings but also helped them uncover the influence of broader technological and societal changes on decision making at the firm level – ultimately leading to a conceptualization involving cognitive and path-dependent factors. Quite tellingly, when reconstructing the criteria behind these strategic decisions, they placed significant trust in the confidential information obtained from the various company archives. Hermeneutics moves beyond comparing and combining sources and/or methods to examine the historical context. For historians, this generally involves relating each document to other primary sources from the same time period in an iterative process. This helps better understand the opinions and intentions of the various authors (Howell and Prevenier, 2001) or, as some have put it, to reconstruct the ‘voice’ of that particular document (Decker, 2013). Iteration occurs through rereading and reinterpreting documents in light of newly discovered documents until interpretations remain stable even if new documents are added to the context, a process generally referred to as the ‘hermeneutic circle’ and facilitated by the use of heterogeneous sources. While the secondary literature can serve as a starting point for this process, the researcher needs to be prepared to question and possibly reject extant interpretations in light of newly found primary sources, which might also shed new light on known documents. A good example, where management scholars have used this approach, albeit without explicitly characterizing it as such, is the study by Munir and Phillips (2005) on the process of transforming photography into an everyday activity from its highly specialized, almost professional origins, by examining what they refer to as ‘the birth of the Kodak moment'. In trying to identify the strategies that the company used to achieve this goal, they rely on primary documents from its archives, but stress that these texts were ‘not meaningful individually’ and only became meaningful by applying a method that ‘links texts to discourses and locates both within a particular social and historical context'. Page 12 of 18

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While the application of source criticism, triangulation, and hermeneutics allows scholars to draw reliable and valid results from historical sources, this still leaves open the question of how to generalize from the insights gained – an area where the gap between the objectives of historians and management scholars seems rather wide, but might not be quite as unbridgeable as it looks.

Going beyond the ‘Good Story': Validation and Theorization Thus, validity for historians is first and foremost achieved through the process of identifying and critically analyzing (primary) sources and is confirmed through triangulation and the use of the hermeneutic circle. But the process does not stop with what could be considered internal validity. Not unlike for other social sciences, there is also some external validation. As Morck and Yeung (2011: 54) succinctly note: ‘To sustain credibility, a good historical narrative must connect the “dots” of all relevant historical events with causal links'. But this causality, as they also note (ibid.), is less constraining than in neo-classical economics and, we would add, in the vast majority of management scholarship, since ‘history is more amenable to the concept of free will’ – even if historians also recognize the influence of impersonal forces in addition to individual decisions. This leaves, however, the already noted issue of how to learn from historical cases, especially if these are single cases (March, Sproull, and Tamuz, 1991). In terms of generating theoretical insights, an historical research strategy can be problematic. The cause-effect relationships identified tend to be complex, reflecting the ‘reality’ of organizational processes. Thus, when business historians explain failure, they typically find from five to ten explanations for the outcome of the process (e.g., Jones, 2002). They prefer, it seems, to reproduce and stress the complexity inherent in these cases, making it difficult to construct the crisp theoretical arguments that are usually necessary for publishing in organization and management journals. By contrast, when management scholars explain historical processes, they usually find a single theoretical explanation. Thus, cognitive myopia in the Polaroid case (Tripsas and Gavetti, 2000) or the complexity of Liz Claiborne's business architecture (Siggelkow, 2001) are used respectively as the theoretical explanation around which these particular cases of decline and failure have been narrated. This does not mean that historians necessarily eschew theory and theoretical reasoning completely, as has been noted by David, Sine, and Haveman (2013: 361), who point out that ‘historians begin with some theory, which guides them in their selection of evidence to scrutinize. They then move between their reading of the evidence and their understanding of theory, updating theory, and updating their search for evidence to investigate new ideas as they arise'. Theoretical pre-understanding, this suggests, is essential for historical researchers to create any meaningful interpretation of the historical ‘relics’ they find in the archives. Another way to understand the way results emerge is to see the work of the historian as continuous theorizing (Murphey, 1973), i.e., in some sense as a comparative method in which the comparative judgement occurs between the theoretical knowledge and the historical interpretation (von Leyden, 1984; Walker, 1980). As the archival sources lack a coherent structure and/or narrative form, each piece of information must be woven into a process model in which information and events have links over time and in time (Griffin, 1993). It should be noted though that this kind of theorizing happens largely independently of the literature that motivates the researcher to go to the archive. By contrast, in the other social sciences, theoretical motivations are more explicit. For the theorizing process to make sense for both business historians and management scholars, it has to be highly iterative with the simultaneous reading of theories and archival research, stimulating new ways to read the literature and the archival sources (Shanahan, 1989).

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We started by examining the reasons why process organization studies and historical research (as historians understand it) have remained largely isolated streams of research. One major reason for the lack of cross-fertilization is that, on average, management scholars have only a very vague understanding of the requirements and advantages of the historical method. This is largely due to the lack of proper books, articles, and PhD courses on these methods. The situation has improved somewhat after the first calls for more history in the 1990s by the likes of Zald and Kieser (see Üsdiken and Kipping, 2014), a growing number of methodological articles (e.g., Decker, 2013; Kipping, Wadhwani, and Bucheli, 2014), and the establishment of specialized journals, in particular Management & Organizational History. Yet, despite this progress, process scholars may have difficulty in identifying historical methods as a distinctive and valuable approach for studying organizational processes. On the other hand, most historians – even business historians – do not recognize the fieldspecific theoretical and conceptual issues that make process studies distinct from other forms of organization and management studies. Our aim has been to highlight (a) the versatile nature, in an onto-epistemological and methodological sense, of historical studies; and (b) the opportunities a proper historical approach could offer for process scholars. First, echoing more general tendencies in the social sciences, historians differ onto-epistemologically and in terms of the methods they use. Although the vast majority of historians do research from a ‘naturalistic’ perspective, there are also camps that favour narrative analysis, formal structural analyses of texts, comparative methods, and process tracing techniques. As we have stressed, however, the use of historical sources requires specific types of skills and a very different type of philosophical stance toward reasoning compared to other social sciences. In particular when making interpretations of the motives and logics of past actors, historians engage in an active reasoning process that results in historical descriptions and conclusions. The researcher's role is elemental not only as an observer but more importantly as a kind of mediator between the relics of the past and contemporary scholarly discussions. Second, we have offered reasons for using an historical approach, and we have suggested ways of conducting such research. An historical approach is especially valuable when studying processes located in the past ‘by definition’ such as imprinting or field creating events and relationships between processes and their outcomes. It also allows to consider other outcomes that were possible at the time, examining why they did not materialize and what the consequences might have been if they had. While these reasons seem intuitively clear, they have not catalyzed large volumes of research on the scale of other well-defined approaches to qualitative research. We argue that the recent historiographical method literature even in the leading management journals (e.g., Kipping and Üsdiken, 2014; Maclean, Harvey, and Clegg, 2016; Rowlinson, Hassard, and Decker, 2014; Vaara and Lamberg, 2016) probably better: ‘may not be enough’ to make historical processes more accessible to process researchers. We have therefore highlighted the importance of source criticism, triangulation, hermeneutic treatment, and iterative theorizing of materials in the making of historical analyses of processes. Perhaps more importantly, our text hopefully functions as a reminder of the innovative historical research that has already been conducted in the field of process organization studies and offers some additional ways forward.

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies

PART IV

Process Applications

Malena com d1re1tos a.utorats

1

A Process Perspective on Organizational Routines Jennifer Howard-Grenville University of Oregon Lundquist College of Business Department of Management Eugene, OR 97403-1208, USA [email protected]

Claus Rerup Western University Ivey Business School Department of Organizational Behavior Office 2308, 1255 Western Road, London, ON, Canada, N6G 0N1 [email protected]

PUBLISHED: Howard-Grenville, J., & Rerup, C. 2017. “A process perspective on organizational routines.” In A. Langley., & H. Tsoukas (eds.), Sage Handbook of Process Organizational Studies, chapter 20: 323-339. Sage Publications, London, UK.

Acknowledgements. We thank Mohamed Hassan Awad for valuable assistance with our review of the literature, and Martha Feldman, Brian Pentland, and Hari Tsoukas for valuable feedback on an earlier version of the manuscript.

2 Organizations use routines to accomplish work (Nelson and Winter, 1982). Routines are the storehouses of organizational memory, often representing specialized or tacit knowledge, and are valuable building blocks of organizational capabilities (Dosi, Faillo, and Marengo, 2008; Winter and Szulanski, 2001). To adapt, organizations must learn new routines or reconfigure old ones (Christianson, Farkas, Sutcliffe, and Weick, 2009; Edmondson, Bohmer, and Pisano, 2001). Further, endogenous change in routines can lead to adaptations that influence how organizations function (Feldman, 2000). In other words, scholarship from a broad swath of theoretical traditions affirms a central connection between organizational routines, organizing, and change. We explore how organizational routines have been studied from a process perspective, and how this work helps our understanding of this construct.

Nelson and Winter characterized routines as “regular and predictable behavior patterns of firms” (1982: 14). Building on this definition, Feldman and Pentland (2003) focused on how actions uphold or alter these patterns. They defined routines as “repetitive, recognizable patterns of interdependent organizational actions carried out by multiple actors” (Feldman and Pentland, 2003: 95). This definition is consistent with a process perspective because it sees routines not as entities that encapsulate organizational knowledge, but as emergent (i.e., coming into being only through specific performances), and generative (i.e., capable of producing continuity or change in the actions they spawn) (Feldman, 2000; Feldman and Pentland, 2003; Rerup and Feldman, 2011). This perspective emphasizes how organizational routines unfold and how people and artifacts enable routines to emerge, persist, or change.

3 In this chapter, we review how early work on organizational routines captured process. We then introduce Feldman and Pentland’s main arguments and illustrate how they are consistent with and generative of a process perspective. Next, we describe the methods and findings of our literature review. We conclude with directions for future work.

Early Work on Organizational Routines The economic and early management literature conceptualized organizational routines as relatively stable and paid limited attention to process. It saw organizational routines as storehouses of reliable solutions to recurrent problems, learned by actors performing a task (Levitt and March, 1988) that provided semi-automatic responses to environmental cues - “a fixed response to defined stimuli” (March and Simon 1958: 142). Routines inhered in behavioral (Becker and Zirpoli, 2008) or cognitive regularities (Cyert and March, 1963). Behavioral regularities are recurrent activities performed by individual or collective actors (Winter, 1964). Because routines involve repetition, they can be seen as patterns of highly automatic or mindless behaviors (Cohen and Bacdayan, 1994; Gersick and Hackman, 1990; Levinthal and Rerup, 2006). Cognitive regularities are “understandings that organizational agents adopt to guide and refer to specific performances of a routine” (Salvato and Rerup, 2011: 472). Seen cognitively (Cohen, 1991; Cyert and March, 1963), routines entail decision rules and standard operating procedures that influence organizational behavior by conserving cognitive effort.

This work usually regarded routines as whole “entities” as opposed to being comprised of parts (Parmigiani and Howard-Grenville, 2011; Pentland and Feldman, 2008). This focus reflected the effort to identify routines as stable units of selection in order to explain organizational evolution

4 by natural selection (Nelson and Winter, 1982). By conceptualizing routines as stable, selectable units – “factors that tend to limit the individual firm to the exercise of a distinctive package of economic capabilities that is of a relatively narrow scope” (Nelson and Winter, 1982: 134) – evolutionary scholars diverted attention from questions of how individuals perform routines and “black boxed” much of what might explain their internal dynamics.

As a result, issues of interest to process scholars showed up infrequently, such as when authors paid attention to how organizations used routines to learn or change. Routine change in this perspective is explained through replacement or learning of whole routines, not endogenously. Managers select specific routines (Knott, 2001), or routines themselves might be valuable tools for learning (Mitchell and Shaver, 2003; Peng, Schroeder, and Shah, 2008). For example, Aime and colleagues found that the movement of players between NFL teams facilitated the diffusion of a routine represented by a type of play (Aime, Johnson, Ridge, and Hill, 2010).

The routines as entities perspective also hints at process via its emphasis on routines as “organizational truces” (Nelson and Winter, 1982: 107-112). It assumes that the objectives of participants in a routine overlap only partially, so coordination is possible only when objectives are agreed upon (Simon, 1947: 15). Routines freeze conflict and represent tacit agreements about how to subsume conflicting goals and interests in the routine’s tasks. Truces break and evolve (Zbaracki and Bergen, 2010), however, and may be renegotiated through new routines that restabilize underlying conflicts and help a new truce emerge. Therefore, routines as truces imply political processes that suppress conflict. Until recently, however, this work has not probed the processes underlying truces.

5 In sum, past work has viewed routines as behavioral or cognitive regularities that produce stability and reduce the cognitive strain on boundedly rational decision makers. This focus led scholars to neglect internal complexity and dynamics by conceptualizing routines as entities and black boxing how they were performed by distinct people at distinct times. However, while not working from a process perspective, scholars are urging greater attention to microfoundations of entities – including routines – “to understand how individual-level factors impact organizations, how the interaction of individuals leads to emergent, collective and organization-level outcomes and performance, and how relations between macro variables are mediated by micro actions and interactions” (Felin, Foss, and Ployhart, 2015: 4).

A Process View of Routines A number of scholars have begun to view routines as inherently dynamic rather than stable (Feldman, 2000). This process orientation is grounded in the idea that routines are performative accomplishments and expresses a wider desire to move towards dynamic ways of understanding organizational phenomena (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002). Specifically, “[p]rocess studies focus attention on how and why things emerge, develop, grow, or terminate over time. … Process studies take time seriously, [and] illuminate the role of tensions and contradictions in driving patterns of change” (Langley, Smallman, Tsoukas, and Van de Ven, 2013: 1).

A process perspective helps open the black box of routines by investigating how routines are performed by specific people in specific settings. Work in this vein demonstrates how action, surprise and creativity are all part of routine performances. Feldman (2000) demonstrated that organizational routines can change continuously, and subsequent work has shown how the

6 flexible use of routines enables organizational work (Canales 2011; Howard-Grenville, 2005; Turner and Rindova, 2012). It also highlights how routines are “effortful accomplishments” that reflect “complex patterns of social action” (Pentland and Reuter, 1994) implicating individual agency and artifacts. Finally, it acknowledges the “paradox of the (n)ever-changing world” (Birnholtz et al. 2007), capturing how routines are recognizable patterns, yet simultaneously inhere in messy, unpredictable situated actions. Cohen (2007: 781–782) explained this paradox:

From one perspective … ‘one does not step into the same river twice.’ … From another perspective … ‘there is no new thing under the sun.’ For an established routine, the natural fluctuation of its surrounding environment guarantees that each performance is different, and yet, … it is ‘the same.’

This paradox highlights the possibility that the same dynamics underlying a routine might produce either stability or change (Feldman and Pentland, 2003).

A process perspective also facilitates a new language for integrating the behavioral and cognitive aspects of routines. By conceptualizing routines as generative systems and distinguishing between a routine’s performative and ostensive aspects, Feldman and Pentland (2003) suggest that behavioral and cognitive regularities are entwined; the performative and ostensive are created and re-created through action. Performative aspects constitute actual performances carried out by specific participants, at specific times, in specific places, whereas the ostensive aspects provide a “model of” and “model for” enacting the routine (see also Pentland and Feldman, 2007: 789). The routine must comprise both aspects. A focus on only the ostensive or the performative encourages the separation of mind and body. As such, the ostensive has

7 meaning only when derived from performances. Representations of a routine, like a standard operating procedure, or an espoused, envisioned routine (Feldman, 2014; Rerup and Feldman, 2011) cannot be regarded as a routine.

This understanding of routines raises several questions. These include: how do performative and ostensive aspects vary over time? How do actors and artifacts shape the performative aspects, the ostensive aspects, and their interactions? How does coordination occur across contrasting points of view concerning how to perform a routine, or goals associated with routines, such that patterns remain recognizable? How do contextual aspects condition the interplay of the performative and ostensive? Where do organizational routines come from? And, how do multiple routines that involve overlapping actors and/or artifacts interact?

Further, “[t]he understanding of the abstract [ostensive] pattern may not be the same from person to person, from event to event or over time. Indeed, multiple and divergent understandings are probably more the norm than the exception” (Pentland and Feldman, 2005: 797). Conflict and heterogeneity can arise because i) an espoused ostensive does not accord with that which is enacted (Rerup and Feldman, 2011), ii) there are divergent performances of routines (Feldman, 2004), iii) the participants in a routine hold different perspectives on it (Turner and Rindova, 2012; Zbaracki and Bergen, 2010), or iv) have goals and intentions for the routine (D’Adderio, 2014; Howard-Grenville, 2005). When a routine is performed, the participants will note if there is a match between the ostensive “model” of the routine (Pentland and Feldman, 2007), and their actions. If a mismatch persists, the actors may be unable to enact the routine as consistent with the ostensive. At that point, they will face two options. First, they can change the ostensive.

8 Second, they can change their actions. These changes might lead to different patterns over time, or the same pattern persisting despite variability in its performance. The process scholar must explore the mechanisms at play and how they drive these dynamics.

Studying routines from a process perspective is difficult because of reduced grain size (Cohen et al., 1996) and more moving parts. It “requires engaging with the everyday realities of organizational life that are rich with contingency, multiplicity, and emergence” (Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011: 1249). Scholars have predominantly relied on qualitative data, including observation and inductive analysis. Below, we review this literature.

Methodology of the Literature Review of Process Studies of Organizational Routines Our literature review covered the period from 2003 to August 2014. We began by searching ISI/Web of Science for articles and other works citing Feldman and Pentland (2003). This search revealed over 500 items; 482 were available in ISI/Web of Science. We excluded proceedings, focusing on scholarly published articles. We included review articles and editorial material because several important statements have appeared in the introductory articles of special issues or in essays. This yielded a final list of 445 published works for our analysis. Over 85% of the works in this list were in Management and Business, in Information Science/Computer Science, Public Administration, Psychology, Economics, and Educational and Health Science.

A research assistant working closely with one author coded the 445 published works as either being centrally about organizational routines, or not centrally about organizational routines. We assessed this by asking whether the article focused on explaining organizational routines or other

9 phenomena. Similarly, we paid attention to the authors’ intended theoretical contribution. Was the article seeking to advance routines theory, or seeking to advance another theory that referred to routines? For example, some papers focused on related literatures, like organizational learning or dynamic capabilities, but cited the routines literature to establish what a routine is and, perhaps, how routines might change. We coded these articles as not centrally about organizational routines. As well, because Feldman and Pentland (2003) is also a statement about practice theory and structuration, it is cited when authors focus on these topics, and not on organizational routines. Again, we coded these articles as not centrally about routines. After several iterations, we arrived at a list of 97 articles that cited Feldman and Pentland (2003) and were centrally concerned with routines. We coded these articles with: i) a “process” code to indicate that they took a process perspective on routines, inquiring into their dynamics, as opposed to an “entity” perspective on routines, in which the inner workings of routines are blackboxed (Parmigiani and Howard-Grenville, 2011; Salvato and Rerup, 2011); and ii) an “empirical” code to indicate that they employed data and empirical analysis. As Table 1 shows, 64 articles adopted a process perspective. 45 were empirical and 19 were conceptual. As Table 2 and Figure 1 show, the articles were published in a range of journals, with most appearing in management journals.

------------------ Insert Tables 1 and 2, and Figure 1 about here ------------------

For the 97 articles, we noted the core themes of the article, and, if empirical, the data sources and analytical methods used. We downloaded these articles in order to distill this information. We applied thematic codes that were initially very close to the language used by the authors, and

10 then grouped these themes into larger categories, including: Change in Routines, Artifacts, Emergence of Routines, Learning, Nature of Routines, and Miscellaneous. We wanted to understand what aspects of routines authors attended to using a process perspective and how they advanced this perspective. We also examined what methods and data sources are used to advance a process perspective of routines. Most of the empirical work used multiple sources of qualitative data (e.g., interviews, observations, and archival material). However, some important work uses modeling (Cohen, Levinthal, and Warglien, 2014) and quantitative data (e.g., Salvato, 2009; Pentland, Hærem, and Hillison, 2011) to shed light on aspects of routines hard to observe “in the wild” (Parmigiani and Howard-Grenville, 2011: 415).

Organizational Routines: What is Studied from a Process Perspective Change in Routines The most prevalent theme among the articles was change in routines. More than 40% of the 64 articles written from a process perspective were coded as primarily about change in routines. This code captured articles that portrayed how routines admit variation across their specific performances, often through individual agency. The connection between individual agency and endogenous change in routines was made clear by Feldman and Pentland:

In contrast to the traditional view of routines, which emphasize structure, our framework brings agency, and therefore subjectivity and power back into the picture. Agency involves the ability to remember the past, imagine the future, and respond to present circumstances …. While organizational routines are commonly perceived as reenacting the past, the performance of routines can also involve adapting to contexts that require

11 either idiosyncratic or ongoing changes and reflecting on the meaning of actions for future realities. While organizational routines are commonly portrayed as promoting cognitive efficiency, they also entail self-reflective and other-reflective behavior. We argue that organizational routines consist of the resulting performances and the understandings of these performances. As a result of the movement among these aspects, organizational routines are inherently capable of endogenous change. (2003: 95).

This passage conveys important ideas that have been taken up in the subsequent literature. First, the reviewed articles demonstrate that people do not perform routines identically (both across people and across performances by the same person) because their dispositions, subjectivity, and power relations shape how they perform routines. Second, such variation is sometimes consequential for the ongoing performance of organizational routines. As Feldman and Pentland argue, at times performance variation due to individual agency is idiosyncratic, whereas as other times it might trigger ongoing changes to a routine.

Performance variability is common to many routines. For example, Pentland and colleagues used invoice processing data from four organizations and modeled routine performances as networks of action (Pentland, Haerem, and Hillison, 2010; 2011). They found hundreds of unique patterns of action generated by the routines, and substantial change in how the routines were performed, absent exogenous triggers, over a five-month period. Their results confirm that endogenous factors, including experience of the routine’s participants, better explain performance variability, compared to exogenous factors. Other studies echo these findings. People’s orientations (to the past, present, or future) and intentions (Howard-Grenville, 2005), their role in a routine (Turner

12 and Rindova, 2012), their discretionary use of rules (Canales, 2011), implicit valuation of certain objectives (Bruns, 2009), and positions in systems of power relations (Brown and Lewis, 2011; Lazaric and Denis, 2005; Raman and Bahardawaj, 2012) can influence how they perform routines. For example, Bruns (2009) shows that the performance of new safety routines in a university laboratory was shaped by molecular biologists’ prioritization of their scientific goals – to protect their experiments from contamination – rather than the intended prioritization of human health and safety. Other work explores the foundations that might lead to such variability, whether through cognition, memory, or affect (Cohen, 2007; Miller et al., 2012).

While such variation might be regarded as problematic, work from a process perspective finds that performance variability enables the accomplishment of work entrusted to routines. For example, Turner and Rindova (2012) showed how garbage collectors sustained two patterns of collection routines – one oriented towards consistency and one to flexibility – thereby enabling the organization to adjust to contingencies. Canales (2011) found differences in how microfinance loan officers apply written rules, with some enforcing them strictly and others bending or ignoring them. He concludes that the rule bending is productive for the organization as a whole, but only when at least some loan officers are strict enforcers.

Performance variation does not necessarily mean that routines change or evolve over time; variation may be idiosyncratic (Feldman and Pentland, 2003). Or, variation may be necessary for the routine, and its multiple ostensive aspects , to work in practice (Tuner and Rindova, 2012). In some cases, best illustrated by Feldman’s study in a university housing organization (2000), variation in performances led to significant change in the routine (both its performative and

13 ostensive aspects). New patterns emerged such that the routine was not recognizable as the “same.” Agency can explain these changes, as people performing the routine might have aspirations for or act in a way that enables it to change (Feldman, 2000; Howard-Grenville, 2005). Recent work suggests how feedback on routines contributes to change in routines (Chen, Ouyang, and Pan, 2013), and how conceptualizing routines as “trajectories” can uncover mechanisms underpinning their reconfiguration (Chen, Pan, and Ouyang, 2014). Other work explores learning in relation to change in routines; Rerup and Feldman (2011) demonstrated how organizational routines and organizational schema coevolve, and Bresman (2012) explored vicarious learning of routines between groups in a pharmaceutical company.

Finally, some work has examined the organizational or broader context in which routines are performed, and explored how this shapes both individual agency and the tendency for routines to change. Howard-Grenville (2005) argued that the embeddedness of routines in an organization’s culture, hierarchy, or technologies might constrain evolution, despite permitting flexibility in routines’ daily performance. Turner and Fern (2012) used a unique quantitative data set of GPSencoded garbage collection routes to demonstrate that drivers with more experience were better able to adjust to environmental contingencies, showing how skillful actors read the context to contribute to routine consistency. The use of routines can also reflect macro contextual factors as channeled through individual participants; Essen (2008) found that macro cultural values, adopted differently by different caregivers, led to variability in performance of elderly health care routines.

14 In sum, there is a considerable body of work exploring change in routines – both how routines are performed flexibly in the day to day, and how they, at times, evolve over time to become recognizable as a new routine. Individual agency, and its interaction with contextual conditions, underpins explanations for these outcomes.

Artifacts Artifacts’ influence on the performance of routines has been central to scholarship on routines from a process perspective. Ten articles were coded as being primarily about artifacts; three of these are conceptual and seven are empirical. Other articles allude to the role of artifacts in explaining, for example, routine change. Feldman and Pentland (2003) referred to artifacts as “artifacts of” the ostensive aspects of routines. In other words, a standard operating procedure or other documentation, like a past employment ad in a hiring routine, are artifacts of the ostensive. The ostensive aspect of a routine is, however, different from its artifacts. It comprises subjective understandings of multiple actors, and is significantly tacit. Some routines are not associated with artifacts, as their ostensive aspects are understood through norms or abstract rules. Alternatively, an artifact might outlast its use in a routine if the routine is no longer performed (Feldman and Pentland, 2003: 108).

Early process work echoed these claims and emphasized the importance of not confusing routine artifacts with the routine itself. In a conceptual paper, Pentland and Feldman (2008) asserted that designing a routine by creating a set of artifacts (checklists, written procedures, or software encoded versions of these) reinforces the misunderstanding that routines are things, and divulges the “folly” of believing that artifacts can actually generate desired patterns of action. Supporting

15 this, Hales and Tidd (2009) found that formal representations of routines are less consequential to how routines are actually performed than are non-formal representations. Scholars now recognize that material artifacts both constrain and enable agency (Leonardi, 2011). For example, D’Adderio asserts “artifacts have been treated as either too solid to be avoided, or too flexible to have an effect” on routine performance (2011: 1), and argues for reconceptualizing the role of artifacts in routines by recognizing that artifacts can “influence [routine’s] emergence and persistence, both in destabilizing existing action patterns, or providing the glue that can hold patterns together” (2011: 1). D’Adderio uses performativity theory to explore how artifacts and human agency adapt to each other, especially when “an artifact is entangled in a thick web of organizational relationships” (2011: 23).

This move invites scholars to consider how artifacts shape routine dynamics. Several papers capture how artifacts shape routine performances, enabling or altering connections between different actors involved in routines (Bapuji, Hora, and Saeed, 2012; D’Adderio, 2008; Turner and Rindova, 2012). Recent work also articulates how systems of artifacts are used in routine performances (Cacciatore, 2012; Volkoff et al., 2007), and how artifacts used across multiple routines can have unintended consequences for specific routines (Novak, Brooks, Gadd, Anders, and Lorenzi, 2012). This research suggests the need to understand how artifacts and routines influence and are constitutive of human agency. Accordingly, empirical work is exploring how the design and use of artifacts influence the truces that get resolved through routine performances (Cacciatore, 2012). Other studies examine technological change, including the contextual settings into which technologies get introduced, as a basis for understanding routine adoption and performance. For example, Labatut, Aggeri, and Girard (2011) trace the co-emergence of a new

16 technology (animal breeding) and routines for its use in two distinct regional settings, finding different trajectories in each region.

Learning and Routines When viewed as entities, routines encode knowledge and are hence regarded as a product of learning (Levitt and March, 1988; Argote, 1999). Organizational learning might also occur through routine renewal or replacement. From a process perspective, learning is viewed as more nuanced as the focus shifts to how people use and adjust routines.

Several papers explore learning and routines from a process perspective. Some consider connections between routines and organizational learning. For example, Levinthal and Rerup (2006) theorize how routines can enable mindfulness, and how mindfulness can lead to organizational learning. Looking at learning in international new ventures, Prashantham and Floyd (2012) theorize that variability in performances of routines will result in improvisational learning and new capability development, while variability in ostensive aspects of routines will lead to trial and error learning and improvement of existing capabilities. Christianson and colleagues (2009) explored how the collapse of a railway museum’s roof triggered learning through the strengthening and broadening of three organizing routines. Other work focuses on learning through routines within a group or team. For example, teachers’ conversational routines shaped how they learned from problems, thus linking the performance of routines with work group learning (Horn and Little, 2010). In examining change implementation, management scholars found that team mental models were shaped by coherence between ostensive and performative aspects of routines (Guiette and Vandenbempt, 2013).

17

Emergence of routines An important question for the process perspective is “where do routines come from?” If routines are not simply relatively stable products of organizational learning, or the performance of scripted standard operating procedures, then it is important to consider how they emerge. Routines might represent political truces that result from managerial conflict (Nelson and Winter, 1982), but they might arise as a “product of action that occurs in the context of the enabling and constraining structure that are typical of modern organizations (Feldman and Pentland, 2003: 98).” Beyond this, and recognizing that power is exercised in different forms in the interplay of the performative and ostensive, Feldman and Pentland did not theorize explicitly about the emergence of routines. Recent emphasis on the “microfoundations” of organizational routines calls for more work to consider how routines emerge (Felin, Foss, Heimeriks, and Madsen, 2012).

Work from a process perspective has theorized how role taking enables the combining of individual lines of action into recognizable, interdependent patterns (Dionysiou and Tsoukas, 2013). Other work uses agent-based simulation modeling to explore how individual skills are combined as a routine forms (Miller, Choi, & Pentland, 2014). This work demonstrates that development of a routine relies on people during initial performances searching for and remembering what other actors do; in this way, transactive memory connects individual skills with the collective capability of repeated routine performance. Others have studied how routines emerge as new rules are imposed (Reynaud, 2005), communities attempt to share knowledge (Ribes and Bowker, 2009) and organizations seek to improve collaboration (Swinglehurst,

18 Greenhalgh, Myall, and Russell, 2009). Related to the work on artifacts, several papers consider how artifacts can act as “intermediaries” between various actors in the development of new routines (Bapuji, Hora, and Saeed, 2012), or how novel technologies more generally influence the emergence of routines (Labatut, Aggeri, and Girard, 2011).

Nature of routines Some research using simulation modeling (e.g., Lazaric & Raybaut, 2005; Pentland, Feldman, Becker and Lui, 2012) develops Feldman and Pentland’s (2003) arguments about the nature and generative properties of organizational routines. Pentland and Feldman (2005) elaborate how understanding routines as comprising “parts” advances our conceptualization of them as generative systems. Other work (Pentland and Feldman, 2007; Pentland et al., 2012), introduces new ways of conceptualizing the dynamics underpinning routines. Others consider the relationship between routines from a performative perspective and organizational capabilities (Salvato and Rerup, 2011) or use simulations to investigate how different capabilities within organizations lead to the selection of routines (Lazaric and Raybaut, 2005; see also Cohen et al. 2014). Finally, Parmigiani and Howard-Grenville (2011) review empirical work on routines from both a practice and a capabilities perspective, and find common themes and opportunities for future research. Organizational Routines: How They are Studied from a Process Perspective We also investigated the data sources and methods used in the 45 empirical papers that explore routines from a process perspective. Of those that clearly specified the methods used, more than 90% relied on qualitative data, with the remaining used at least some quantitative data.

19 The predominant use of qualitative data is not surprising, given that the process perspective emphasizes looking inside the “black box” of routines. Most of this work included direct observation (ranging from ethnographic studies to short stints of observation). Qualitative papers that did not use observation relied on interviews and/or archival data. In fact, these two sources were nearly ubiquitous, as most studies using observation also included interview and archival data. The message is that studying routines from a process perspective demands a close-in view of actions and interactions, or the capacity to capture routines “in the wild” (Parmigiani and Howard-Grenville, 2011: 415). In line with the qualitative data collected, virtually all of these studies used inductive analysis. Much of this theorizing took Feldman and Pentland (2003) as foundational, and elaborated on when, how, and why performative and ostensive aspects of routines interact, change, and implicate actors and artifacts.

The empirical papers that used non-qualitative data and/or didn’t rely on inductive analytic methods offer some promising insights. First, some studies (Bapuji et al., 2012; Turner and Fern, 2012) use quantitative data. Turner and Fern (2012) used GPS-encoded garbage route data and information on who drove which routes to discover the relationship between level of experience and capacity to adjust the routine to context. Bapuji and coauthors (2011) ran an experiment in which they changed a sign associated with a hotel towel-changing routine and collected data on the towel-changing behavior of participants in experimental and control conditions. These papers also used qualitative (interview) data to develop explanations. A second novel method for studying routines from a process perspective is modeling, using either quantitative or qualitative data as inputs. Several papers portrayed routines as “narrative networks” (Hayes, Lee, and Dourish, 2011; Mein Goh, Gao, & Agarwal, 2011; Pentland & Feldman, 2007), which represent

20 the narrative fragment (as nodes) that involve “two or more actants and the actions that go on between them” (Hayes et al, 2011: 165.) Narrative networks then graphically represent the relationships between narrative fragments and their sequencing. Narrative coherence results from a routine’s performance rather than from its espousal. Simulation modeling is also used to explore how individual actions accrue to patterns of action, (Lazaric & Raybaut, 2005; Miller, Pentland, and Choi, 2014; Pentland, Feldman, Becker and Lui, 2012.)

Discussion: Ways Forward Our review identified several topics that merit more research. Specifically, future research should more deeply explore routines’ processual aspects, the embeddedness of routines within other organizing processes, and address under-researched topics including the nature of truces, temporality and spatiality, and creativity in routines. Finally, we suggest some additional methods to broaden the reach of process perspectives on routines.

Routine Dynamics One challenge in using the process perspective has been the difficulty of conceptualizing, capturing, and describing processes when we so readily conceive of entities. Ostensive aspects of routines are sometimes regarded as existing independently – through being thought, espoused, or encapsulated in an artifact like a written procedure. Yet, this understanding is inconsistent with the idea that the ostensive and performative exist only in relation to the other.

To further illuminate routines as processual, scholars should describe not only the dynamics of the performative aspect, but also probe how the ostensive is itself dynamic. Feldman (2014) has

21 begun to speak of ostensives as patterns, and direct attention to the process of patterning (Feldman, 2014). Exploring patterning will limit the conflation of an espoused, written, or imagined pattern with an actual aspect of a routine. Thinking about patterning also redirects attention to the processual character of routines – patterns appear as experienced regularities, not as entities. Routine participants recognize routines when their prior performances appear patterned, yet performances can depart and new patterns emerge as a result. Paying attention to patterns and patterning (as opposed to ostensives), might also trigger scholars to be alert to the consequences of breakdowns that prevent people from enacting patterns; for example, the absence of expected cues can lead to new patterns emerging (Jarzabkowksi, Le, and Feldman, 2012). This suggests that gaps in action, or omissions that constitute a departure from previously performed patterns, might help scholars more deeply theorize the interplay of actions and patterns in organizational routines. Future work should therefore attend to situated actions and pauses or disruptions, as ways of furthering understanding of how patterns evolve from and shape actions.

Routine Embeddedness While the process perspective on routines has peered deep into the black box to address an earlier tendency to regard routines as black-boxed entities, scholars should pull their heads far enough out of the box to be able to situate the inner workings of routines within other processes of organizing. As Parmigiani and Howard-Grenville (2011) noted:

Perhaps somewhat ironically, studies from a practice [process] perspective are so concerned with situated action – the specific actions of specific people in specific

22 organizations – that they sometimes ignore fundamental organizational attributes that exist above the level of the routine but nonetheless affect its performance (443). Howard-Grenville (2005: 619) introduced the concept of a routine’s embeddedness “to capture the degree to which the use of a routine overlaps with the enactment of other organizational structures,” such as cultures, hierarchies, and technologies. While this might suggest a dynamic routine lodged within stable surrounding structures, Howard-Grenville regarded these structures as also enacted, observing that “the simultaneous enactment of multiple structures can contribute to the persistence of routines, by generating multiple, often overlapping artifacts and expectations” (2005: 631). For example, expectations generated through employee’s understandings of how their organization works can prevent top-down routine change efforts from taking hold (Feldman, 2003). More recent work begins to offer a more processual account of embeddedness by arguing that “routines are not simply embedded in context, they are also enacted through context” (D’Adderio, 2014: 23). Process scholars are well positioned to explore how the performance of organizational goals (D’Adderio, 2014), organizational schema (Rerup & Feldman, 2011), coordinating (Jarzabkowski, Le and Feldman, 2012), or other aspects of organizing, like culture, identity, or sensemaking are intertwined with the performing of routines. As well, they can address how multiple routines are performed together, within and between organizations. In this way, attention to routines’ inner workings will be matched with attention to how these are situated within processes of interest to a broader community of organizational scholars.

Multiplicity in Routines and the Nature of Truces

23 Process scholars conceptualize routines as performed by an ensemble of actors, which ensures multiple ostensive aspects of the same routine (Pentland and Feldman, 2005). Thus, the “ostensive” is never singular (For a different view see Dionysiou and Tsoukas (2013)). If there are conflicting ostensive aspects associated with a routine, how is a recognizable routine accomplished? The concept of routines as truces (Nelson and Winter, 1982) suggests that multiple points of view are managed through a truce, but says little about how truces emerge, change, and reform because it “misses the conflict behind the truce; it reveals only the stable truce” (Zbaracki and Bergen, 2010: 956). In existing work, conflict and contradiction between different perspectives are balanced through experimentation (Rerup and Feldman, 2011) or are aligned through the creative use of authority (Rerup and Feldman, 2011; Zbaracki and Bergen, 2010), improved connections between routine participants (Cacciatori, 2012; Turner and Rindova, 2012), or by sequentially performing different ostensive patterns of the same routine (D’Adderio, 2014). The study of truce dynamics over an extended period remains an open topic. Future work could trace how the routine as truce might sustain generative tension between participants with contradictory ostensive orientations over extended periods, and explore the implications for the routine’s performance, stability and change.

Temporality and Spatiality of Routines An area ripe for further development is accounting for how temporality and spatiality contribute to understanding routines from a process perspective. Some routines play out in fairly short bursts, in confined spaces through co-located actions and actors. Other routines occur across long periods, are spatially dispersed, and may involve actors unknown to one another. Some routines involve only face-to-face interactions; others may involve no such interactions. In distributed

24 organizations, routines may be performed exclusively in “virtual” space, by people and artifacts connected only through electronic means. The times and spaces within and across which a single routine is performed are as varied as routines themselves. This variation does not pose a problem for thinking about routines as inhering in action and patterns, but the nature and interplay of these actions and patterns differs and should be understood. As Turner writes:

[T]he temporal dimension has received only limited attention in existing reviews of routines scholarship. … [T]his is a function of the limited body of empirical work that has explored the temporal aspects of routines … and [the fact that] we are only beginning to develop the common understandings and frameworks about time [in organizational routines]. (2014: 2)

Such research should examine both how clock time influences the performance of routines and how people’s experiences of time shape routine performances. An individual’s history with a routine, the pacing of actions central to a routine, or time pressure, all influence the actions and patterns that arise from routine performances. Similarly, scholars could examine how actions are experienced as interdependent when actors (humans and/or artifacts) are widely dispersed in time or space. Through what mechanisms are actions coupled in routine performances, and how do these actions then shape the patterns that arise? How does spatial colocation versus dispersion influence the multiplicity of ostensive patterns that arise and underpin routine performances? How does the performance of routines in virtual space shape the evolution and interaction of artifacts and actions both online and offline?

Creativity and Routines

25 Process-oriented conceptualizations of routines highlight the centrality of action, agency, and performativity in organizational routines. Because open-ended actions and performativity help constitute the routine, creativity is an important but overlooked aspect of routines (Joas, 1996). A body of work is starting to show how novelty, interruption, and adaptation are common features of routine performances (Dionysiou and Tsoukas, 2013; Jarzabkowski et al., 2011; Rerup and Feldman, 2011). Just as mindless routines can help organizations become more mindful (Levinthal and Rerup, 2006), creative routines might help organizations be more innovative. Future work should examine how creative actions taken within a routine contribute both to the accomplishment of the routine (Obstfeld, 2012) and to creative organizational outcomes. More fundamentally, what is the relationship between routines as recognizable patterns of interdependent actions, and the drivers, experiences, and outcomes of creativity?

Method for Studying Routines We have already mentioned the merit in extending process research on routines by using simulations (Cohen et al., 2014) and conducting more quantitative research. As well, additional work using qualitative data is needed to continue to develop the processual perspective along the lines indicated above. Novel methods might also be suitable to further develop this stream of literature. For instance, historical methods (Rowlinson, Hassard, and Decker, 2014) may help scholars trace routine patterns across long time spans (e.g., decades) and dispersed locations. Historical analysis and archival data make detailed longitudinal analysis possible. “[I]t allows us to look at … dynamics … in ways that more accurate but shorter-term ethnographic studies would not allow” (Cohen et al. 1996: 682). At the other end of the spectrum, methods that seek to capture distributed, individual, and real-time data, including diary methods might considerably

26 enrich our understanding of how individuals experience routines. Sensor technologies might also be used, with care, to measure interactions between individuals in certain settings, enabling insight into actual, real-time action patterns. In each of these cases, data could be augmented with those from additional sources to make sense of routine dynamics.

Conclusion A process perspective is alive and well in the study of organizational routines. The foundational work by Feldman and Pentland (2003) opened up a new way of thinking about routines as possessing both performative and ostensive aspects and helps scholars theorize how routines change or are recreated, how artifacts and agency shape these dynamics, and how routines emerge and evolve over time. Future research should build on these findings and further our thinking about routines as processes, exploring their multiplicity, how time and space shape them, and how they are connected to seemingly disparate processes like creativity.

27

Figure 1: Count of Routines Papers from a Process Perspective Published by Journal

28 Table 1: Summary of Review of Papers Citing Feldman and Pentland (2003) Total articles citing Feldman & Pentland 2003 Articles coded as centrally about routines Articles coded as centrally about routines and adopting a process perspective -

of these, empirical of these, non-empirical

445 97 64 45 19

Primary themes in articles coded as centrally about routines and adopting process perspective (empirical/non-empirical) -

Change in routines Artifacts in routine performance Emergence of routines Learning and routines Nature of routines Miscellaneous

27 (25/2) 10 (7/3) 10 (7/3) 5 (3/2) 7 (0/7) 5 (3/2)

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Table 2: Top Five Journals Publishing Routines Papers from a Process Perspective Journal Frequency Percent Organization Science 12 18.8 Journal of Management Studies 5 7.8 Industrial and Corporate Change 5 7.8 Organization Studies 4 6.3 Journal of Institutional Economics 2 3.1 Total 28 43.8

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Sensemaking, Simplexity, and Mindfulness

Contributors: Timothy Vogus & Ian Colville Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Sensemaking, Simplexity, and Mindfulness" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n21 Print pages: 340-353 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Sensemaking, Simplexity, and MindfulnessTimothy Vogus and Ian Colville It is in the realm of the glimpsed potential that the future takes shape Seamus Heaney (2002) Sensemaking is in the nature of the reflective glance Karl Weick (1979)

Introduction There is more to the sensemaking perspective than Karl Weick, but it does not make a lot of sense without him (Colville, 2009). The sensemaking perspective (Weick, 1995, 2001, 2009) and its progenitor, the organizing model set out in The Social Psychology of Organizing (1969, 1979), are directly attributable to Weick. Consequently, it behooves any attempt to make sense of the sensemaking perspective to begin with an appreciation of his contribution. And because sensemaking advances essentially a process ontology and epistemology, a major aspect of that contribution lies in its formative influence on the process perspective in organization studies (Hernes & Maitlis, 2010; Langley, Smallman, Tsoukas, & Van de Ven, 2013; Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). For example, in Tsoukas and Chia's (2002) highly influential theorizing of the process perspective in management, Weick is lauded as an inspiration and the central figure of process theorizing in management and organization studies. Weick (2010) has customarily demurred; claiming that he was not aware of being a process theorist at the time of writing the key texts (Weick, 1969, 1979, 1995), noting in many ways he was among the last to discover that he was a process theorist as the word process is not in the index of Weick 1995. Weick (2010) does later accept the distinction of being a ‘process practitioner,’ which is different from theorist as it is only implies ‘When I look back at what I have said, I see process thinking (“how can I know what I think until I see what I say”)’ (p. 103). Students of Weick will recognize the familiar one-line recipe for organizing (1979, p. 133) and sensemaking (1995, p. 18) that reaffirms that attention and sensemaking lie in the reflective glance. But if it is the case that life is lived forward and understood backward, as Kierkegaard tells us (cited by Dru, 1938), then there is a tension between the prospective forward living of life (practice) that has a quality of becoming, with the retrospective assessments of what has happened, which has the quality of time passed or going (theory) (Colville, 2009). This is a central tension for the process and sensemaking perspectives. Despite the unresolved tension, sensemaking has mostly been applied rather than directly tested and refined (Anderson, 2006), nor has it been the recipient of much ‘in-house’ criticism. But recently it has been subjected to more critical reviews (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2015; Maitlis & Christianson, 2014; Holt & Cornelissen, 2014). Our particular refinement focuses on the sensemaking and organizing ‘recipe’ and its retrospective nature. If sensemaking lies wholly in the reflective glance, and notions of prospective sensemaking (Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991; Corley & Gioia, 2011) are merely variations of retrospective sensemaking (Gioia, 2006; Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2015), its relevance to mainstream organization theory is diminished. We live in times suffused with dynamic complexity (Farjoun, 2010) in which the unprecedented and unexpected happen on an increasingly regular basis. This means that lessons from past sensemaking may no longer provide reliable guides to the present and may be pathological regarding the future (Colville, Brown, & Pye, 2012). We argue that redress for the sensemaking perspective lies in rebalancing the enactment, selection, and retention processes constitutive of sensemaking and organizing. Our proposed rebalancing of sensemaking is advanced in terms of simplexity (Colville et al., 2012), which has to do with a sharper focus on the type of attention deployed in reducing equivocality together with an understanding of mindfulness that increases the breadth of cues bracketed for consideration, the richness of the interpretation of those cues, and the swift action that follows (Langer, 1989a; Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, Page 2 of 15

The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies

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1999; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2006). Taken together, simplexity and mindfulness close the gap between the realm of the glimpsed potential that gives shape to the future and the retrospective glance to the past. The chapter proceeds, first, with a focused review of sensemaking highlighting its emphasis on process; second, a discussion of how simplexity can help clarify and amend the sensemaking perspective, and, third, a consideration of how individual and collective mindfulness embody simplexity and illustrate an enriched form of sensemaking.

A Brief Review of Sensemaking Reviews of the sensemaking perspective are like the proverbial London buses; you wait a long time for one to turn up, and a number of them turn up together (Brown, Colville, & Pye, 2015; Maitlis & Christianson, 2014; Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2015). Our review draws upon these but is more focused on tracing the history that reveals the process side of sensemaking, critically highlighting some limitations and showing how they can be addressed. In the beginning, there was organizing (Weick, 1969, 1979), which was followed by sensemaking (Weick, 1995), which was followed by organizing and sensemaking (Weick, Sutcliffe & Obstfeld, 2005). The differences between them are slight, with sensemaking and organizing being said to constitute each other (Weick et al., 2005). Weick (2001, p. 95) essentially consolidates the two when he asserts that it is perhaps best to talk of organizing ‘as’ sensemaking or organizing ‘through’ sensemaking rather than organizing and sensemaking. Sandberg and Tsoukas (2015) put it succinctly by arguing that sensemaking is homologous to organizing: the latter is achieved to the extent that sensemaking is accomplished. Thus, organization is said to emerge from an ongoing process in which people make sense of equivocal inputs and enact that sense back into the world to make it more orderly (Weick, 1969; Weick et al., 2005). This approach is best understood in a historical context. First, The Social Psychology of Organizing (1969) was written as a rebuttal to Katz and Kahn's (1966) The Social Psychology of Organization and as a critique of a static and positivistic view of organization as a reified entity (a view developed more fully in Weick, 1979). Note that the only difference between the two titles is the ‘ing’ in organizing – but this is difference that makes a difference. The use of verbs and gerunds signaled processes, whereas the use of the noun organization spoke to entities. The motto was to ‘stamp out nouns’ and to be ‘generous in the use of verbs … then more attention would be paid to process and we would learn about how to see it and manage it’ (1979, p. 44). Putting it even more starkly, Weick (1979) notes: The word organization is a noun and it is a myth. If you look for an organization you won't find it. What you will find that there are events, linked together, that transpire within concrete walls and these sequences, their pathways, and their timings are the forms we erroneously make into substance when we talk about an organization. (p. 88, emphasis in original) In other words, if practitioners in and scholars of organizations were focusing on the nouns of sturdy structures, they were missing the point, the processes of which they were a product. On the opening page of Weick (1969), the centrality of process to the organizing perspective is laid bare for the reader. Forget nouns Instead, assume that there are processes which create, maintain, and dissolve social collectivities, that these processes constitute the work of organizing, and that the ways in which these processes are continuously executed are the organization. (Weick, 1969, p. 1) And the reason why processes had to be continuously executed was amplified in Weick (1979): The idea of process implies impermanence. The image of organization that we prefer is one that argues that organizations keep falling apart and have to be re-accomplished. Process imagery also means concerns with flows, with flux, and with momentary appearances. (p. 44) Page 3 of 15

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Given this, we might forgive the reader for seeing in this a conscious and avowedly process perspective, notwithstanding Weick's claims that it was only in retrospect that the writer became aware of it. Tsoukas and Chia (2002) linked Weick's ideas on flow and flux to those of William James, Henri Bergson, and Alfred North Whitehead. Other organizational scholars have utilized Weick as a way of linking to process/pragmatist philosophers. For instance, Bakken and Hernes (2006) drew upon Whitehead, to critique Weick's motto to ‘stamp out nouns’ and argue that nouns and verbs co-exist and co-evolve such that ‘organizing is an exercise in noun making’ (p. 1601). Weick (2010) subsequently admits that he overemphasized ‘stamping out nouns’ but that it should be understood in terms of the theorizing of the 1970s’ reification of structure. In line with his own motto that it is more important to get people's attention ahead of intention, then certainly it had the desired effect (see Colville, Waterman, & Weick, 1999a). But if one looked closer, there were always nouns (entities and organizations), but viewed as impermanent and needing to be re-accomplished. Tsoukas and Chia (2002) also sought to reverse ontological priorities and make a process perspective figural with organization as ground. In other words, there are essential stabilities (Colville, Waterman, & Weick, 1999b; Colville, 2009) necessary for seeing process and detecting change. Otherwise, it would be like the situation described by Whorf where in a world of blue the color blue could not be detected for lack of contrasting colors (Watzlawick, Weakland, & Fisch, 1974). However, in sensemaking, contrast is provided through the retention process. The retention process is the repository for past successful organizing and sensemaking efforts. It has structure and memory that influences sensemaking through shaping what was singled out for closer attention in the processes of enactment and the interpretations subsequently developed regarding what was bracketed. It also explains why Weick could write that a sensible event is one that resembles something that has happened before (1995, p. 170). But what happens when we live in times characterized by dynamic complexity? When change is not only discontinuous, but continuously discontinuous? When the assumptions on which yesterday rested are exposed, sometimes cruelly, as flawed? In short, when effective sensemaking is not reflected in something that has happened before, does this mean that the sensemaking model has outlived its usefulness? Our argument is that it has not, but that it requires amendments. Amendments that lie within the model itself, that require a rebalancing, and a rebalancing which enhances the process dimension and links to mindfulness. This we call simplexity.

Simplexity Simplexity is a term (Colville, 1994; Colville et al., 2012; Colville et al., 2016) that refers to organizational skills which characterize future organizing and sensemaking: a fusion of sufficient complexity of thought with actions that simplify. Complexity of thinking is required to notice and register the variety – the wild profusion of things – that reflects an increasingly random, entropic world. But you also require action which clarifies situations by eliminating ‘might have beens’ by reducing equivocality. The difference between reducing equivocality and reducing ambiguity is crucial to our argument and to productive definitions of sensemaking and organizing. Lessening ambiguity, a term which is used in many definitions of sensemaking, implies that through action you can discount what might have been going on and answer’ what is going on?'. That is, the fog of ambiguity clears to reveal the answer. Reducing equivocality, however, suggests that action does not clarify by allowing you to eliminate ‘lack of clarity’ but that action clarifies by shaping attention and the unfolding reality (Mangham & Pye, 1991). This way one creates the story. That is, people do not just make sense by cognitively interpreting what is going on, but they also (en)act their way into meaning (Bruner, 1990). What using the term equivocality reminds us of is the integral part action plays in sensemaking. This is something that that has been too easily lost in many sensemaking studies and may explain why Sandberg & Tsoukas (2015, p. S14) conclude that in 84% of the studies they reviewed ‘processes of sensemaking become synonymous with processes of interpretation which often end up taken as processes of cognition.’ Sensemaking always has been a balance between thinking and acting; simplexity suggests the balance moves toward action in a world suffused by dynamic complexity where the past is an unreliable guide to what is sensable. This is why Weick (2012, p. 151) posits: ‘A central issue in Page 4 of 15

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sensemaking will be the ways in which people redeploy concepts in order to ward off blind perceptions, and redirect perceptions to ward off empty conceptions.’ This is, as Weick adds, the central tension in simplexity. Simplexity is thus a maxim that not only reminds the 84% that there is more to sensemaking than cognition/ interpretation, but it underscores the process perspective because it puts a premium on attending to the potential novelty and changeful nature of action. William James (as cited by Weick, 2012) tells us that ‘The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes’ (pp. 49–51). The process perspective and simplexity commands us to return to the phenomena of the percept/ cue and to create concepts/frames that enable us to capture the making of events or their organizational becoming (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). However, this is far from easy. Colville, Pye, and Carter (2013) illustrate how counterterrorism forces struggled to make sense of unprecedented suicide bombings (i.e., new cues) and effectively place it in a novel frame as it was unfolding. In the specific circumstance, it had tragic results. In describing this process, Colville, Pye, and Carter (2013) demonstrate how people act their way into meaning, and perforce have to engage in prospective sensemaking dealing with a fast flowing and complex situation they had never encountered before. But at the same time, what it reveals is the lack of reach of the sensemaking perspective in terms of paying attention not just to the content of unfolding experience, but more demandingly on the process of experiencing (Tsoukas, 2013). Simplexity draws attention to the need for sensemaking to encompass both simplicity of action (cues) and complexity of thought (requisite variety in frames) and how these two experiences are connected. In short, it brackets attention, the ‘what’ of unfolding experience rather than the ‘how’ (Tsoukas, 2013), and what is needed to complement it is a consideration of the quality of attention – that is mindfulness.

Mindfulness and Simplexity We have argued that sensemaking theory, research, and practice can be enriched by better incorporating the notion of simplexity – a fusion of complexity of thought with actions that simplify. This is especially challenging given the nature of organizing as noted by Tsoukas (2005). Specifically, ‘organizing implies generalizing … the subsumption of heterogeneous particulars under generic categories’ (Tsoukas, 2005, p. 124). Organizing also requires coordinating that further forces ‘interdependent people substitute categorically-based knowing for perceptually-based knowing’ (Weick, 2011, p. 24). In other words, people impose discrete concepts on continuous perceptions. But the danger in this substitution (known as a shareability constraint [Freyd, 1983, p. 192; Baron & Misovich, 1999, p. 587]) is that perceptual details get lost and that the world is registered in a less complex and nuanced manner. Simplexity implies attending more closely to the particular perceptual details and processing them more fully. It also entails discrediting history and prior categories, while action serves to clarify. Mindfulness embodies simplexity in the form of individual mindset and skills (i.e., individual mindfulness) and social processes (i.e., collective mindfulness) that allow for capturing more discriminatory detail and triggering grounded, swift action to reduce the complexity. We next explore individual mindfulness (e.g., Langer, 1989a) and collective mindfulness (Weick et al., 1999) – and their implications for sensemaking.

Individual Mindfulness Individual mindfulness is defined as ‘the state of being attentive to and aware of what is taking place in the present’ (Brown & Ryan, 2003, p. 822). Mindfulness also involves a more expansive ‘attentional breadth’ or directing attention toward external events and phenomena as well as internal states (Dane, 2011). In attending to present-moment events, one refrains from making evaluations and thus maintains a ‘non-judging stance’ (Reb, Narayanan, & Chaturvedi, 2014). This view of mindfulness aligns closely with traditional ‘Eastern’ perspectives on the topic that have their foundations in Buddhist thought and emphasize the importance of adopting an open and accepting attitude toward the events one encounters (see Bishop et al., 2004). InPage 5 of 15

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dividual mindfulness serves to enhance sensemaking by more regular enactment of the environment in ways that discredit the past by focusing on the present and withholding the application of old categories. At the same time, the attentional breadth of mindfulness creates more occasions for sensemaking and increases the cues considered in the course of sensemaking. By focusing on the present moment and remaining open to unfolding events, mindfulness is posited to work by preventing individuals from taking things ‘personally,’ which can leave them vulnerable to interpreting events as an indictment of who they are (Brown & Ryan, 2003). In ‘re-perceiving’ the world in a way that promotes the ‘decoupling of self’ (Glomb et al., 2011), individuals are able to remain open and curious – qualities promoting insight (Carlson, 2013). Mindfulness also facilitates self-regulation (e.g., Glomb et al., 2011) that reduces their dependence on automatic mental processes and enables people to exert greater control over their actions (Glomb et al., 2011). Decoupling of self and self-regulation both provide a foundation for a more prospective (i.e., grounded in enactment), nuanced, and richer sensemaking. A different line of research – pioneered by Ellen Langer – defines mindfulness as an active state of mind characterized by novel distinction drawing that results in being (1) present focused; (2) sensitive to context and perspective; and (3) guided (but not governed) by rules and routines (Langer, 1989a). In this ‘Western’ perspective, mindfulness is expressed through active differentiation and refinement of existing categories and distinctions, creation of new discontinuous categories out of streams of events, and a more nuanced appreciation of context and alternative ways to deal with it (Langer, 1989a). Langer has noted that mindfulness is a state of de-automatization where an individual can break free from old categories and stereotypes (Langer, 1989b). In either tradition, mindfulness can be a trait of an individual, but it can also be induced, as experimental research has shown that state mindfulness can be activated through brief meditation-related instructions and exercises (e.g., Hafenbrack et al., 2014; Ostafin & Kassman, 2012; Papies, Barsalou, & Custers, 2012; Reb & Narayanan, 2014). Mindfulness can also result from work experience. For instance, Dane (2013) found that, compared to their less experienced colleagues, highly experienced trial attorneys exhibited greater attentional breadth and attention quality. That is, experienced trial attorneys were more attuned to how small events occurring during a trial could be enlisted to strengthen their case. A study of paramedics in Austria similarly indicates that experience is associated with higher levels of mindful awareness; however, this study found that past a certain level of experience, mindfulness declined (Mitmansgruber, Beck, & Schüßler, 2008). Mindful individuals attend closely and continuously to their surroundings, richly interpret them, and swiftly adapt their actions according to their present moment understanding (Dane, 2011). That is, they notice more cues, interpret and process the cues observed more fully or, in other words, increase the vividness with which people interpret their surroundings (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2006). Consequently, individual mindfulness enriches sensemaking by enabling people to see more nuances and complexities in the events they observe. Thus, the vividness of mindful attention should enable individuals to identify effective courses of action with their present circumstances and perform effectively (Dane, 2013; Rerup, 2009). In other words, mindfulness enriches sensemaking by broadening attention, deepening interpretation, and fostering regular updating (i.e., a focus on the present moment). There is emerging evidence that the effects of mindfulness on sensemaking also enhance performance in the workplace, especially in complex, dynamic, and high-hazard settings. In studies of nuclear power plant operations, Zhang and Wu (2014) found a positive relationship between trait mindfulness and safety performance, and Zhang et al. (2013) found a relationship with job performance when task complexity was high. Dane and Brummel (2014) found a positive relationship between mindfulness and job performance among those working in a dynamic service context. Importantly, the effortful nature of mindfulness does not seem to come at the expense of workers. Hülsheger and colleagues (2013) found mindfulness reduced emotional exhaustion and increased job satisfaction, and others have linked mindfulness to greater work engagement (Leroy et al., 2013; Marzuq & Drach-Zahavy, 2012). In summary, higher levels of mindfulness are associated Page 6 of 15

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with higher levels of performance in complex work, in part, because it speeds a more expansive, generative, and resourceful sensemaking and adaptation to the current, unique demands of the work context.

Collective Mindfulness Like individual mindfulness, collective mindfulness helps people focus attention on perceptual details that are typically lost when they coordinate their actions and share their interpretations (Weick, 2011). In other words, collective mindfulness functions by counteracting the tendency to simplify events into familiar categories, strengthening the capability to surface what is unique about events (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2006, p. 518), and improving capabilities to more swiftly cope with what is seen (Weick et al., 1999; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007). Thus, collective mindfulness is a means of engaging in the everyday social processes of organizing and sensemaking that entails a heightened attention to a detailed, up-to-date comprehension of one's context and on factors that interfere with such comprehension (Weick et al., 1999; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007). As such, it represents a mode of sensemaking that enlarges the set of precepts considered relevant, brackets them more for careful interpretation, and uses action to refine interpretations as well as quickly address discrepancies and unexpected events. Collective mindfulness conceptually builds on the individual mindfulness research of Langer (1989a, 1989b), but unlike individual mindfulness, collective mindfulness is a social rather than intrapsychic process (Cooren, 2004). Thus, collective mindfulness emerges through real-time interactions that occur in briefings, meetings, updates, and in ongoing work (Schulman, 1993; Weick et al., 1999). As such, it is a bottom-up processes that is relatively fragile and must be continuously reconstituted (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007). Collective mindfulness originally emerged from a systematic review of a specific set of organizations known as high-reliability organizations (HROs, such as aircraft carrier flight decks, air traffic control, and nuclear power control rooms, Roberts, 1990) that continually avoid disaster (and to a large extent, error) despite operating in extremely difficult circumstances (Weick et al., 1999). The content of conversations represent the means by which collective mindfulness can enhance sensemaking including coproduction and co-completion of utterances (Cooren, 2004), reflective reframing of solutions (Hargadon & Bechky, 2006), questioning working hypotheses, and rigorously discussing the possibility that something was missed (Madsen et al., 2006), and portraying hazards in uncertain and novel terms (Scott & Trethewey, 2008). In contrast, less mindful conversations rely on outdated categories and labels or are distant from the current situation (Weick, 2005; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2003) and are less effective tools for sensemaking. Collective mindfulness is seen to inhere in five interrelated processes – preoccupation with failure, reluctance to simplify interpretations, sensitivity to operations, commitment to resilience, and deference to expertise (Weick et al., 1999; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007). Preoccupation with failure is active consideration and ongoing wariness of the possibility of failure that treats any failure or near miss as an indicator of potentially larger problems (LaPorte & Consolini, 1991). This wariness induces proactive actions in the form of preemptive analyses of possible vulnerabilities that may reside in seemingly insignificant deviations that might not warrant immediate intervention but might indicate that the system is operating in unexpected ways. Reluctance to simplify interpretations means actively questioning received wisdom and taken-for-granted assumptions to better uncover blind spots (Schulman, 1993; Weick et al., 1999). It entails socializing members to make fewer assumptions, to bring more perspectives to bear on problems and decisions, and to ensure that key aspects are not overlooked. In other words, frequently discussing alternatives as to how to go about everyday work (Vogus & Sutcliffe, 2007a). Sensitivity to operations means creating and maintaining a current, integrated (i.e., big picture) understanding of operations in the moment (Weick et al., 1999). Doing so instills an orientation toward updating and mutual adjustment to forestall compounding of small problems (Roth, 1997). Each of these features encompasses the anticipatory and complex thinking of simplexity, but collective mindPage 7 of 15

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fulness also increases the sophistication of understanding through swift action and interaction when things go awry. Commitment to resilience involves growing employee and organizational capabilities to adapt, improvise, and learn in order to better recover from unexpected events of any magnitude (van Dyck, Frese, Baer, & Sonnentag, 2005). In other words, recognizing the inevitability of setbacks and thoroughly analyzing them in order to build adaptability and skill (Sutcliffe & Vogus, 2003). Lastly, deference to expertise occurs when decisions migrate to the people with the greatest expertise with the problem at hand regardless of formal position in the organizational hierarchy (Roberts, Stout, & Halpern, 1994). Hierarchical rank is subordinated to expertise, which increases the likelihood that new capabilities will be matched with new problems, ensuring that emerging problems will get quick attention and action that speeds effective sensemaking (see Roberts et al., 1994, p. 622). That is, in the face of problems or unexpected events, a collective pools the necessary expertise (Vogus & Sutcliffe, 2007a). Madsen and colleagues (2006) illustrate how the implementation of such practices result in higher levels of collective mindfulness and better outcomes in their study of a pediatric intensive care unit. They found that leaders championing principles of HROs played an especially important role in fostering collective mindfulness by implementing a set of practices including continuing staff education (e.g., regular patient rounds, in-service), supporting staff decisions, and post-event debriefings (frequent and inclusive; focused on learning and emotionally coping with difficult events). Consequently, front-line staff were constantly alert to the possibility that they had missed something (preoccupation with failure), regularly interpreted and questioned data that appeared relevant to their working hypotheses (reluctance to simplify interpretations), collaboratively constructed an up-to-date picture of potential threats to safety for each patient (sensitivity to operations), discussed errors and attempted to learn from them (commitment to resilience), and migrated decisions to bedside caregivers who had more experience with a specific patient (deference to expertise). Together, the practices and processes produced better patient outcomes (Madsen et al., 2006). In a study of trauma units, Klein and colleagues (2006) found that active leaders with more confidence in themselves and their subordinates more frequently and skillfully engaged in an aspect of collective mindfulness, dynamic delegation (i.e., deference to expertise), in response to the patient's condition. Knox et al. (1999) found that a clear statement of purpose by a leader and modeling preferred language were key enablers of collective mindfulness. There is a growing body of evidence that collective mindfulness influences a wide array of outcomes. In a rigorous longitudinal case study of Novo Nordisk, Rerup (2009) found three attentional processes focused on attending to weak signals led to recovery from crisis and subsequent highly reliable performance. Consistent with its connection to high reliability, a number of studies have qualitatively associated collective mindfulness with greater organizational reliability (LaPorte & Consolini, 1991; Schulman, 1993; Weick & Roberts, 1993) and more effective response to disasters (Bigley & Roberts, 2001), near disasters (Rerup, 2009), and traumas (Klein et al., 2006). In health care contexts, qualitative studies have also linked observed changes in collective mindfulness to mortality rates (Madsen et al., 2006) and clinical outcomes (Knox et al. 1999). In a qualitative study of firefighters, Scott and Trethewey (2008) found that collective mindfulness was associated with amplifying weak signals and engaging in swift action for novel threats. Hargadon and Bechky (2006) find that mindful interactions among members of professional service firms act as occasions for sensemaking by triggering moments of reflective reframing where individuals demonstrate the difficulty of their problems and share their prior experiences that can help solve them and elicit collective creativity. Other analyses of highprofile disasters like the Columbia Shuttle (Weick, 2005), ‘excess deaths’ of pediatric patients at the Bristol Royal infirmary (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2003), and increases in mortality rates in a pediatric intensive care unit (Madsen et al., 2006) have all been used to show the negative consequences of low levels or even the absence of collective mindfulness. A series of quantitative studies in hospital nursing units has found that collective mindfulness is associated with fewer medication errors (Ausserhofer et al., 2013; Vogus & Sutcliffe, 2007a, 2007b) and patient falls (Vogus & Sutcliffe, 2007a). The benefits of collective mindfulness were enhanced in workgroups that trusted their leaders and more fully implemented standard operating procedures (i.e., care pathways, Vogus & Sutcliffe, 2007b). In a study of five intensive care units, Hales and colleagues (2012) investigated the effects of a Page 8 of 15

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ten-day collective mindfulness intervention on multiple indicators and found evidence of fewer negative interactions between nurses and patient families, a 50 percent reduction in the number of failed nurse supervisor inspections, and an improvement in patients discharged alive. Like individual mindfulness, the benefits of collective mindfulness extend to the workforce, but in a more complex way. For example, Vogus and colleagues (2014) find a complex relationship between collective mindfulness and emotional exhaustion. Specifically, they find beneficial effects of collective mindfulness, namely lower levels of emotional exhaustion, only when a hospital nursing unit had a negative performance history of adverse events like medication errors that caused patient harm. Under those conditions, collective mindfulness acted as a sensemaking resource for problem solving and regulating individual emotions. In contrast, on units without a history of adverse events, collective mindfulness was associated with higher levels of emotional exhaustion, ostensibly acting as a personal resource depleting demand without tangible benefit. This finding confirms that collective mindfulness is cognitively and emotionally demanding (Levinthal & Rerup, 2006: Schulman, 1993; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2001), but an especially helpful sensemaking resource in difficult circumstances.

Discussion and Future Research We have argued that the sensemaking perspective can be substantially enhanced through two steps. First, rebalancing the focus on retrospective cognition and interpretation with attention to current and future circumstances through enactment and prospective action, specifically simplexity. Second, operationalizing simplexity in sensemaking research by accounting for individual and collective mindfulness. Yet, further conceptual work that elaborates the simplexity perspective on sensemaking and develops propositions regarding the potential roles of individual and collective mindfulness in sensemaking and on its effectiveness is needed. Although we have treated simplexity and mindfulness as intertwined, there may also be value in separating them conceptually and empirically. Next, we explore four promising sets of research questions regarding routines, sensemaking accounts, entrepreneurial opportunity and innovation, and affective mechanisms in sensemaking. Routines, Simplexity, and Mindfulness. Mindfulness and simplexity both evoke images of novelty and the unexpected. Under such circumstances, one might expect routines to potentially be a hindrance. However, there is research suggesting otherwise and indicates potential directions for research. Routines may be constitutive of simplexity and likely to foster collective mindfulness when they set expectations that help individuals discern threatening deviations (Rerup, 2009; Weick & Roberts, 1993) or act as general guidelines that balance mindful consideration with preserving coherence to ensure swift action (Turner & Rindova, 2012). In addition, the repertoire of routines that a collective possesses may allow its members to draw upon and/or recombine them to make sense of and respond to unexpected events (Bigley & Roberts, 2001; Schulman, 1993). In addition, routines may also be a tool deployed across an organization (e.g., the audits and facilitation of the Novo Nordisk Way, Rerup, 2009) to enhance mindfulness and sensemaking. Mindfulness and Sensemaking Accounts. Additional empirical work can build upon emerging conceptual refinements to collective mindfulness that attempt to decouple the concept from its conceptual origins in HROs and render it more broadly applicable to the study of organizational processes (e.g., Fiol & O'Connor, 2003; Levinthal & Rerup, 2006; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2001, Chapter 1 or Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007, pp. 18–21). Specifically, research needs to move beyond safety, operational reliability, and things to be avoided or mitigated. Given collective mindfulness's focus on ‘enriched awareness’ and a ‘more nuanced appreciation of context and alternative ways to deal with it’ (Weick et al., 1999, p. 90) and the similar dynamics regarding individuals mindfulness and greater present moment awareness, further research on individual and collective mindfulness could enrich sensemaking. For example, prior research has argued that sensemaking can vary in the extent to which it is ‘resourceful’ (Wright, Manning, Farmer, & Gilbreath, 2000) and that more resourceful sensemaking may be especially essential in knowledge work in dynamic contexts. Alternatively, customer service Page 9 of 15

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work, even in relatively routinized retail contexts, relies on developing an intimate and particular understanding of the customer's needs and delivering service responsive to those unique needs (e.g., Benner, Tanner, & Chesla, 1996). The suggestive study of Ndubisi (2012) regarding the salutary effects of collective mindfulness on service process and performance in hospitals suggests that more direct examination of the effects of collective mindfulness qualitatively or quantitatively (using specific measures of collective mindfulness) be conducted. Thus, a group comprised of individuals with higher levels or trait (or state) mindfulness may result in more resourceful sensemaking that is expansive and horizon broadening. However, it may be that a group's processes of collective mindfulness (or lack thereof) may be especially important to the resourcefulness of the sensemaking that occurs. Both merit further examination and could help deepen the connections between mindfulness and sensemaking. Individual and collective mindfulness might also influence the quality of accounts produced in a sensemaking process, for example, the extent to which they are unitary and rich versus fragmented and narrow (Maitlis, 2005). This research could enhance understanding of the sensemaking process as it behaviorally and conversationally unfolds as well as the relationship between mindfulness and more proximate interpretive outcomes. Innovation and Opportunity Construction. Another domain for which simplexity should be essential and individual and collective mindfulness may be a powerful mechanisms is the search for and construction of (entrepreneurial) opportunities. Abilities to perceive, conceive, and understand contextual details and otherwise engaging in more resourceful sensemaking can be critical to innovation (Vogus & Welbourne, 2003) and entrepreneurship (Barton, 2010). For example, Vogus and Welbourne (2003) studied software firms and found indirect evidence that human resource practices were antecedents of mindful organizing and subsequent innovation over the long term. The positive consequences of collective mindfulness on opportunity-oriented outcomes is bolstered by Barton's (2010) qualitative research on high-tech entrepreneurs and Rerup's (2005) work on ‘habitual’ entrepreneurs. Barton (2010) finds that founders who developed mindful practices for monitoring unfolding events and making sense of equivocal experiences were better able to shape and capitalize on new opportunities. Specifically, mindful practices enabled entrepreneurs to more rapidly build and update their knowledge about an emerging opportunity and perform better as a result. These studies provide a foundation for more detailed conceptual and empirical work to illustrate how individual and collective forms of mindfulness enrich sensemaking such that entrepreneurial opportunities are constructed and acted upon and the conditions under which this is most likely to occur (e.g., in the presence of specific organizational or leader practices). Affective Mechanisms. Although the events that trigger sensemaking and necessitate mindful processing are often laden with emotion and despite recent work to identify the varied ways in which emotion shapes sensemaking (Maitlis, Vogus, & Lawrence, 2013), emotion remains largely peripheral to sensemaking theory and research. However, bringing mindfulness and sensemaking together holds potential to rectify the theoretical and empirical gap. Emotion regulation is a mechanism that seems to underlie individual and collective mindfulness and could help explain why individuals and groups differ in sensemaking effectiveness. Individual mindfulness research finds that mindfulness fosters emotion regulation that reduces emotional exhaustion (Hülsheger et al., 2013). The salutary effects of emotion regulation might help collectives sustain the demanding processes of collective mindfulness (Schulman, 1993), especially in trying conditions. In addition, emotion regulation may be a promising mechanism by which individual mindfulness fosters collective mindfulness. Group or organizational feeling rules (Hochschild, 1979) may help regulate emotion and guide interpretations in ways that foster individual and/or collective mindfulness and correspondingly richer sensemaking. Other affective mechanisms also seem promising for future research including affective forecasting accuracy (see Emanuel, Updegraff, Kalmbach, & Ciesla, 2010). Vogus and colleagues (2014) have previously outlined how emotional ambivalence, the simultaneous experience of two emotions, in the form of simultaneous doubt and hope may help sustain collective mindfulness and richer sensemaking in HROs. This merits further investigation.

Conclusion Page 10 of 15

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We argued that sensemaking theory and research can be enhanced if the focus on retrospection is relaxed to allow for more present moment and prospective enacted sensemaking. We further posited that simplexity – a fusion of sufficient complexity of thought with actions that simplify – enables a more future-oriented sensemaking. We then articulated how the growing literature on mindfulness, both individual and collective, represent the processual engine of simplexity and are potentially valuable to explaining sensemaking dynamics and outcomes. We close with a set of proposed research areas that can operate at the intersection of sensemaking and simplexity/mindfulness such that sensemaking research too stays in the present moment with an eye toward the future.

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and safety performance of nuclear power plant operators. Personality and Individual Differences, 55: 433–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n21

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies A Temporal Understanding of the Connections between Organizational Culture and Identity

Contributors: Tor Hernes & Majken Schultz Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "A Temporal Understanding of the Connections between Organizational Culture and Identity" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n22 Print pages: 356-371 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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A Temporal Understanding of the Connections between Organizational Culture and Identity Tor HernesMajken Schultz

Introduction Organizational culture and organizational identity are both central to the study of organizations and bring a rich conceptual history to the field, drawing on ideas from, among others, anthropology, ethnography, social psychology, and philosophy. Although the two concepts both address questions of the importance and construction of collective meanings in organizations and often are intertwined in the world of practice (as shown by, for example, Ravasi and Schultz, 2006: Rindova, Dalpiaz, and Ravasi, 2011; Hatch, Schultz, and Skov, 2015), they have, with a few exceptions, been treated separately in the existing literature, reflecting their different origin in anthropology and ethnography (culture) and social psychology and philosophy (identity). Nevertheless, we witness a parallel development of process perspectives within both organizational culture and identity underpinned by different assumptions about time and change, as shown in the review below. In this chapter, we argue that a process view of organizational culture and identity enables further exploration and theorizing of their entangled relationship, often neglected in the literature. We elaborate on how culture and identity are conceived as process based in the distinction between evolutionary, periodic, and becoming views on temporality and suggest how a becoming view provides a promising foundation for theorizing their mutually constitutive relationships in time. Organizational culture is defined as systems and understandings that underpin organizational practices. As explained by Morgan in his elaboration of culture as an image of organizations: ‘In talking about culture we are really talking about a process of reality construction that allows people to see and understand particular events, actions, objects, utterances, or situations in distinctive ways’ (Morgan, 1986: 128). Although culture is expressed through artifacts, symbols, and practices, cultural meaning systems are often tacit and taken for granted among organizational actors. In comparison to organizational culture, organizational identity is more agentic, reflexive, and externally focused, defining what organizational actors believe and understand about who they are as an organization and how they are distinctive from others. Organizational identity is concerned with collective self-definitions and how organizational actors ‘develop, express, and project their organizational sense of self’ toward others (Hatch and Schultz, 2002: 23), which entails continuous comparison and selfreflections (e.g., Corley et al., 2006). As shown below, the further conceptualization of each concept depends on the view of temporality taken. We first elaborate each of the three views, which serve as our conceptual framing for the review of organizational culture and organizational identity. It is based on selected contributions from each of the two fields separately starting with organizational culture, which emerged in organization studies in the 1970s, followed by organizational identity, which took hold in the mid-1980s. Finally, we turn to the relationships between the two concepts. Here, we draw on the identity dynamics model, suggested by Hatch and Schultz (2002; see also Ravasi and Schultz, 2006), while adding a becoming view of temporality, which we use to further theorize the dynamics between organizational culture and identity in the flow of time. We will further argue how the connections between culture and identity are influenced by their ongoing constructions of past and future.

Three Temporal Views We work from the assumption that how time is constructed as the relationship between past, present, and future is fundamental to a process view (e.g., Emirbayer and Mische, 1998; Hernes, 2008, 2014; Helin et al., 2014). We are careful to distinguish temporality as ‘in time’ from ‘over time,’ as ‘over time’ suggests a succession of static states of culture and identity. ‘In time,’ on the other hand, lends agency to the work performed Page 2 of 16

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by acts and events in the flow of time. Such a view enables reconstruction of the temporal meaning of organizational culture and identity. This is what we refer to as the ‘becoming view’ (see also Chapter 38). On the basis of different conceptions of time and their implication for change, we distinguish between three temporal views of organizational culture and identity. They are summarized in Table 22.1.

Table 22.1Three views of temporality in relation to organizational culture and identity

An Evolutionary View An evolutionary view is rooted in the idea that phases or cycles set the stage for later phases or cycles, and that later phases or cycles represent a development from previous ones. It is assumed that there is a sort of logical progression from one phase to another, as experiences from the previous phases become embedded as organizational learning takes place between one evolutionary stage of the organization to the next. While organizational learning takes place during phases of transition from one state to another, and involves change of routines or rules (Nelson and Winter, 1982; March, 1988), the notion of shifting lifecycles follows from the formation and growth of the organization until its decline and eventual death. The stability that emerges after each transition represents an equilibrium state, which is aligned with the demands of the external environment (Aldrich, 1999). In this way, the organization is seen to achieve an alignment with the external environment, making organizational evolution contingent upon the demands of the environment. An evolutionary view assumes that change from one period or cycle to another has certain directionality, as argued by path dependency scholars (e.g., Schreyögg and Sydow, 2011). With the evolution of time, organizations become increasingly set in their preferences, routines, and procedures and will tend to standardize organizational life through repetitive patterns, resulting in organizational persistence. Thus, the past represents inertia that weighs in on organizational change. This development is echoed in the argument that it becomes increasingly difficult for leaders to influence culture with the passage of time (e.g., Schein, 1985/2010). Also, constructions of organizational identity are traced back to previous constructions, and identity is assumed to develop slowly over time, as identity claims made at a particular time shape commitments far into the future Page 3 of 16

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(e.g., Anteby and Molnár, 2012).

A Periodic View A prevalent view of organizations is that of achieved or stabilized states that endure over periods of time, where change is seen as the exception and stability the rule (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002; Hernes, 2014). Change is assumed to take place in the form of a ‘jolt’ from one state to another at a certain point rather than as an accumulative or gradual development over time. A periodic view has similarities to theories of punctuated equilibrium, where stable periods are disrupted by transformations or reorientations (e.g., Gersick, 1991; Romanelli and Tushman, 1994; Orlikowski, 1996), providing an understanding of how internal and external factors combine to trigger changes of organizational culture or identity. For example, organizational culture is assumed to be fairly stable, and cultural change is described as rapid or momentary, such as, for example, with the arrival of a new CEO or a merger and acquisition. Likewise, organizational identity is believed to be stable, but may change in reaction to environmental threats such as shifts in stakeholder perceptions (e.g., Elsbach and Kramer, 1996) or changing market conditions (Ravasi and Schultz, 2006). A periodic view is similar to an evolutionary view, in the sense that the temporal unit of analysis is the period or cycle under study. Still, the two views differ in their emphasis on the role of the past. While an evolutionary view assumes a certain contingency and hence interdependency between a former and a later period or cycle, a periodic view tends to frame what goes on within a certain time span. The period is a way of analytically ‘freezing’ the temporal life of the organization. Conceptually freezing organizational change into periods of stability makes it possible to say something about what has changed. If, for example, the work culture is characterized by a higher level of precision after the implementation of a certain technology, testimonies and cultural practices over that period may be studied to better understand what the change actually entails. It also makes it possible to study whether the introduction of new technologies is perceived as a threat to current identity claims, compelling organizational actors to engage in self-reflections about who they are. On the other hand, such a view considers change as an output focusing on what generates the shifts from stability to change and vice versa, while it tells us little about the change process itself (Hernes, 2008; Langley and Tsoukas, 2010).

A Becoming View Taking a becoming view means to assume, as expressed by Weick (1995) and Feldman (2000), that organizing is ‘an on-going accomplishment.’ It demands that we step back from seeing organizations as accomplished states depicted in evolutionary cycles of periods to seeing them as in a continuous process of becoming. This sets a becoming view apart from both the previous views, both of which are suggestive of semi-stabilized states. A process view, which we associate with the ‘becoming’ view of temporality invites, in line with Whitehead (1929), an understanding of being as the process of becoming in time (Hernes, 2014), and time as composed of present, past, and future, none of which ever stays fixed as actors move through time. Every emerging present (Mead, 1932) contains its precedents and possible antecedents, for them to become part of the past of the new emerging presents. An emerging present takes part in a temporal pattern of accumulated presents, while being directed toward the future. This constantly merging and changing temporal pattern is what characterizes the organization in time, and which gives it a sense of movement from past to future and from future to past, experienced and instantiated in the present. A becoming view of temporality implies that time stretches from the present into the past and the future, and that both past and future are open to reinterpretation and enactment while the present changes with the flow Page 4 of 16

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of time. Past events are incorporated into the organizational history, while they may also be interpreted differently with time. For example, stories of the founder's role in a culture are often reinterpreted with time, such as the shifting interpretations of the role of Steve Jobs in Apple; just as perceptions of what makes us unique change with time, such as reinterpretations of what it means to be a financial services provider before and after our digital mobile life took hold. The temporal pattern exhibits both actuality, in the sense that both past and future events are treated as facts, and also potentiality, in the sense that it could have turned out otherwise, and may still turn out otherwise. Still, although an event turns out otherwise or is interpreted differently, it is still restricted by its connectedness to other events. Actors are constantly engaged, implicitly or explicitly, in the work of connecting and reconnecting events to perform the temporal becoming of the organization (see also Chapter 38). We will, in what follows, try and link organizational culture and organizational identity through these three temporal lenses, by discussing each of these concepts through the lens of an evolutionary, a periodic, and a becoming view.

Three Temporal Views of Organizational Culture Evolutionary View of Organizational Culture An evolutionary view stresses how culture is learned and passed on from generation to generation, as its members learn to survive and develop a social order, whereby it is assumed to evolve slowly as cultural patterns are transmitted, selected, and diffused from one generation to the next. The view resonates with Schein's view of culture as evolving through various states. Echoing early insights from ethnography on how culture develops, he defined organizational culture as follows: The culture of a group can now be defined as a pattern of basic assumptions that the group has learned, as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that was worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think and fell in relation to those problems. (Schein, 1985/2010: 18) An evolutionary view assumes that culture emerges from processes of problem solving, and that cultural values that turn out to work are learned and passed on to the next generation. Time is conceived in terms of ‘generations’ replacing one another, as the culture develops slowly and incrementally from early birth to midlife and maturity (Schein, 2010; Schultz, 1991). Such cultural evolution also predicts that growth entails increasing specialization and formalization generating potential subcultural conflicts between, for example, different functions or types of competencies, such as engineers versus blue-collar workers. Schein further argues that the mechanisms of cultural change differ throughout the cultural life cycle. Whereas cultural change early on may occur based on self-reflections and organizational development activities, cultural change at the mature stage entails efforts of destruction or a complete turnaround. The cultural framework by Schein has been further elaborated by Hatch (1993), suggesting a reinterpretation of the relations between the cultural levels by adding symbols as a fourth cultural element; it has also been elaborated by Gagliardi (1986), whose work on cultural change suggests how organizational culture is forced to continuously change in order to stay the same, suggesting that in order, for example, to maintain an innovative culture, that culture must change continuously as requirements and perceptions of what it takes to be innovative shift continuously. The emphasis on cultural evolution is also found in studies of cultural processes, such as rites and rituals (e.g., Trice and Beyer, 1984; Schultz, 1991). Here, sequences of behavioral patterns work as guiding mechaPage 5 of 16

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nisms to organizational actors, as they are associated with specific meanings and considered to be the appropriate ways of behaving in specific situations. One example is a rite of passage, serving to move individuals from one stage to the next through a sequence of ‘separation’ from the past, ‘liminality,’ and ‘incorporation’ into a new present, as for example in military recruitment processes transforming outsiders to insiders of the culture (e.g., Trice and Beyer, 1984). More recent work has used the concept of ‘liminality’ as a way to unsettle routines paving the way for individuals to change their cultural repertoire (Howard-Grenville et al., 2011), emphasizing the opportunities for cultural change across time.

Periodic View of Organizational Culture Contrary to an evolutionary view, according to which stages form a continuous and incremental development, a periodic view assumes that organizational culture differs significantly between more or less isolated periods. Cultural conceptions from a periodic view address either how different cultural configurations, such as frames or repertoires, replace each other across time, or how cultural resources remain stable for long periods of time ready to be transformed or reinterpreted in periods of organizational change. Although Martin (1992) conceptualizes three different perspectives on culture as structural configurations, defined as cultural integration, cultural differentiation, and cultural ambiguity, we find her work underpinned by a periodic view in that cultural integration, differentiation, and ambiguity (or different combinations between them) are seen to replace each other across time as part of the process of organizational change (Martin, 1992; see also Martin, 2001). Still, the fact that the periods are not seen as leading to one another over time, sets her work aside from a an evolutionary view of culture. Being opposed to a view based on cultural life cycles, Martin does not predict a specific evolution of cultural configurations. Instead, she suggests that culture develops as shifts between stable periods of one cultural configuration, such as a corporate culture characterized by integration along with pockets of subcultures, and periods of cultural change, where, for example, the power relations between subcultures change and create strands of cultural ambiguity. In this view, time does not figure as a decisive factor, other than to frame periods of organizational life. More recently, the interest in culture as a resource has re-emerged drawing on, for example, Swidler's (1986) early contribution on how actors apply culture as a toolkit when engaged in organizational change processes, as well as her distinction between ‘settled’ and ‘un-settled’ cultures (Swidler, 1986: 282). The editors of the 2011 special issue of Organization Science comprising a variety of empirical studies on culture (Weber and Dacin, 2011) challenge the restraints on cultural processes, as implied in evolutionary views, and suggest a more agentic view, in which culture as a resource can be deliberately evoked, reinterpreted, and used for different purposes across time (see also the review by Giorgi, Lockwood, and Glynn, 2015). For example, the study of the manufacturer of household products Alessi (Rindova, Dalpiaz, and Ravasi, 2011) illustrates how the incorporation of new cultural resources in the cultural repertoire of the firm contributed to strategy formation in five different periods over 20 years. The authors argue that the process of enriching cultural resources is repeated in various situations of strategy formation across time, assuming that cultural resources lay dormant in between strategic reconfigurations. A periodic view of culture is widespread, and which is highly compatible with the very notion of culture as semi-stabilized systems of symbols beliefs and practices. Viewing culture in terms of periodic stability also enables breaks between periods to be identified and the forces leading to change to be inferred.

Becoming View of Organizational Culture We find that a becoming view of organizational culture has been intrinsic to the concept during its early stages Page 6 of 16

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in organization studies (e.g., Smircich, 1983; Smircich and Stubbart, 1985), but has not been particularly visible in later work. Drawing on insights and concepts from ethnography, culture studies ask how cultivation emerges from the ongoing creation of meaning among actors. For example, in his definition of culture, Geertz argued: Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law, but an interpretative one in search of meaning. (1973: 5) Similarly, in organization studies, based in the notion of culture as ‘webs of significance,’ Smircich stresses how this implies a closer scrutiny of ‘how things, events, and interactions come to be meaningful’ (Smircich, 1983: 63), promoting the idea that culture is never settled, but always potentially developing in new and unforeseen directions. As stated by Smircich and Stubbart (1985: 734): Interpretive studies are longitudinal. They record socio-political-cognitive-affective processes as these unfold. What did strategic actors think and feel at the time of the events? How did their prior experiences affect them? To what societal or cultural events did they pay attention? The becoming of cultural meaning is enhanced by its entangled character, where ‘webs’ of interrelated symbolic representations, such as symbols, stories, myths, rituals, and metaphors, can spur new directions and attract new interpretations (Schultz, 1991). Conceiving organizations as cultures entails a focus on the processes of meaning creation among actors in organizations, for example, in studies of how meaning is created, contained, and transferred in key symbols (Ortner, 1973), or how work cultures emerge from systems of semiotic codes (Barley, 1983). The processes of meaning creation have been elaborated both in terms of how management seeks to influence meaning processes in organizations and how managers themselves become symbols of meaning creation (e.g., Pondy et al., 1983; Frost et al., 1985) in turn. Also, scholars point at how such attempts of ‘management of meaning’ can be perceived and transformed by employees and turned into their own culture of resistance. For example, in his story of Disneyland, Van Maanen points to how employees engage in an ongoing and responsive construction of their own rituals and stories as resistance to becoming robots in the symbolic orchestration of the ‘smile factory’ (Van Maanen, 1991). A becoming view has also influenced how culture is studied and analyzed. Inspired by ethnography, organizational culture scholars embrace fieldwork defined as a process, where the researcher spends significant periods of time among the people being studied in order to reach a deep understanding of the localized ‘webs of significance’ (Geertz, 1973; Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Van Maanen, 1988/2010). A becoming view is clearly articulated in relation to writing up culture, as mainstream forms of scholarly writing are not able to grasp the unfolding richness from the cultural field. The concept of ‘thick description’ suggested by Geertz (1973) underlined the quest for multiplicity and detail in order to capture the processes of making culture found in the richness of life. In organization studies, the ongoingness of culture is conveyed by the writing of ‘impressionist’ tales, which in opposition to both ‘realist’ and ‘confessional’ tales, take the reader into situations, where actors are ‘seated ringside’ to the events. As explained by Van Maanen: The form of an impressionist tale is dramatic recall. Events are recounted roughly in the order in which they are said to have occurred and carry with them all the odds and ends that are associated with the remembered events. The idea is to draw the audience into an unfamiliar story world and allow it, as far as possible, to see, hear and feel as the fieldworker saw, heard and felt. (2010/1988: 103)

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Both examples illustrate the wish to capture the processes of making culture in a present, which is nevertheless subject to change. While the drama and emotional intensity of the present is carefully orchestrated in the writings of both Geertz and Van Maanen, Geertz in particular also emphasizes how the cockfight ritual serves as a ‘meta-social commentary,’ where actors express and enact a continuous theme of what it means to be Balinese (1973: 448). In that sense, Geertz shows how culture stretches both into the past and the future.

Three Temporal Views of Organizational Identity Similar to organizational culture studies, all three views are applied by organizational identity scholars. However, opposed to the more fierce discussions in culture studies (even using war metaphors, see Martin and Frost, 1999), organizational identity scholars have stressed the need to combine views (e.g., Ravasi and Schultz, 2006; Schultz, 2016; Gioia and Hamilton, 2016). Gioia and Patvardhan (2012), for example, argue for the need to study identity as both being (with ‘snapshot qualities') and becoming (with ‘motion-picture qualities').

Evolutionary View of Organizational Identity The evolutionary view underpins the seminal definition of organizational identity by Albert and Whetten (1985) as the Central, Enduring, and Distinctive dimensions (the so-called CED definition) of an organization, which answers the question of ‘who are we as an organization.’ Drawing on evolutionary social psychology, the authors propose that fundamental self-definition establishes the organization as a unitary social actor and provides means for identification with the organization among its members. The evolutionary view particularly refers to the notion of enduringness, suggesting that central attributes of identity develop slowly and incrementally across time, similarly to the life-cycle view in culture studies. The focus on enduringness has been much debated in identity studies, as other identity scholars have argued that Albert and Whetten underestimate the ‘adaptive instability’ of identity and the ability of identity to change across time (e.g., Gioia, Schultz, and Corley, 2000; for more recent discussions, see Gioia et al., 2013; Schultz et al., 2012; Schultz, 2016). However, the role of enduringness is maintained by Whetten as a definitional pillar of identity in later works: ‘The enduring definition standard [of identities] does not stipulate that only very old organizational features will be experienced by current members as central and distinguishing features. Rather, organizations are capable of signalling their intent to make recent commitments endure’ (Whetten, 2006: 225). The enduring evolution of identity is empirically illustrated by a study showing how an organization for a 50-year period maintained enduring identity claims by forgetting and omitting elements of the past (Anteby and Molnár, 2012). Although these authors defend the enduring dimension of identity, they show how enduringness is an outcome of deliberate communication tactics when narrating the identity of the organization across time rather than an evolving and organic process as assumed in the early culture studies. Other scholars have studied the endurance of identity as ‘identity inertia', describing how stakeholder images and organizational practices contribute to the slow evolution of identity (e.g., Nag, Corley, and Gioia, 2007). On the whole, the evolutionary view tends to look to the past as a driving force of identity definition, where the ‘stickiness’ of the past (Greve, 2002) tends to be implicitly assumed in organizational identity evolution.

Periodic View of Organizational Identity Many empirical studies apply a periodic view, showing how identity changes and/or is reconstructed during specific periods of instability, while assuming that identity is stable in between changes. One early example, Page 8 of 16

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which paved the way for later elaborations of the periodic view, is the study of organization identity in a series of organizational changes in the Port Authority in New York by Dutton and Dukerich (1991). They focus on two periods of organizational responses to external critical issues and show how organizational identity influences organizational members’ reactions to negative images by external stakeholders concerning their treatment of homeless people. The study by Dutton and Dukerich (1991) was among the first to demonstrate the importance of stakeholder images for identity construction and to point at how negative images in the present might motivate future changes of identity. Another study shows how university faculty react to negative rankings by changing their cognitive tactics as a way to stabilize a new identity (Elsbach and Kramer, 1996), while studies of mergers or spin-offs demonstrate how temporary changes in identity facilitate organizational change, such as identity ambiguity enabling a spin-off (Corley and Gioia, 2004) or transitional identity paving the way for a transformation of identity from one state of stability to another (Clark, Gioia, Ketchen, and Thomas, 2010). Other scholars point at relations between identity and, suggesting that actors draw on cultural resources during periods of identity reconstruction, echoing the periodic view of organizational culture. For example, the study of Bang & Olufsen (Ravasi and Schultz 2006) demonstrates how the company redefined its identity claims in three different periods of identity threat across 25 years, while assuming stability between these punctuations of identity. Ravasi and Schultz show how actors in each period draw on past cultural practices and artifacts when seeking to make sense of what the organization is about in the present. By the same token, the study shows how new revised identity claims are embedded in cultural practices seeking to forge connections between the past and a desired future. Also, a study of Alessi by Rindova, Dalpiaz, and Ravasi (2011) includes redefinitions of organizational identity claims in the periodic changes of strategy in the company, pointing at how the relationship between culture and identity unfolds across multiple periods of time.

A Becoming View of Organizational Identity Inspired by the conceptualization of process as becoming, recent contributions offer a further conceptualization of identity as ongoing activity in time. In their study of identity reconstruction in the LEGO Group, Schultz and Hernes (2013) show how actors continuously reconstruct connections between past and future being in the present. Drawing on Mead's work on temporality (1932), the authors introduce the concept of the ‘ongoing present,’ indicating how identity construction takes place in time as actors in each moment interact to bring past and future into the present by evoking the past through different memories of past identity expressions, which, in turn, are projected upon a different future. Their study shows how the management team of LEGO evoked past identities through combinations of different forms of textual, oral, and material memories, which in turn influenced the time horizon of the envisioned future in that going far back in time inspired actors to look far into the future. For example, stories from decades before the brick was invented were evoked to inspire a different future for LEGO Group focused on the construction idea. Hence, the redefinition of what the organization is becoming takes place, while actors are constructing their own trajectory of time. Other empirical studies of identity enhance the importance of how actors bring the past into the present. Grounded in institutional theory, Kroezen and Heugens (2012) show how actors make extensive use of material and symbols from past identities in the brewing industry, suggesting how connecting back in time provides legitimacy in the establishment of new industries. A similar argument is made by Howard-Grenville, Metzger, and Meyer (2013), who in their study of identity resurrection explain how the town of Eugene is able to revitalize its former iconic identity as ‘Track Town’ by bringing experiences from an authentic past into the present, e.g., refurbishing the running stadium ‘Hayward Field’ and remembering famous individuals such as runner S. Fontaine and coach Bowerman, co-founder of Nike. The study shows how identity resurrection follows a pattern of repetitive processes attracting an expanding pool of resources available for future uses. Other scholars stress the temporal dimension of how individuals engage in processes of identity construction. Page 9 of 16

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Building on Mead (1934), Pratt argues the need to distinguish between ‘identity’ and ‘self,’ allowing a more nuanced view on how organizational self and identity processes interrelate and unfold across time (2012: 33). Others use the notion of ‘identity work,’ focusing on the ‘processes organizational members employ to create, maintain, and share organizational identity’ (Kreiner et al., 2015: 982, see also Alvesson and Willmott, 2002; Kreiner, Hollensbe, and Sheep, 2006; Pratt, Rockmann, and Kaufmann, 2006). Focusing on the activities of (re)constructing organizational identity open to further scrutiny the tensions underlying identity, as suggested in the study of how members of the Episcocal Church constructed expansions and contractions of the church's identity across time leading to what the authors label ‘identity elasticity’ (Kreiner et al., 2015). By expanding the concept of organizational identity to include all the processes underpinning its ongoing (re)constructions, scholars, in our opinion, bring the concept of organizational identity even closer to the concept of organizational culture, as the processes of creating, maintaining, and sharing are embedded in and draw upon the cultural meaning system and its related practices and/or resources.

An Attempt at a Combining Organizational Culture and Identity into a Becoming View A Model of Culture–Identity Dynamics As our starting point, we draw upon the identity dynamics model by Hatch and Schultz (2002), which is one of the early attempts to conceptualize the relations between organizational identity and culture. Based in Mead's notion of social identity constituted by the relationship between the ‘I’ and the ‘me,’ Hatch and Schultz (2002) describe the relational construction of organizational identity as a conversation between organizational culture(s) and perceived stakeholder images. Whereas Mead conceptualizes the ‘I’ and the ‘Me’ as responses and reactions for individuals, Hatch and Schultz suggest similar processes at the organizational level. As defined by Mead: The ‘I’ is the response of the organism to the attitudes of others; the ‘me’ is the organized set of attitudes of others which the person himself assumes. The attitudes of the others constitute the organized ‘me,’ and then one reacts toward that as an ‘I.’ (1934: 75) Hatch and Schultz (2002) use the concept of image to include the attitudes and experiences of others in identity construction, turning it into an infinity loop constituted by four processes shown in Figure 22.1.

Figure 22.1Organizational identity dynamics model

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The processes of mirroring and impressing are inspired by the early work of Dutton and Dukerich (1991) connecting identity to image, while the processes of expressing and embedding are suggested by Hatch and Schultz (2002) to connect culture to identity and image. For example, reflections on and reactions to images are embedded in cultural understandings, influencing attempts to express organizational identity (via new claims, reinterpretations, and new artifacts), which, in turn, may leave new impressions on external audiences. In a recent study of transformational change in the Carlsberg Group, Hatch, Schultz, and Skov (2015) further develop the culture–identity dynamics side of the model, showing how identity unfolds across time through identity activation processes dispersed among actors in a global organization, while being embedded in tensions of cultural change. In the following elaboration, we also focus on relations between culture and identity omitting conceptualization of perceived images, although we do include the importance of other actors in identity construction. In addition, we draw upon the distinction between identity claims as deliberate articulations of the organizational identity, as used by a majority of scholars, and identity work defined as the processes of making, creating, and sharing identity.

The Tangled Becoming of Culture and Identity If we study the connections between organizational culture and identity through the lens of a becoming view, their mutual entanglement in the present begins to emerge, as both constructs point backward and forward to each other in time. A becoming view explores the processes connecting culture and identity, tracing how they continuously feed into each other. The temporality of the processes connecting identity and culture can be conceived in different ways. First, we distinguish between prospective and retrospective processes pointing forward or backward in time, while, second, we suggest some ways in which the processes become further related. Our argument relies on our conception of four interrelated processes, as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4. Page 11 of 16

Actors draw upon cultural resources in identity work. Actors project identity claims onto emerging culture. Actors enact cultural resources in the light of identity claims. Actors make cultural meaning of past identity claims. The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies

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A schematic representation of the four processes is shown in Figure 22.2.

Figure 22.2Temporal connections between organizational culture and identity

Before turning to a discussion of how these processes connect, it should be pointed out that the figure is a considerable simplification of the tangled nature of the processes in question. Nevertheless, it may be helpful as a visualization of the temporal connections between identity and culture. Prospective processes connecting culture and identity are illustrated in the upper arrows in Figure 22.2. The forward direction of the processes implies that organizational identity is more reflective, articulated, and strategic than organizational culture. Two processes (processes 1 and 2) are at play, which represent the culture–identity dynamics in separate ways. Process 1 depicts actors as drawing upon their cultural resources in identity work. Identity work is seen as taking place in a forward movement in time, while embedded in the present culture. This is projective work in which actors are embedded in their cultural setting, while employing identity in the form of labels (Weick, 1995) and narratives (Czarniawska, 1997). As opposed to identity, organizational culture, being both a way of life and an understanding of that way of life, cannot understand itself. By the same token, people in organizations have a sense of their culture, but not of its potential implications, because their cultural understanding is restricted by that very culture, as argued by Weber and Dacin (2011). Nevertheless, as actors engage in identity work, they may become more aware of the potentiality of their cultural resources. Process 2 takes place at a point in time where identity claims have been articulated and are projected upon the further emerging culture. Articulating identity claims projects distinctions between prevalent cultural practices and those that will not be part of ‘us’ in the future. Imagining ‘the emerging other’ enables actors to draw distinctions between what will become the organization's cultural practices and those practices by ‘others’ from outside the organizational setting. Thus, the articulation of identity claims enables what Hernes (2014: 175) calls ‘distinction drawing operations,’ influencing the emerging organizational culture by providing directions for how organizational cultural practices differ from that of other organizations. Retrospective processes connecting culture and identity are illustrated in the lower arrows in Figure 22.2, including process 3 and 4. These processes pointing backward in time illustrate how culture is inherently hisPage 12 of 16

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torical in the sense that it represents practices that prevail at the present, while stretching into the past. Process 3 describes how actors draw upon cultural resources while formulating identity claims. Importantly, this is a process involving selection of past cultural resources, much like the selection of labels in the forward process of projecting identity claims. A temporal view of process considers not just the future to be open to selection, but also the past (Mead, 1932; Hernes, 2014). As actors look into the past while articulating claims for the future, they strive to select past cultural resources available through organizational memory (Schultz and Hernes, 2013), then aligning the selected resources with the emerging identity claims, as shown in the studies of identity reconstruction (e.g., Ravasi and Schultz, 2006; Schultz and Hernes, 2013) and identity resurrection (Howard-Grenville, Metzger, and Meyer, 2013). Process 4 describes how actors make cultural meaning of past identity claims through retrospection (Weick, 1995). Distinctions provided by identity claims, articulated in the past, are subject to cultural meaning, as they are conceived through the lens of the present culture, an observation that was made in the early work on culture (e.g. Schein, 2010; Martin, 1992). Hereby past identity claims become meaningful cultural resources in the present, such as when the hand-carved sign by the LEGO founder became a meaningful cultural resource available for future use (Schultz and Hernes, 2013). The four processes are entangled in multiple ways and connect culture and identity simultaneously, both prospectively and retrospectively, as indicated by the black and gray arrows in Figure 22.2. Taking a closer look at the potential entanglements invites further elaborations of how culture and identity are connected. Such projections of the future rely on meaningful distinctions expressed through labels and categories, which may be selected among past cultural resources. In identity work, cultural resources are revealed, compared, and reflected upon, also through mediated experiences with stakeholders that are seen as outside one's culture, such as media, customers, or other organizations. This may make actors more aware about their identity claims toward ‘the others,’ enabling actors to select cultural resources underpinning the ongoing articulation of identity claims, which in turn feed into the projection of articulated identity claims directed at the emergence of a new or different culture. Although organizational culture and identity are tangled with one another, they may also be seen as two different trajectories in time. For example, articulations of identity claims are a means to project a possible future identity, while drawing upon past identity claims. Conversely, drawing upon past identity claims relies on selection of claims among several possible identity claims. For example, in the study of identity reconstructions in LEGO (Schultz and Hernes, 2013), LEGO managers engaged in making sense of previous attempts at past processes of identity reconstruction in the 1990s during their identity reconstruction process in 2001, leading to new significant distinctions from others (i.e., their competitors).

Conclusion Although organizational culture and organizational identity are related constructs both in their theoretical domain and in their empirical representation, the connections between the constructs have been largely ignored in organization research. While some identity scholars seem to aspire to replace culture studies with identity studies, in recent years there has been a growing awareness of the need to include both constructs. We argue that taking a process view rooted in temporality invites a further elaboration of their mutual connectedness, suggesting that identity and culture are mutually constitutive pointing backward and forward at each other across time.

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Helin, J., Hernes, T., Hjorth, D., & Holt, R. (2014). ‘Process is what process does'. In Helin, J., Hernes, T., Hjorth, D., & Holt, R. (Eds.), Oxford handbook of process philosophy and organization studies, pp. 1–16. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hernes, T. (2008). Understanding organization as process: Theory for a tangled world. London: Routledge. Hernes, T. (2014). A process theory of organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Howard-Grenville, J., Golden-Biddle, K., Irwin, J., & Mao, J. (2011). ‘Liminality as a cultural process for cultural change', Organization Science, 22(2): 522–539. Howard-Grenville, J., Metzger, M., & Meyer, A. D. (2013). ‘Rekindling the flame: Processes of identity resurrection', Academy of Management Journal, 56(1): 113–136. Kreiner, G. E., Hollensbe, E. C., & Sheep, M. L. (2006). ‘On the edge of identity: Boundary dynamics at the interface of individual and organizational identities', Human Relations, 59(10): 1315–1341. Kreiner, G. E., Sheep, M. L., Hollensbe, E. C., Smith, B. R., & Kataria, N. (2015). ‘Identity elasticity and its dialectic tensions: How can we hold together while we're pulling apart?', Academy of Management Journal, 58(4): 981–1011. Kroezen, J. & Heugens, P. (2012). ‘Organizational identity formation: Processes of identity imprinting and enactment in the Dutch microbrewing landscape'. In Schultz, M., McGuire, S., Langley, A., & Tsoukas, H. (Eds.), The construction of identity in and around organizations, pp. 89–128. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Langley, A. & Tsoukas, H. (2010). ‘Introducing “perspectives on process organization studies”'. In Langley, A. & Tsoukas, H. (Eds.), Perspectives on process organization studies. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. March, J. G. (1988). Decisions and organizations. Oxford: Blackwell. Martin, J. (1992). Cultures in organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martin, J. (2001). Organizational culture: Mapping the terrain. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Martin, J. & Frost, P. (1999). ‘The organizational culture war games: a struggle for intellectual dominance'. In Clegg, S. & Hardy, C. Studying Organization: Theory and Method. pp. 345-367. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications Mead, G. H. (1932). The philosophy of the present. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morgan, G. (1986). Images of organization. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications. Nag, R., Corley, K. G., & Gioia, D. A. (2007). ‘The intersection of organizational identity, knowledge, and practice: Attempting strategic change via knowledge grafting', Academy of Management Journal, 50(4): 821–847. Nelson, R. R. & Winter, S. G. (1982). An evolutionary theory of economic change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Orlikowski, W. J. (1996). ‘Improvising organizational transformation over time: A situated change perspective', Information Systems Research, 7(1): 63–92. Ortner, S. B. (1973). ‘On key symbols', American Anthropologist, 75: 1338–1346. Pondy, L., Frost, P., Morgan, G., & Dandridge, T. (Eds.) (1983). Organizational symbolism. Greenwich: JAI Press. Pratt, M. G., Rockmann, K. W., & Kaufmann, J. B. (2006). ‘Constructing professional identity: The role of work and identity learning cycles in the customization of identity among medical residents', Academy of Management Journal, 49(2): 235–262. Pratt, M. (2012). ‘Rethinking identity construction processes in organizations: Three questions to consider'. In. Schultz, M., McGuire, S., Langley, A., Tsoukas, H. (Eds.), The construction of identity in and around organizations, pp. 21–50. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ravasi, D. & Schultz, M. (2006). ‘Responding to organizational identity threats: Exploring the role of organizational culture', Academy of Management Journal, 49(3): 433–458. Rindova, V., Dalpiaz, E., & Ravasi, D. (2011). ‘A cultural quest: A study of organizational use of new cultural resources in strategy formation', Organization Science, 22(3): 413–431. Romanelli, E. & Tushman, M. (1994). ‘Organizational transformation as punctuated equilibrium: An empirical test', Academy of Management Journal, 37(5): 1141–1666. Schein, E. H. 4th edition (2010). Organizational culture and leadership. San Francisco: Jossey Bass. Schultz, M. (1991). On studying organizational cultures. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Page 15 of 16

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Schultz, M., McGuire, S., Langley, A., & Tsoukas, H. (Eds.) (2012). The construction of identity in and around organizations, pp. 21–50. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schultz, M. & Hernes, T. (2013). ‘A temporal view on organizational identity', Organization Science, 24/1: 1–21. Schultz, M. (2016). ‘Organizational identity change and temporality'. In M. Pratt, M. Schultz, B. Ashforth & D. Ravasi (Eds.), Handbook of organizational identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schreyögg, G. & Sydow, J. (2011). ‘Organizational path dependence: A process view', Organization Studies, 32(3): 321–335. Smircich, L. (1983). ‘Concepts of culture and organizational analysis', Administrative Science Quarterly, 28(3): 339–358. Smircich, L. & Stubbart, C. (1985). ‘Strategic management in an enacted world', Academy of Management Review, 10(4): 724–736. Swidler, A. (1986). ‘Culture in action: Symbols and strategies', American Sociological Review, 51(2), 273–286. Tsoukas, H. & Chia. R. (2002). ‘On organizational becoming: rethinking organizational change', Organization Science, 13(5): 567–582. Trice, H. M. & Beyer, J. M. (1984). ‘Studying organizational cultures through rites and ceremonials', Academy of Management Review, 9(4): 653–669. Weber, C. & Dacin, T. (2011). The cultural construction of organizational life: Introduction to special issue', Organization Science, 22(2): 287–298. Van Maanen, J. (1991). ‘The smile factory: Work at Disneyland'. In P. J. Frost, L. F. Moore, M. R. Louis, C. C. Lundberg, & J. Martin (Eds.), Reframing organizational culture, pp. 58–76. London, UK: Sage Publications. Van Maanen, J. (1988/2011). Tales from the field: On writing ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weick, K. E. (1979). The social psychology of organizing ( 2nd ed. ). New York: Random House. Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Whetten, D. (2006). ‘Albert and Whetten revisited: Strengthening the concept of organizational identity'. Journal of Management Inquiry, 15(3): 219–234. Whitehead, A. N. (1929). Process and reality. New York: The Free Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n22

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Institutions as Process

Contributors: Panita Surachaikulwattana & Nelson Phillips Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Institutions as Process" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n23 Print pages: 372-386 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Institutions as Process Panita SurachaikulwattanaNelson Phillips Process theories are theories that consider ‘phenomena dynamically – in terms of movement, activity, events, change and temporal evolution’ (Langley, 2007: 271). From this perspective, institutional theory is, and always has been, a process theory. For example, in some of the earliest work in institutional theory, Selznick (1949) defined institutionalization as the general process through which ‘organizations’ (i.e., formally structured entities with fixed and limited goals) gradually take on lives of their own and become ‘institutions’ (more distinctly social collectivities with complex social structures and broader, self-defined purposes). More recently, new institutional theorists have continued to recognize the process nature of institutions and institutionalization. In their seminal article, Meyer and Rowan (1977) defined institutionalization as the process through which ‘social processes, obligations, or actualities come to take on a rule-like status in social thought and action.’ The processual nature of institutional theory is thus inherent in an interest in the process of institutionalization; institutional theory is intrinsically about catching institutions ‘in flight’ (Pettigrew, 1992: 11). But while institutional theory has always been a process theory, the process nature of institutional theory became clearer in more recent work as new institutionalists have shifted their interests to questions of institutional change and the role of agents in institutional processes. Initially within new institutionalism, institutions were primarily characterized as stable and taken for granted. Most institutional studies were dedicated to understanding the effects of these institutions while the processes that led to their formation were left largely unexplored. But the 1990s saw a shift within institutional studies from stability to institutional change and agency. Perceiving institutions as only about stability was argued to be misleading (Greenwood, Suddaby, & Hinings, 2002), and various authors claimed that the institutional context should be seen as evolving rather than static (Hoffman, 1999). As a result of this shift in focus, over the past two decades we have seen more and more work explicitly employing process theory and process research strategies to unravel ever more nuanced understandings of institutions, institutionalization, and institutional change. Our task here is to examine the role of process theory and research in organizational institutionalism, provide an integrative review to advance our current understanding of institutional processes, and identify interesting future research avenues for deeper engagement between process theory and institutional theory. We will recognize the work that has been done, but also argue that much more is possible at the interface between institutional theory and process theory and that more can be accomplished by integrating an explicit process approach into institutional theory. Understanding and making explicit the process underpinnings of new institutional theory will benefit organizational researchers working to understand the processes underlying institutional phenomena and those interested in applications of process theorizing. This chapter is organized as follows. We begin with an overview of the theoretical and empirical research on institutions, institutionalization, and institutional change and discuss how the focus of attention of institutional scholars’ has changed from institutions as stable entities to dynamic processes of institutional change. Against the backdrop of this broad shift within institutional theory, we discuss the emergence and evolution of the central constructs of new institutional theory, including organizational fields, institutional logics, institutional entrepreneurship, and institutional work. We conclude our discussion of institutional theory as a process theory by discussing potential future research directions and discuss how process research can continue to advance our understanding of organizational institutionalism.

Institutions and Institutionalization as Process The institutional perspective in organization studies has evolved remarkably since the beginnings of new institutionalism. In this section, we will focus on how the terms ‘institution’ and ‘institutionalization’ have been understood theoretically and empirically over time (1). We will also highlight a number of important moments Page 2 of 15

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when the definitions and application of institutional theory changed and became more process oriented.

Early Conceptualizations of Institution The beginning of new institutional theory as a stream of research can be linked back to four seminal papers: Meyer and Rowan (1977), Zucker (1977), DiMaggio and Powell (1983), and Tolbert and Zucker (1983) (see Greenwood, Oliver, Suddaby, & Sahlin-Andersson, 2008; Mizruchi & Fein, 1999). Arguably, Meyer and Rowan's (1977) article was the most important both because it appeared first and also due to its key role in shaping the debate that followed. Meyer and Rowan observed that formal organizational structures become increasingly complex as new organizations emerge and existing organizations adopt new practices. However, against the then prevailing perspectives within organization theory, they argued that the increasing complexity of formal organizational structures cannot be understood simply as attempts at enhanced coordination and control. Rather, this phenomenon reflects the effects of societal institutions and rationalized myths (Sahlin & Wedlin, 2008). Scholars were inspired by the idea that organizations are influenced by the rationalized myths that characterize their institutional context. Because organizations are expected to be rational, they conform to rationalized myths in order to appear rational, thereby achieving legitimacy and enhancing prospects for survival. Organizations’ conformity to institutional demands leads to isomorphism – a situation where members of a population come to resemble one another. This early work in institutional theory is a process theory, but not a process theory of institutions as much as it a process theory of isomorphism. These early institutional scholars acknowledged that conformity with rationalized myths would often conflict with the technical and efficiency requirements of the organization. Hence, conformity would appear only at the surface or ‘ceremonial’ level, while the technical core of the organization remained unchanged. In other words, the organization would only externally conform, while ‘deliberately decoupling symbolic practices from the organization's technical core’ (Greenwood et al., 2008). But this left much unexplained. For one thing, Meyer and Rowan did not clearly define what they meant by ‘institution,’ but only provided the rather vague notion that institutions are taken-for-granted rationalized myths and that the institutional context is the environment that contains these myths (Greenwood et al., 2008). Some definitions of institutions focused on types of organizations such as hospitals, prisons; other definitions refer to fields such as education, business, or the military as institutions. Tolbert and Zucker (1983: 2) moved away from conceptualizing an institution as a concrete entity and instead developed a more general definition focusing on the institutional context as the symbolic environment in which organizations are embedded and that is constituted by widespread social conceptions of appropriate organizational form and behavior. In an attempt to move beyond the problem of defining institution, many researchers turned their attention to institutionalization.

Early Conceptualizations of Institutionalization Although Meyer and Rowan failed to define clearly what they meant by institution, they did provide a useful (and process-oriented) definition of institutionalization as ‘the process by which social processes, obligations, or actualities come to take on a rule-like status in social thought and action’ (Meyer & Rowan, 1977: 341). Zucker (1977) followed suit, giving a more empirical definition of institutionalization as the process by which a set of units and a pattern of activities comes to be normatively and cognitively taken for granted. Tolbert and Zucker (1983) extended and developed this idea with the observation that for practices to be institutionalized they must be widely followed, without debate, and exhibit permanence. Therefore, although institutionalization was originally conceptualized as a process theory, little attention was Page 3 of 15

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given to empirically examining underlying processes of institutionalization (Tolbert & Zucker, 1996). As Tolbert and Zucker (1996: 175) noted, ‘a process-based approach to institutionalization has not been followed in most organizational analyses.’ Instead, institutionalization was treated as a state: the question was whether structures and/or practices are institutionalized or not (Tolbert & Zucker, 1996), while investigation of how structures and/or practices become institutionalized received marginal attention. One of the earliest processual research studies of institutionalization was carried out by Tolbert and Zucker (1983). In their influential study, they undertook a longitudinal investigation of the diffusion of civil service employment practices by US municipal governments in 167 cities from 1880 to 1935. Based on a rich database of archival data and using process theorizing, their research shows that diffusion consists of two stages, each identified by the motivation for adoption. Early adoption was based on motivations grounded in a desire to improve operations or to meet efficiency requirements, while later adoption was driven by the growing social approval of the practice. In other words, later adopters were motivated to adopt the reforms to secure legitimacy by appearing rational and efficient, even though the practices were not particularly functional for them. Tolbert and Zucker interpreted the second stage of diffusion to mean that, as increasing numbers of organizations adopt an innovation, the innovation itself becomes ‘progressively institutionalized, or widely understood to be a necessary component of rationalized organizational structure’ (1983: 35). Tolbert and Zucker's research is important for moving ideas of institutionalization toward process research in two ways. First, it was the first large-scale, quantitative, historical analysis of institutional processes (Greenwood et al., 2008). Their work adopted approaches to process data such as the construction of a detailed story in a chronological order, and the comparison of cases across time and space. Second, based on process theorizing, they took into account contextual conditions, temporality, and patterns of actions with associated motivations, and developed a general process model of institutionalization. Although their work was still coarse grained from the standpoint of more recent ideas of processual analysis and process theorizing, their work influenced subsequent institutional studies and arguably paved the way for further examination of institutionalization from a process perspective. Moreover, notions of ceremonial adoption and decoupling imply that organizations have choice and some level of agency. As Greenwood et al. (2008: 6) noted, this also implies ‘reciprocal tensions between institutions as culturally hegemonic (with organizations “bound” by taken-for-granted rationalizations) and institutions as enacted and reconstructed (with organizations responding “strategically” to institutional pressures).’ Agency exists but is limited by the institutional environment surrounding the agent at a moment in time. What is hopefully clear from all of this is that the new institutional approach that developed at this time was fundamentally based on process theorizing. Such concepts as isomorphism, diffusion, ceremonial adoption, and decoupling represent the idea of a flow or progressive performance of institutionalization; while implicit notions such as tensions and interaction between actors and institutions, and motivations to achieve legitimacy reflect micro- and macro-dynamics. But this early research focused mainly on the effects of institutions. The processes underlying institutionalization awaited empirical investigation.

Agency and Change The late 1990s saw a fundamental shift in institutional theory away from a focus on the effects of institutions and institutionalization to the role of agency and the nature of institutional change. Critics argued that the approach of new institutional theory was predicated too heavily on compliance and conformity, and was therefore unable to explain organizational transformation and change (Greenwood & Hinings, 1996; Stinchcombe, 1997). Page 4 of 15

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In response to these criticisms, the attention of institutional research turned to questions involving legitimacy and change with a more agentic and processual approach: How do organizations acquire and manage legitimacy? How are institutional arrangements created, maintained, and changed? And, growing out of these new research directions was a new concern: the problem of embedded agency (Dacin, Goodstein, & Scott, 2002; Greenwood & Suddaby, 2006; Seo & Creed, 2002). That is, how can an actor whose thought and actions are constrained by institutions is able to promote change in those same institutions (Greenwood & Suddaby, 2006; Zietsma & Lawrence, 2010)? Along with this shift, there were attempts to give a greater precision to what the key terms within institutional studies meant theoretically and empirically. For example, Suchman (1995) provided what is now the standard definition of legitimacy as ‘a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions’ (Suchman, 1995). Suchman identified three forms of legitimacy, including pragmatic, moral (normative), and cognitive legitimacy. The knowledge of legitimacy is key to understanding institutional change (see Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005). In the same vein, Scott (2001) contributed to institutional analysis, by suggesting that institutionalized practices are supported by three institutional ‘pillars’ – regulative, normative, and cognitive – through which legitimacy is established. These more precise definitions provided a greater systematization of the theory, expanded potential theoretical applications, and facilitated development of institutional studies as process research. In one important stream of research, scholars examined why and how change occurs, and developed an increasingly sophisticated understanding of institutional change. A majority of these change studies focused on exogenous factors such as shocks (Fligstein, 1991), jolts (Meyer, 1982), discontinuities (Lorange, Morton, & Ghoshal, 1986), and cultural anomalies (Hoffman & Jennings, 2011), considering these factors as triggers for change. According to these studies, exogenous factors act by ‘smacking into stable institutional arrangements and creating indeterminacy’ (Clemens & Cook, 1999: 447). The result is various processes of change. Little attention was initially paid to endogenous change and its sources. Seo and Creed (2002) began the process of unraveling these complexities, suggesting four sources of endogenous contradictions: 1) the gaps between the performance arising from conformity to existing institutions and from functional efficiency, 2) inability of fields to adapt to jolts, 3) intrainstitutional conformity that creates interinstitutional incompatibilities, and 4) isomorphism that conflicts with divergence of interests. Seo and Creed suggested that these contradictions occur at the field level, creating ‘praxis’ for institutional change, whereby actors ‘move from unreflective participation in institutional reproduction to imaginative critique of existing arrangements to practical action for change’ (2002: 231).

Stability and Change In other studies, researchers developed models that highlighted the institutional processes underlying stability and change. These models help explain the influence of the cognitive beliefs of actors on institutional processes, the symbolic aspects of institutionalization, and the fragmented and (sometimes conflicting) nature of institutions. They incorporate the creation of meaning as a mechanism used by actors to promote change and managerial innovations. From this perspective, institutions, despite their role as environmental constraints, can be purposefully manipulated by actors. Building on Berger and Luckmann (1991), Zucker (1977), and their 1986 studies of the civil service reform, Tolbert and Zucker (1996) synthesized and proposed a much more developed process model of institutionalization. The model begins with habitualization (or the preinstitutionalization stage) – the development of patterned problem-solving behaviors or the process of generating innovations such as new structures in rePage 5 of 15

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sponse to particular stimuli. The process of habitualization is followed by objectification, the development of a social consensus on the value of the new structures, leading to increasing adoption by other organizations. The final stage is sedimentation (or the stage of full institutionalization or reinstitutionalization), which ensures historical continuity and the survival of the structure over time and across generations of organizational actors. Tolbert and Zucker (1996) argued that little attention had been paid to understanding how innovations moved across organizations and became reinstitutionalized, or according to their model of change, from objectification to reinstitutionalization. To fill this important gap in institutional theory, they suggested adopting the construct of theorization (Strang & Meyer, 1993). For new practices to be diffused, it requires agents, or to use DiMaggio's (1988) term ‘champions,’ who need to accomplish two tasks: identifying the problems that organizations are facing and justifying a particular structure as a solution. Elaborating this model of change, Greenwood, Suddaby, and Hinings (2002) outlined a six-stage model: 1) change begins with a precipitating jolt such as political and technological upheavals that disrupt existing institutions; 2) this is followed by deinstitutionalization, which involves emergence of new players or institutional entrepreneurship; 3) then preinstitutionalization, whereby new practices are developed or sought; 4) which is followed by theorization, in which new practices together with the need for change become abstracted and justified based on pragmatic and/or normative legitimacy; 5) diffusion, in which new practices increasingly gain social consensus on their benefits; and finally, 6) reinstitutionalization, where the density and the time of adoption provides new practices with cognitive legitimacy, enabling them to achieve a taken-for-granted status as natural and appropriate. More recently, Lounsbury and Crumley (2007) drew on the case of the creation of active money management in the US mutual fund industry to develop a process model of new practice creation. Their process model explains the multilevel nature of new practices emergence and institutionalization. Similarly, drawing on the 199-day ethnography of Cambridge's 2007 selection practices for the annual University Boat Race, Lok and De Rond (2013) investigated how highly institutionalized practices are maintained, by examining how embedded actors in their institutional environment collectively restore breakdowns in the institutionalized practice. Their findings contribute to more nuanced understanding of how institutions are maintained through microlevel dynamics. But it is not only the process of institutionalization that has received attention. Deinstitutionalization processes have also begun to be explored. Maguire and Hardy (2009) is a good example of using process theorizing and methods to examine deinstitutionalization. In their interesting study, Maguire and Hardy examined the deinstitutionalization of the taken-for-granted practices of DDT use over a 10-year period. Their findings show how the abandonment of practices as a result of ‘problematizations’ change discourse in ways that are detrimental to the institutional pillars supporting practices.

Summary We hope that our discussion so far has made it clear how refocusing on change and agency has meant that institutional researchers have paid growing attention to understanding and unraveling the processes and mechanisms of institutionalization – how an institution is created, maintained, transformed, and terminated. This research connects directly with the philosophy of process theorizing that examines how and why things emerge, develop, grow, or disappear over time (Langley, Smallman, Tsoukas, & Van de Ven, 2013). Unsurprisingly, institutional scholars have increasingly adopted process research strategies to empirically examine institutionalization processes. Process research focuses on evolving phenomena, and it directs attention to temporal progressions of activities, events, actions, and the like, as ways of understanding and analyzing a Page 6 of 15

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given phenomenon (Bingham & Kahl, 2013; Langley et al., 2013). We have also highlighted how an increasing number of institutional studies have explicitly drawn on process research to undertake empirical studies of institutionalization, whether on the emergence, transformation, or reproduction of institutions. In the next section, we will discuss the core concepts that have been developed by institutional theorists as they have sought to better understand institutional actors and processes.

Key Concepts in Institutional Theory While our discussion in the previous section focused on the core processes of institutionalization and how understandings of institutionalization have evolved over time, in this section we will examine the theoretical infrastructure that has been constructed by institutional theorists as they have worked to broaden the theoretical power of the perspective. We will begin by defining a core concept in each subsection and then examine the role of process theory in the development and elaboration of the concept.

Organizational Fields The concept of an organizational field is one of the central constructs of institutional theory (Scott, 1991). It represents an intermediate level between organizations and society, and is central to understanding the process by which organizational forms or practices become disseminated (Greenwood et al., 2002). Organizational field is more or less synonymous with various other terms such as institutional sphere (Fligstein, 1990), institutional field (Meyer & Rowan, 1977), institutional environment (Orru, Biggart, & Hamilton, 1991), and societal sector (Scott & Meyer, 1992). However, the term organizational field has become the most accepted and widely used term for the constellation of relevant actors in an institutional context, and the term has become the central organizing construct in institutional theory (Wooten & Hoffman, 2008). The concept of organizational field is generally attributed to DiMaggio and Powell's influential 1983 paper. According to DiMaggio and Powell (1983: 148), an organizational field refers to ‘those organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life.’ In developing this concept, DiMaggio and Powell direct attention not only to competing firms in a way similar to the concept of industry, but also to ‘the totality of relevant actors’ such as the government, sources of funding, professional and trade associations, special interest groups, the general public – any constituent which imposes a coercive, normative, or mimetic influence on the organization (DiMaggio & Powell, 1991; Scott, 1991). Also, by defining organization field in this way, DiMaggio and Powell focus on ‘sets’ or ‘communities’ of organizations that interact with each other and influence each other in a meaningful way (Greenwood et al., 2002). Scott (1994) later elaborated and defined an organizational field as ‘a community of organizations that partakes in a common meaning system and whose participants interact more frequently and fatefully with one another than with actors outside the field.' Reflecting the early stream of institutional research where institutionalization was predominantly conceived as a mechanism that led to homogeneity, an organizational field was characterized as static, unitary, and formed around common technologies, industries, or discrete network ties (DiMaggio, 1995; Greenwood & Hinings, 1996). Most scholars used the definition of an organizational field as a ‘means to understand the impact of rationalization on organizations’ (Wooten & Hoffman, 2008: 131). This work was more structural than processual in nature. However, beginning in the early 1990s, the calls of scholars to bring agency and change into institutional studies began to affect thinking about the nature of organizational fields. Along with this shift in understandings of institutionalization, scholars brought new thinking to the concept of an organizational field. From this new Page 7 of 15

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perspective, researchers began to focus on an organizational field as a system of relations (Greenwood et al., 2002; Sahlin-Andersson, 1996; Zietsma & Lawrence, 2010). In an organizational field, central and peripheral actors emerge. Central actors with control over resources or dominant organizations that are perceived as influential and successful are points of reference for other organizations in the field. Central or dominant actors generally seek to maintain the status quo, as their privileged position is supported and facilitated by existing institutional arrangements, and therefore they resist change (Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001). Institutional change in an organizational field is therefore often a result of actions by peripheral actors. As a reference system, an organizational field also shapes the attention and identities of actors in the field. On the basis of this notion, an organizational field can have both periods of stability and change. Other scholars emphasized that fields can contain conflicts and contestation and function as a central arena for dialogue and discussion. On the basis of this view, an organizational field is formed around issues that bring together various constituents with different interests and purposes (Hoffman, 1999). This evolving definition posits that fields usually contain multiple logics. Due to this multiplicity, field constituents might have opposing interests and different perspectives toward the same issues that bind them together. Therefore, on the one hand, a field is conceptualized as a community of organizations bound together by shared meaning system (Scott, 2001). On the other hand, a field can be viewed as a zone of institutional war (Hoffman, 1999), in which actors compete over the theorizing of issues and the forms of institutions that will guide organizational behavior (Zietsma & Lawrence, 2010). Scholars argue that the organizational field should be seen as evolving, rather than static, through the entry, movement, and exit of individual/organizational actors within a structured field (Barnett & Carroll, 1993), and/or through contradictions (Seo & Creed, 2002) that lead to negotiation and redefinition of criteria for legitimacy of social entities and practices. This evolving understanding of an organizational field fittingly capture the definition and purpose of process research: ‘[p]rocess studies focus attention on how and why things emerge, develop, grow, or terminate over time’ (Langley et al., 2013: 1).

Institutional Logics Within new institutional theory, fields are characterized by institutional logics. Institutional logics are socially constructed, historical patterns of practices, assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules by which individuals and organizations produce and reproduce their material subsistence, organize time and space, and provide meaning to social reality (Friedland & Alford, 1991; Thornton & Ocasio, 1999). Institutional logics have emerged as a powerful theoretical tool for analyzing the interrelationships among institutions, organizations, and individuals (Thornton, Ocasio, & Lounsbury, 2012), where the values, interests, and identities of organizations and individuals are culturally embedded within prevailing institutional logics (Thornton & Ocasio, 2008). Logics operate at three distinct levels of social action, namely, ‘individuals competing and negotiating, organizations in conflict and coordination [within a field], and institutions in contradiction and interdependency’ (Friedland & Alford, 1991: 240). An important distinction in the institutional logics literature is between those scholars, such as Thornton and Ocasio (2008), who retain the idea that logics at the field level are nested within higher-order societal logics, and ‘others who identify logics within a field without referencing their societal patronage’ (Greenwood et al., 2008: 21). The societal nesting of field-level logics brings to the forefront the issue of how logics are historically dependent and how actors may draw on multiple and often contradicting societal-level logics from different institutional orders. This conception of historically contingent, competing logics provides the foundation for ongoing conflict and field-level change (Fiss & Zajac, 2004; Marquis & Lounsbury, 2007; Reay & Hinings, 2005; Reay & Hinings, 2009). The concept of an institutional logic has proved to be a key approach to understanding processes of instiPage 8 of 15

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tutionalization and change. On the basis of the notion of a logic, scholars posit that field change occurs not only through modifications in governance structures and actors’ roles, but also through shifts in the logics that underpin the field (Scott, Ruef, Mendel, & Caronna, 2000). The concept is used to gain an understanding of how aspects of the institutional environment such as social beliefs and norms provide ‘guidelines for practical action’ (Rao, Monin, & Durand, 2003: 795), but also to deepen understandings of change by elaborating how logics guide actors’ roles in change and therefore explaining in a more detailed way how institutional change occur. Although studies of institutional logics have contributed greatly to our understanding of institutional processes, institutional logics themselves have generally been depicted as surprisingly stable and unchanging. As a result, institutional change occurs following a shift from one logic to another. However, institutional logics are socially constructed by definition, and thus we would expect them to be evolving and dynamic. A greater sensitivity to the processual nature of institutional logics has the potential to change the way we understand institutional change and field evolution. It is not only about moving from on logic to another, but logics themselves may be changing and coevolving through processes of institutional change. The notion of an institutional logic emphasizes that institutionalization is not a steady state, but a dynamic process. It highlights the complex qualities of agency, history, time, and context, which fittingly captures the definition of process and processual research. As Pettigrew (1997: 339) stated, ‘critically, for any processual analysis, this interchange between agents and contexts occurs over time and is cumulative. The legacy of the past is always shaping the emerging future.’ Time and history are central to process research (Pettigrew, 1997), and institutional logic contributes to understanding of those elements within institutionalization and change.

Institutional Entrepreneurship Over the past 20 years, a new stream of research has emerged focused on the role of actors in changing institutions and fields. One of the most influential ways this has been studied has been through the construct of institutional entrepreneurship (DiMaggio, 1988; Eisenstadt, 1980). The term was introduced to the institutional theory literature by DiMaggio's (1988: 14) when he observed that ‘new institutions arise when organized actors with sufficient resources (institutional entrepreneurs) see in them an opportunity to realize interests that they value highly.’ But in addition to providing real insight, this observation highlights a fundamental question facing institutional scholars: ‘if actors are embedded in an institutional field … how are they able to envision new practices and then subsequently get others to adopt them?’ (Garud, Hardy, & Maguire, 2007: 961). Seo and Creed (2002) referred to this as the ‘paradox of embedded agency,’ a problem that has become a central challenge for institutional theorists as mentioned earlier. Institutional entrepreneurship refers to the ‘activities of actors who have an interest in particular institutional arrangements and who leverage resources to create new institutions or to transform existing ones’ (Maguire, Hardy, & Lawrence, 2004: 657). Thus, from the standpoint of this definition, institutionalization and change can also be viewed as political processes that reflect the power and interests of organized actors (Fligstein, 1997; Seo & Creed, 2002). Rao et al. (2000: 240) concisely summarized institutional entrepreneurship as a process in which institutional entrepreneurs ‘lead efforts to identify political opportunities, frame issues and problems, and mobilize constituencies’ and ‘spearhead collective attempts to infuse new beliefs, norms, and values into social structures.' Phenomena such as the paradox of embedded agency and institutional entrepreneurship involve complex institutional processes in which causal dynamics are complex and difficult to unpack. To cope with these challenges, institutional scholars require tools that allow them to investigate the reciprocal relationship among Page 9 of 15

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actions, actors, institutions, and fields, and how these entities are connected. This need for theoretical elaboration fits precisely with the philosophy and purpose of process research. Hence, it is no surprise to see that most institutional studies in this area have adopted process strategies and data to understand how actors, who are shaped by their institutional arrangements, are able to transform institutions and create an innovation. For example, Munir and Phillips (2005) examined Kodak's role in transforming photography from a professional activity to a part of everyday life. Through an examination of Kodak's introduction of the roll-film camera, they focused explicitly on understanding the processes through which institutional entrepreneurs use discursive strategies to institutionalize new technologies and consequently to the formation of new fields. Similarly, Greenwood and Suddaby (2006) examined the introduction of the multidisciplinary (MDP) organizational form within the field of professional business services and developed a process model of institutional entrepreneurship in which central actors become change agents through processes of boundary bridging and boundary misalignment that exposes them to field-level contradictions and lowers their embeddedness. The notion of institutional entrepreneurship provides a foundation for examining the role of actors in institutional processes, particularly institutional creation. Extending these attempts to understand the role of actors in affecting institutions and fields, there is a modest amount of research documenting the actions and activities that have other impacts on institutional arrangements, including institutional maintenance (Berger & Luckmann, 1991; Giddens, 1984) and deinstitutionalization (Ahmadjian & Robinson, 2001; Oliver, 1992).

Institutional Work In 2006, Lawrence and Suddaby published an influential essay that developed connections among the diverse literature on institutional entrepreneurship, deinstitutionalization, and institutional maintenance. They conceptualized this new institutional approach as institutional work. As a broader vision of agency, institutional work focuses on activities rather than accomplishments, success as well as failure, acts of resistance and transformation, and intended and unintended consequences (Lawrence, Suddaby, & Leca, 2009). It presents not only visible and dramatic actions but also those that are invisible and mundane, such as in day-to-day adjustments, adaptations, and compromises of actors attempting to maintain institutions (Lawrence et al., 2009). Institutional work – ‘the purposive action of individuals and organizations aimed at creating, maintaining or disrupting institutions’ (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006: 215) – has rapidly become an important area of investigation in new institutional theory. One reason for the enthusiasm for this new concept is that it allows a deeper investigation of how institutions and strategic action affect each other (Rojas, 2010). As a result, it allows scholars to inject agency into what has been a rather static view of institutions and begin to shed light on the enduring paradox of embedded agency. Furthermore, in contrast to traditional institutional research that tended to focus on single institutional processes, e.g., institutional entrepreneurship (Greenwood & Suddaby, 2006; Hardy & Maguire, 2008), deinstitutionalization (Ahmadjian & Robinson, 2001), or diffusion (Green, 2004; Kennedy & Fiss, 2009), research that draws on the concept of institutional work has developed more integrative models of institutional dynamics (Lawrence, Leca, & Zilber, 2013), which present a broad variety of types of work including creating, maintaining, and disrupting institutions within the same context (see, e.g. Zietsma & Lawrence, 2010). Lawrence and Suddaby (2006) explicitly identify nine types of work aimed at creating institutions which include vesting, defining, advocacy, constructing identities, changing norms, constructing normative networks, mimicry, theorizing, and educating. Vesting, defining, and advocacy are overtly political work through which actors reconstruct the rules, property rights, and boundaries that determine access to material resources. Constructing identities, changing norms, and constructing networks are seen as actions in which actors’ belief Page 10 of 15

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systems are reconfigured. Mimicry, theorizing, and educating involve actions designed to change the abstract categorizations upon which meaning systems depend. Combined, this typology provides a useful framework for examining the link between purposeful human action and institutions. The reason that the concept of institutional work has so rapidly risen to prominence in institutional research over the past two decades can partly be attributed to scholars’ increasing interest in institutional process in its absolute sense of dynamics, movement, and outcomes. Process thinking drove scholars to look for active languages of becoming, emerging, developing, transforming, and decaying (Pettigrew, 1997). The concept of institutional work provides such a language.

Conclusion New institutional theory evolved in two broad phases. Early institutional theorists focused on institutions as entities that imposed values and expectations on organizations. The great majority of the early empirical work approached institutional studies through a variance-based approach, using organizational adoption as a proxy of institutionalization. Institutional theory was a process theory at heart, but this had little impact during this first phase of institutional theory, and little was done to use process theory to better understand institutional phenomena. In the second phase, institutional theorists shifted their focus to institutional change and agency, and the process nature of institutions came much more to the fore. Following this shift, many institutional studies used an explicitly process approach to explore and explain how institutional change occurs. Many studies used process data (especially longitudinal data), and process research strategies (e.g., qualitative methodologies such as narrative analysis, grounded theory, visual mapping, temporal bracketing) to examine institutional processes. In addition, and in line with the increasing development of process studies of institutionalization, further studies have been conducted to examine institutional processes in different types of contexts (i.e., mature and emerging fields). Although institutional studies are now more explicitly process oriented, it is also clear that tremendous opportunities exist to make process theories of institutionalization more rigorous and actionable by further developing the connection to process theory. In fact, we would argue that we are at the beginning of a third phase of development in institutional theory. Practical questions such as what actors can do to precipitate change, at what point in time to act, and the role of context in these questions, all of which are central to process research, have not yet been fully explored in the many process-based institutional studies that exist. Most tellingly, perhaps, is the fact that most research has included temporality as simply a precipitating event or trigger for change, rather than analyzing the deeper temporal structure of social patterns unfolding over time. Institutional researchers should look to process theory for ways to investigate temporality and the role of time in institutional processes. Moreover, drawing more deeply on process theory would assist researchers in highlighting the tensions and paradoxes underlying institutional processes (whether it is the creation, maintenance, or termination of institutions), and provide insight into how to creatively represent process dynamics in complex models. Future institutional research needs a more nuanced process conceptualization, and this can be best developed by delving deeper into what characterizes temporality. We need to move beyond conceptualizations of temporality focused on the antecedents that precipitate change such as external shocks and power struggles among internal and external factions of a field. We need to go further by examining the temporal structures of social patterns that are associated with not only antecedents but also consequences and the replication of stability over time. Connections in time are not necessarily based on simple sequential linkages, but can Page 11 of 15

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also be amplifying or conditional relationships that hold the flow of the process together. A more nuanced view could reveal a more subtle and deeper understanding of processes in which organizations interact or respond with institutional contexts over time. For example, in a recent special forum on process research, some studies used temporal bracketing techniques to help structure the data and progressions of events/activities (Bingham & Kahl, 2013; Lok & De Rond, 2013) or used change in definitions of success that are triggered by awareness of paradoxical outcomes (Jay, 2013). These papers provide important resources that institutional theorists can and should build on. With the increasing process research orientation evident in institutional theory in recent years, we have unraveled more activities and actions that help us understand more about agency and institutional processes. As Langley et al. so cogently argue, ‘[t]he conventional boxes and arrows of variance studies (representing concepts and causal linkages respectively) return in new forms, wherein boxes tend to represent states and arrows relations of precedence or distinctive processual elements or flows’ (Langley et al., 2013: 8). Realizing this vision in institutional theory will provide a much-needed impetus to institutional studies.

Note 1The old institutionalism of Selznick (1949) also has an important process component, but given the limited space, we have decided to forego a discussion of old institutionalism and begin our discussion with early ‘new institutional’ theory.

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Strategy as Practice, Process, and Institution: Turning Towards Activity

Contributors: Richard Whittington Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Strategy as Practice, Process, and Institution: Turning Towards Activity" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n24 Print pages: 387-400 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Strategy as Practice, Process, and Institution: Turning Towards Activity Richard Whittington

Introduction Strategy as Practice reconceives strategy as something people do, rather than something organizations have (Johnson et al., 2003). In this respect, Strategy as Practice sits right between Process and Institutionalist traditions in Organization Theory. By its very title, Strategy as Practice connects to Institutionalist concerns for practices, the institutionalized structures of action (Scott, 2014; Vaara and Whittington, 2012). At the same time, Strategy as Practice's focus on the doing of strategy – strategizing – links directly to the growing preference among Process scholars for verbs over nouns, lived experience over abstract concepts (Langley et al., 2013; Jarzabkowski et al., 2007). Strategy as Practice's position between Institutionalist and Process traditions becomes particularly rich in opportunity as ontological convergence on activity brings the three traditions even closer together. The Process tradition's shift from nouns to verbs is not mere word play: it reflects the rise of ‘strong’ process ontologies that replace earlier notions of processes as relatively distinct, concrete things by concepts of fluidity and becoming (Langley and Tsoukas, 2010). In these ontologies, activity is at the bottom of all organizational phenomena. For Strategy as Practice researchers, this commitment to activity is easy to accept: ‘praxis’ is core to its research agenda after all (Whittington, 2006; Jarzabkowski et al., 2007). But for Institutional theorists as well, activity is taking a larger role, as new appreciations of institutional entrepreneurship and institutional work turn attention towards the active creation and maintenance of institutionalized practices (Fligstein, 2001; Lawrence et al., 2011). For contemporary Institutional Theory, practices exist only by virtue of activity. In converging on activity, therefore, Process, Institutionalist, and Strategy as Practice scholars are all riding the same wave. This joint turn towards activity provides Practice, Process, and Institutionalist researchers with a common ontological platform for exchange and collaboration. There is good reason for Process and Institutionalist researchers to engage with strategy. Strategy is about the fundamental purpose and direction of the organizations they study. Strategy is a master concept on which much else hangs – structure and culture, work and boundaries, and plenty more. But Strategy as Practice too has much to gain. In particular, Process and Institutionalist traditions can furnish new themes for research as well as supplying a larger perspective to a tradition that has sometimes been regarded as too narrowly ‘micro’ (Suddaby, Seidl, and Lê, 2013; Chia and MacKay, 2007). My terms ‘Strategy as Process’ and ‘Strategy as Institution’ are intended exactly to mark and reinforce those elements in the wider Process and Institutionalist traditions particularly relevant to enlarging the Strategy as Practice agenda. Strategy as Process retrieves for Strategy as Practice research central processes in strategy's disciplinary mainstream – such as strategy formation, change, or innovation – and insists on how they typically unfold over long periods of time. At the same time, the term Strategy as Process asserts a strong ontology in which organization is fundamentally activity rather than thing: strategy is quite literally in process. Strategy as Institution accepts this strong ontology, but reminds Strategy as Practice researchers that strategy activity is typically governed by practices reaching across space, crossing whole societies. Indeed, to think of strategy ‘as Institution’ is to see strategy as constituting a powerful set of institutionalized practices in itself, deeply embedded in contemporary capitalist economies. Thus, while Process Theory offers a strong ontological commitment to human activity, Institutionalist Theory structures this activity with societal practices. In short, conceiving of Strategy as Process and as Institution extends the Strategy as Practice agenda along two important dimensions. Longitudinally, a Process view increases the temporal range of activity; cross-sectionally, Institutionalism captures activity as expressed in society-wide practices. The next section introduces the activity turn in the Process, Institutionalist, and Practice traditions, identifying limitations and advances in each. The following section takes advantage of the convergence on activity to develop research ideas and Page 2 of 14

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methodological guidelines that reflect the conception of strategy as simultaneously Practice, Process, and Institution.

Turning towards Activity For Strategy as Practice, micro-level activity has been central from the start. However, this commitment to activity has historically been more variable in Process and Institutionalist traditions. This section therefore introduces the different approaches to activity in Process and Institutionalist research, and develops from this the notions of Strategy as Process and Strategy as Institution. I shall continue by discussing how these notions of Strategy as Process and Strategy as Institution can help Strategy as Practice researchers go beyond the level of the micro.

Process Approaches As is clear from elsewhere in this volume, there are many kinds of Process approach. Process research on strategy is no different (Hutzschenreuter and Kleindienst, 2006; Sminia, 2009). Here, three broad approaches can be distinguished: the first extracts strategy processes from organizations and treats them as essentially inanimate; the second still focuses on discrete processes, but infuses them with life and dynamism; and finally, the strong ontology approach conceives of organizations as inherently in process and hesitates to single out any particular process from the fluid whole. The direction of travel is from an approach in which organizations have processes, towards one in which organizations are processes. While I begin with the first inanimate approach, this is to set a baseline contrast; the crucial move is from the second dynamic approach towards the recent strong ontology approach. To start with, there is a long tradition of Process research that extracts from the organization particular strategic processes (for instance, strategic planning, joint venturing, or acquisitions) and reduces them to variables amenable to standard forms of statistical analysis (Van de Ven, 1992). In this reduction, the complexities of process are made tractable by rubbing out the sequences that link initial event and subsequent outcome. There is no room for temporal unfolding or the human activity entailed. Processes are inanimate objects. The classic example of this process-as-variable approach is traditional strategic planning research, where the issue is reduced to the relationship between planning and performance (Langley and Lusiani, 2015). Strategic planning is freeze-dried into a scalar variable, with lifeless connections drawn between variable strength and performance outcomes. Decades of such statistical research on strategic planning performance have been inconclusive (Wolf and Floyd, 2013). Moreover, even if this process-as-variable research were capable of adjudicating on the merits of strategic planning, Wolf and Floyd (2013) doubt its real value without attention also to activity: it is little good saying that strategic planning is valuable, if you cannot help with the practical questions of first how to set it up and then how to do it. More accommodating of activity have been Process studies that take strategic processes as distinct phenomena, but emphasize their dynamics across time. Prominent processes approached in this manner are strategy formation (e.g., Burgelman, 2002; Mintzberg and Waters, 1985), innovation (Van de Ven, Poole & Angle, 2000), and organizational change (Pettigrew, 1985). While these studies are similar to the process-as-variable approach in extracting specific processes from the organization as a whole, they do escape temporal reductionism by tracing the sequence of events across long periods of time. For these authors, the processes that link initial events with final outcomes may take decades. This temporal spaciousness lets activity in. Process is not just stimulus-response: over the long run, it takes actors to move things along. And the vagaries of action over such extended periods reinforce the significance of processes in their own right; the meaning of triggering events is transformed by what transpires in the process. This kind of approach does introduce dynamism, but it is worth pausing to consider in more depth both its Page 3 of 14

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scope and its particular take on activity. My illustration is Pettigrew's (1985) classic study of Organization Development at British chemical giant ICI from the 1960s to early 1980s, The Awakening Giant. Pettigrew's (1985) book deserves analysis for at least two reasons. First, the book is hugely influential, with more than 2000 Google Scholar citations by 2014. But second, at more than 500 pages, the study is large enough for Pettigrew to take a more comprehensive approach than other leading Process studies (as a single company study, only Burgelman, 2002, comes close in length). In terms of scale, Pettigrew (1985) is as good as it gets. Pettigrew (1985) does two things that will be important to my argument. Notably, Pettigrew proposes a ‘contextualist’ account of change, in which he differentiates between two levels of context, inner and outer, each important to the production of change. Pettigrew thereby embraces not only the inner context of ICI and its immediate environment, but also the outer context of British industrial decline, changing class structures, and various forms of political radicalism, both left and right. This is a much larger view of context than in many other Process studies, which typically confine themselves to immediate organizational and market environments. At the same time, Pettigrew's book has the space for many vivid and detailed moments of activity. Readers are unlikely to forget the ‘Californian’ behaviours of ICI's Organization Development practitioners, with tears and nudity in its T-Groups, or how future CEO John Harvey-Jones craftily exploited the accidental circulation of an explosive critique of the company's strategy. Here, there is an appreciation of human agency, something capable of interacting with contexts in order to drive processes of organizational change. Contrasting moments of human agency with more enduring contextual conditions is important to the analysis: ‘Change processes can only be identified and studied against a background of structure or relative constancy. Figure needs ground’ (Pettigrew, 1985: 36). But Pettigrew's (1985) study also illuminates some differences between older Process traditions and more recent Process and Practice points of view. As we shall explore later, a Strategy as Practice perspective would focus more on the role of social practices: for example, it might foreground the nature of Organization Development as a set of widely institutionalized practices, rather than as a series of varyingly successful initiatives in ICI specifically. However, a deeper difference comes from new Process perspectives that assert a strong process ontology. In this view, Pettigrew's commitment to activity is seen as half-hearted, abandoned as he goes up from human agents to the level of context, and inconsistent, particularly when he contrasts stability and change. Exploring this difference is important to understanding the Strong Process ontology that underpins the wider theoretical convergence on activity. Strong Process ontology implies that everything is process, an expression of continuous activity and constantly performed. In this perspective, change is seen in the light of all the ongoing activities that contribute not only to reforming organizations but also to reproducing them over time (Langley and Tsoukas, 2010). Reproduction requires activity too; change is not special in that respect. This appreciation of all kinds of activity drives increasing attention to microscopic phenomena, the incremental shifts, slippages, and corrections that are the natural product of human action and that occur regardless of deliberate large-scale change programmes (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002). In this view, the contrast of stability and change sought by Pettigrew (1985) is deceptive, for it obscures the micro-level dynamism that is endemic to organizations and their contexts whatever is happening. Beneath surface stability, there lies a constant series of minor adjustments whose significance grows over time. Activity is all, and Pettigrew's separation of process and structure, or figure and ground, is unfeasible (Hernes, 2014). At the same time, this strong process ontology dissolves Pettigrew's separation of levels, both between agents and contexts and between inner and outer contexts. Contexts are constantly performed too (Nicolini, 2012). From a strong process perspective, therefore, context is endogenous, not exogenous; it is part of the same web of human activity as the organizational change process itself. To distinguish process and different levels of context is to impose arbitrary boundaries. ICI's change, industrial decline, evolving class structures, and political swings are all processes themselves; they are each equally performed by human activity. Indeed, the humans of ICI's inner and outer contexts overlap. As a great institution in British society, ICI is an important site where the phenomena of outer context are themselves being Page 4 of 14

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produced by the struggles of its own employees. The apparent successes of ICI's new managerial ideology, the rationalization of its industrial capacity, and the curbing of its trade unions were part of and model for the wider transformation of the United Kingdom in the late 1970s and 1980s. Thus, Pettigrew's (1985) separation of company from context actually diminishes the significance of its change processes. To an important extent, ICI is its own ‘outer context'. Context is internalized through activity. This strong ontology critique sets up the notion of ‘Strategy as Process'. From the perspective of strong process ontology, strategy is the same as change: it too is activity, not object. The notion of Strategy as Process precisely affirms this foundation in activity. Strategy is always in process; it is constantly enacted through the micro-level initiatives and interpretations of its protagonists. Consistent with the strong ontology, Strategy as Process affirms the fluid and animate nature of strategy. Strategy is not a stable thing; it is what people do in the moment. This conception of Strategy as Process makes a natural connection with the Strategy as Practice tradition, which has distanced itself from objectifying variants of Process Theory (Whittington, 2007). For Strategy as Practice, the ‘micro-activity’ of strategizing was the starting point of the whole tradition (Johnson et al., 2003). However, the challenge for this common commitment to activity as microscopic phenomenon is to keep in view the larger processes and institutions that Pettigrew (1985) does at least acknowledge. Activity is more than idiosyncratic. As Langley (2007) argues, process thinking does not necessarily imply a narrowly micro focus, but needs to make links to larger phenomena. At its simplest, the Process tradition puts on the table such larger phenomena as those long-run processes of strategy formation, change, and innovation that have always been so central to the strategy mainstream. More radically, Process Theory's strong ontology internalizes the larger phenomena of context, as it renders everything equally as activity: context is not to be put aside in another box. But another linkage to larger phenomena is via Institutional Theory. The Institutionalist concern for practices gives the activity inside these processes a systematic character, one that goes beyond particular organizations. The structuring nature of practices need not smother agency, however: Institutional Theory too has moved towards a greater appreciation of activity.

Institutional Theory The different approaches of Institutional Theory (Scott, 2014) have clear parallels to those within the Process tradition. Thus, there is a good deal of statistical work on how abstract practices get spread around; there are studies that admit some scope for human initiative and struggle in creating these practices; and more recently, some Institutional theorists have begun to insist that practices are in and of themselves forms of activity. For Institutional Theory, this latest turn towards activity is remarkable: the point of institutions is precisely their taken-for-grantedness. Institutional Theory is concerned with institutionalized practices, routine and legitimate, stretching over time and space. It is these practices that can connect the activity of strong-form Process theorizing to sites and moments outside the episodes of observation. Activity is not idiosyncratic but systematic. Yet, as in new appreciations of institutional work, skill, and entrepreneurship, Institutional theorists still allow scope for agency in the enactment of practices. Certainly, Institutional theorists do frequently take a big-N statistical approach, examining institutional factors associated with the adoption and diffusion of new practices across many organizations, for example. Thus, Fligstein (1985) uses Logit analysis to show how the adoption of the multidivisional form in large American corporations through the middle decades of the twentieth century was driven by mimetic as well as market influences, while Zorn (2004) uses a similar methodology to show that the adoption of the chief financial officer position in large American corporations between the 1960s and the 1990s was influenced by both isomorphic pressures and the rise of a new shareholder value ideology within society at large. The ambition is noticeable: these studies trace the success of practices over long periods and across sizeable and important organizaPage 5 of 14

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tional populations. The limitations are clear too. Practices are treated as standardized objects, things whose spread is predictable given particular conditions. Such statistical studies do not penetrate to the fallible nature of human activity in the processes of adoption, partial adoption, and non-adoption. However, just as in the Process tradition, Institutional theorists have long undertaken large-scale studies in which human activity gets a greater role. For example, Dobbin's (1997) Forging Industrial Policy details how the distinctive national industrial policies of the United States and France stemmed from the varying initiatives of local governments and central institutions with regard to the nascent rail industries of the nineteenth century. Similarly, Djelic's (1998) Exporting the American Model explores the interaction of political, economic, and intellectual elites in reforming post-war European capitalism. But I shall focus here on Fligstein's (1993) book The Transformation of Control. My choice is not only because of its influence (substantially over 2000 Google Scholar citations in 2014), but also because Fligstein's evolution, from the statistical work mentioned above to studies of institutional entrepreneurship and skill, exemplifies so effectively the more general shift in Institutional Theory. As in the earlier discussion of Pettigrew (1985), the aim is not so much critique as elucidation of contrasts between one genre of work and another. Fligstein's (1993) The Transformation of Control draws on some of the same statistical material as Fligstein (1985), but extends it considerably. The book traces the changing ‘conceptions of control’ among the largest 1000 American corporations from 1880 to around about 1980. Thus, Fligstein (1993) gives us a picture of American capitalism across a whole century, during which American corporations passed from a ‘direct’ concept of control (in which an unstable environment was typically controlled directly through cartels and mergers) towards a ‘financial’ concept reliant on financial tools and measures (reflected in the rise of financially trained CEOs and practices such as diversification and divisionalization). These transitions were not driven just by market forces, but also by institutions of the state. For instance, the 1950 Celler–Kefauver Act's restrictions on monopoly helped encourage the diversification strategies that formed part of the financial conception control. Although Fligstein (1993) is concerned for broad trends, he does allow some room for individual activity. Thus, Fligstein illustrates his argument regarding the emergence of different conceptions of control with brief case studies. For example, Alfred Sloan is described as an organizational innovator in introducing the multidivisional structure to General Motors, while accountant Harold Geenen is shown as building his 1960s conglomerate, ITT, through a programme of unrelated acquisitions and rigorous practices of financial planning and review (Fligstein, 1993: 132–35; 249–51). Like Pettigrew (1985), but even more so, Fligstein (1993) is extensive in both time period and context: he spans a century and makes the state central to corporate evolution. Indeed, he has a broader organizational range than Pettigrew's, describing the practices of large corporations in general, not just a single case. However, the broadness of his overview does tend to exaggerate the control that is his subject, while obscuring the effortful activity involved. A closer look at ITT, for example, reveals that control involved more than rigorous financial practices and was anyway far from complete (Hopper and Macintosh, 1993). As well as financial controls, Geenen relied on obsessive hard work and a notoriously forceful, inquisitorial manner in face-to-face meetings. Even so, Geenen faced continuous resistance both from his European managers, who used geographical remoteness to effect, and from internal dissidents in the United States, who leaked damning material about his political machinations in Chile and the Republican Party. In the same way, on closer inspection, divisionalization turns out to be much more than the simple expression of the financial conception of control that Fligstein (1993) describes. Freeland's (2001) in-depth account of organizational change at Sloan's General Motors reveals that its multidivisional structure was not a matter of one-off organizational design, but a constantly contested affair, in which the boundaries between centralization and decentralization were always changing. Viewed up close, structure is fluid. Institutionalists have long recognized the risk of overvaluing broad trends over individual agency, with DiMaggio (1988) proposing the notion of institutional entrepreneurship to capture initiative and struggle. In his later Page 6 of 14

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work, Fligstein himself highlights the role of entrepreneurial skills in practice creation, for example, those of framing, brokering, and aggregating interests (e.g., Fligstein, 1997, 2001). In attending to skill, Institutional Theory is recognizing the slippery work that goes into making institutions and practices. Entrepreneurial skills in action matter; clumsiness and finesse make a difference to outcomes. Fligstein (2001) exemplifies the role of skilled entrepreneurs by detailing how European Union leaders Jacques Delors, Lord Cockfield, and Karl Narjes created the Single Market Programme through nearly a decade of painstaking framing of issues and brokering of interests. In this account, the institutional practices of the European Single Market of 1992 did not arrive fully formed, but were shaped by the continuous processes of manoeuvre and compromise necessary to get it adopted. Europe's structure reflects the activity of its making. This recognition of activity in institutional entrepreneurship has recently been developed by the more comprehensive notion of institutional work. Institutional work draws attention to ‘the efforts of individuals and collective actors to cope with, keep up with, shore up, tear down, tinker with, transform, or create anew the institutional structures within which they live, work, and play …’ (Lawrence, Suddaby, and Leca, 2011: 53). In other words, the work goes beyond the entrepreneurial creation of institutions: activity is the condition of institutional persistence. For example, regulatory standards require not only the initial work of design, but the continuous institutional work of monitoring and enforcement (Slager, Gond, and Moon, 2012). Without this constant activity, the institution wastes away. Institutional work thereby connects directly to the Strategy as Practice notion of strategy as a kind of work (Whittington, 2003), while highlighting the macro-implications of continuity and repetition. As Suddaby, Seidl, and Lê (2013) suggest, both the Institutional work and Strategy as Practice approaches ‘… argue for the need to attend to people and what they actually do, on a habitual or day-to-day basis, in order to understand how macro-organizational structures actually work'. Institutional work implies habits over extended periods of time. Praxis is mostly about practice reproduction. Consistent with a strong activity ontology, practices are not simply exogenous, but also internalized in the routines of the everyday. Thus, in developing concepts such as institutional entrepreneurship, skill and work, Institutional Theory has made the same commitment to activity as the Strategy as Practice and Process traditions. What it adds is a focus on practices that lifts activity out of particular moments to give them trans-temporal and trans-organizational reach. Early Fligstein is about the strategic and organizational practices that defined 20th-century American capitalism; later Fligstein is about the role of skilful individuals in the construction of a new set of European practices. From an Institutionalist perspective, it is natural to conceive of strategizing not as isolated activity, but as something involving wider practices. This is where the notion of ‘Strategy as Institution’ can make its contribution. To conceive of strategy as an institution in itself is to recognize the importance of strategy as a body of pervasive practices, the set of tools, procedures, and discourses that are routinely drawn upon in contemporary strategizing activity. Strategy as Institution thus recognizes strategy as a collective phenomenon whose changing shape can have large-scale effects on economic life. The practices of portfolio management facilitated the diversified corporations of the 1970s; the ‘new economy’ practices of the 1990s gave legitimacy to an ultimately empty dot.com boom (Ghemawat, 2002). As Institution, strategy looms large in the world. Yet, for all strategy's scale, the recent Institutionalist turn towards activity provides space for human agency as well. Practices reflect the activities that they shape. Strategy as Institution is as much the product of ongoing work as any other institution therefore. As such, the notion of Strategy as Institution can connect comfortably with Strategy as Practice.

Strategy as Practice For the strategy discipline, Strategy as Practice is the activity turn. Reacting against the abstract noun forms of the traditional strategy discipline, the original term for what became Strategy as Practice was an ‘activityPage 7 of 14

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based view': referenced here were ‘… the myriad, micro activities that make up strategy and strategizing in practice’ (Johnson et al., 2003: 1). While other streams of strategy research have recently taken micro perspectives, for example, Microfoundations (Barney and Felin, 2013) and Behavioral Strategy (Powell, Lovallo and Fox, 2011), a distinguishing mark of Strategy as Practice is its focus on activity. Nonetheless, it is useful to consider the particular approach to activity that Strategy as Practice scholars often take, both to affirm common ground with prominent streams of Process and Institutionalist research and to appreciate some challenges. In particular, Strategy as Practice research is constantly confronted by Langley's (2007) problem: how to combine sensitivity to micro-level activity with relevance to empirical phenomena that extend beyond the particular site and moment. In sharp contrast to the long periods of much Process and Institutionalist research, a good deal of Strategy as Practice research fascinates by its careful analysis of short episodes of strategizing activity. For example, Samra-Fredericks (2003) undertakes minute analysis of fragments of boardroom conversations to examine how top management use relational and rhetorical skills to shape strategic decisions. Similarly, Clarke et al. (2012) closely analyze an exchange during a strategy awayday, revealing the various discursive strategies involved in building and challenging consensus around a strategic investment decision. In Jarzabkowski et al.'s (2015) video analysis of strategizing moments in the Lloyds insurance market, it seems that even the simple arrangement of furniture can structure outcomes. These studies respond precisely to the original call to explore how the various micro activities of strategizing practically matter (Johnson et al., 2003). Moreover, unlike other micro-level approaches such as Microfoundations (Barney and Felin, 2013) or Behavioral Strategy (Powell et al., 2011), these studies attend to praxis: they go direct to what happens in action, rather than merely deduce from the psychological or demographic characteristics of the individuals involved. In this, they align with the strong activity ontology of recent Process Theory. These studies link also to Institutionalist themes. They recognize the same kind of humdrum and day-to-day characteristics of strategizing activity as feature in research on institutional work. They also recall Fligstein's (1997) emphasis on social skill: competent praxis matters for strategizing outcomes. However, the kind of detailed micro-level empirical focus on activity that is such a strength of Strategy as Practice research has been read as a form of ‘methodological individualism’ (Chia and MacKay, 2007). Fineness of detail is represented as mere atomism. Merited or not, this kind of reading reminds us that activity is not enough on its own: Strategy as Practice researchers need always to be explicit about how the activity of particular moments also relates to social practices at large. This is the message of Institutional Theory. Organizational activity expresses, reproduces, modifies, and occasionally creates social practices (Jarzabkowski, Kaplan, Seidl, and Whittington, 2015). The moments that are the stuff of Strategy as Practice research are not isolated episodes, but rely for their power on how they refer back to enduring principles of organizing and strategizing. Practice approaches are about regularized forms of activity, rather than activity as idiosyncratic instances. This marks a distinction from how activity is seen in some Process approaches: Strategy as Practice is finally about practices (Vaara and Whittington, 2012). In Strategy as Practice research, this connection of strategizing activity to social practices has so far been typically achieved by adopting various kinds of ‘tall’ ontologies (Seidl and Whittington, 2014). Tall ontologies – such as Bourdieu's theory of fields, or Foucault's notion of discourse, or Giddens’ structuration theory – recognize activity at any time as drawing upon, and therefore to some degree defined by, the inherited practices and resources of the social systems in which it takes place (for instance, market or cultural systems). In tall ontologies, the characteristics of pre-existing systems act as top-down condition for the activities of the moment. Activity in a tall ontology is therefore not the immaculate conception of particular individuals, groups, or organizations, but something that both expresses and reproduces the social systems in which they are already embedded. From a Foucauldian perspective, business strategy itself can be seen as a historically and socially specific discourse that pre-defines certain organizational problems as ‘strategic’ and certain solutions to these problems as appropriate ‘strategies’ (Knights and Morgan, 1991). Without this pre-existing Page 8 of 14

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societal discourse, strategizing is hard even to imagine. Conversely, the smallest fragment of strategic activity should tell us something about the wider practices and resources upon which it depends. Thus, a Giddensian analysis of a Quebecois manager explaining his company's changing strategy to a cherished female client demonstrates the roles of gender structures and linguistic cultures in achieving mutual understanding (Rouleau, 2005). Strategizing episodes are as revealing about social systems as they are reliant on them. The analysis of activity in Strategy as Practice research therefore needs to connect back to practices inherited from the past and out to practices imported from society. It is in these extensive practices that Strategy as Practice can find an answer to Langley's (2007) conundrum, how to link the micro with the macro. As in Knights and Morgan's (1991) account, any instance of self-conscious strategizing is conditioned by the evolution of discursive practices over decades and across whole societies. But equally, such strategy discourse may draw simultaneously on other societal structures, such as those of gender or culture (Rouleau, 2005). My argument in the next section will be that Process and Institutionalist traditions can help Strategy as Practice make these wider links. Strategy as Process puts back on the agenda such mainstream processes as strategy formation, change, or innovation, but this time with long-run activity as its foundation. Strategy as Institution reinforces the notion that activity is governed by social practices, stretching across time and space.

Strategy as Practice, Process, and Institution The convergence on activity across different traditions presents an opportunity for Strategy as Practice researchers. They can work with Process and Institutionalist scholars on common issues: there are no ontological incompatibilities to get in the way. To think of Strategy as Process is to access key themes in mainstream research while still recognizing strategy as continuous activity; to think of Strategy as Institution is to accept the institutionalized nature of strategizing but not to give up on human agency. Thus, Strategy as Practice researchers can take on the longitudinal perspective of Process research, at the same time as adopting the societal reach of Institutional Theory. It is possible now to treat strategy as simultaneously Practice, Process, and Institution. The most important contribution from a Strategy as Process perspective is its appreciation of time. As earlier, Process studies have excelled in their longitudinal approach, tracing the unfolding of processes over years or even decades (Pettigrew, 1985). By contrast, Strategy as Practice research has often taken short episodes, sometimes just minutes, for in-depth analysis. It is relatively rare still for Strategy as Practice researchers to adopt a more longitudinal approach, for example, studying repeated episodes such as strategy meetings or workshops as they recur (Aggerholm, Asmus, & Thomsen, 2013; Denis, Dompierre, Langley, & Rouleau, 2011). The tracing of practice evolution across multiple episodes and iterations should be meat and drink to Strategy as Practice researchers with a Process sensibility. Practices are in process too. Here there is rich opportunity in taking up some of the themes of earlier generations of Process research. Some Process themes are attracting growing bodies of Strategy as Practice research, for example, strategy formation (e.g., Spee and Jarzabkowski, 2011; Mirabeau and Maguire, 2014) or strategic change (Balogun and Johnson, 2005; Mantere et al., 2012), but coverage of other important strategic themes is still patchy. To take one example, despite Dougherty's (1992) early work on innovation practices, innovation has been largely left aside by Strategy as Practice researchers. This neglect of innovation is in sharp contrast with the large-scale innovation studies of Process researchers (e.g., Van de Ven et al., 2000) and paradoxical given the extent of practiceoriented research in the adjacent domains of knowledge and technology (e.g., Brown and Duguid, 2001; Orlikowski, 2002). A longitudinal approach to innovation practices might examine, for example, the characteristic practices at different stages within a particular innovation episode, or how practices are routinized or modified through the experience of repeated innovations over time. The practices inside other core strategy processes such as internationalization (Melin, 1992) or diversification (Grant et al., 1988) could be studied in similar ways. Page 9 of 14

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There are two caveats in adopting a Strategy as Process approach. First, while the strong ontology of Strategy as Process turns attention to activity, it is important to avoid the idiosyncratic treatments characteristic of many early Process studies. Activity is typically governed by more or less standardized practices. In taking inspiration from the Process tradition, therefore, Strategy as Practice researchers should keep their eyes firmly on the kinds of practices that shape activities across organizations – standard tools, calculating devices, and discursive rhetorics, for example. To return to Pettigrew (1985), the characteristic practices of Organization Development matter more than the fate of Organization Development at ICI in particular. Second, the strong activity ontology suggests the importance of taking time as a more subjective and active construct than in many earlier Process studies. There is more than chronology. As Kaplan and Orlikowski (2013) show, processual links forwards and backwards in time are not objective givens, but rather the product of ‘temporal work’ by organizational members. Processes can be truncated or extended in time through deliberate acts of articulation or forgetting. In a strong activity ontology, time too is something made in action. Researchers should hold in mind the distinction between their external definition of relevant time and the changing and contested conceptions of the actors’ themselves. Change in practices over time is, of course, a key theme for Institutional theorists. But approaching strategy's practices with the lens of Strategy as Institution offers a further set of opportunities. In particular, an Institutionalist lens widens the focus to include how strategy practices are created, diffused, and adapted across many organizations. Diffusion was Fligstein's (1985) focus with regard to divisionalization. More contemporary strategy practices such as ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’ (Kim and Mauborgne, 2005) or ‘Open Strategy’ (Whittington et al., 2011), for example, are only vaguely understood as cases of institutional entrepreneurship, diffusion, and adaptation. Again, applying such an Institutional lens to widely diffused practices helps to take Strategy as Practice researchers beyond the moment of the episode and out into the larger population of users. Here it is valuable to fix on practices with some general application, and then to compare them in a range of different organizations, as, for example, in Johnson et al.'s (2010) comparative study of strategy workshops. General comparisons should of course avoid the half-hearted acknowledgement of activity found in some Institutionalist accounts. Scholars of Institutional work show that practices are always in processes of local interpretation and negotiation. Thus, lawyers in international law firms are obliged to work constantly at negotiating the complex, contradictory institutional logics of different national legal practices, German and British, for instance (Smets et al., 2012). This kind of study shows the feasibility of combining Institutionalism's respect for national-level practices with the appreciation of micro-level praxis entailed by the strong ontology of activity. Generalized practices are important, but they are necessarily adapted in action. Finally, the notion of Strategy as Institution suggests the value of addressing strategy as a whole, as sets of influential practices within contemporary societies (Ghemawat, 2002); Whittington et al., 2011). As Knights and Morgan (1991) originally proposed, strategy became an institutionalized ritual within post-war managerial capitalism. Financial analysts, media, and regulators came to expect the production of strategies; specialized managers, consulting firms, and business academics made good livings from strategy. Strategy has grown into an institution in its own right. Process Theory prompts us to take a longitudinal perspective on the historical and current trajectory of this strategy institution: what was established in the 1960s remains in process, continually evolving. Institutional entrepreneurship approaches encourages us to look out for the entrepreneurs who have initiated and diffused the practices that have defined successive stages of strategy's institutional development. For example, institutional entrepreneurs such as Clayton Christensen and the consulting firm Deloitte have promoted a discourse of disruption that has radically transformed the practices of innovation in the last two decades, sometimes legitimizing the destruction of whole industries (Christensen, 1997; Lepore, 2014). Institutional accounts prompts us to attend to national differences as well (e.g., Djelic, 1998; Smets, Morris, and Greenwood, 2012), for example, the influence of national institutions on the local expressions of strategy's practices. Given that Strategy as Institution originated in mid-20th-century America, a society imbued with notions of competition and profit maximization, one can only expect substantial reinterpretation in early 21st century China, where such norms are by no means entrenched. Strategy as Institution will vary over time and across contexts, always produced by the activity of human agents, in the moment and on the spot. Page 10 of 14

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For Strategy as Practice researchers, there are some methodological implications of thinking in terms of both Strategy as Process and Strategy as Institution. Process Theory, of course, highlights particularly the longitudinal perspective. Episodes of activity (strategy workshops, tool uses, or strategy briefings, for example) should be tracked more over time, with attention to how they repeat, change, and interlink. Series matter. From Institutional Theory, the distinctive contribution is more cross-sectional, tracing practices beyond particular organizations to consider patterns across environments. The concern is with how far the same kind of practice (a strategy tool, for example) is adopted and – always – adapted within different kinds of organizations and different institutional circumstances. Generality matters. Thus, Process and Institutionalist perspectives combine to recommend the temporal and spatial stretching of the sites of Strategy as Practice research. Thinking of strategy both as Process and as Institution helps move Strategy as Practice from the study of isolated episodes extracted for convenience to more systematic selection and comparison. In a sense, it replaces semi-random marks on the empirical map by a structured grid, with lines carefully drawn to connect episodes longitudinally in time and cross-sectionally in space. Time periods should be selected with an eye to both observer criteria, with respect to change, for instance, and to perceived importance for the actors themselves. Site selection should be driven by theory, comparing sites within the domains of theoretical relevance with those that test their limits, for instance, because of institutional distance. Temporal and institutional comparisons become crucial. These longitudinal and cross-sectional extensions might seem like a lot of work, but such research can be managed more easily by defining precisely the practices in hand: the cases are no longer whole organizations (ICI or whatever), but particular tools, procedures, discourses, or routines. A defined practice may be easier to research than a sprawling corporation. There is no imperative therefore to fall back on the short-cut of quantitative surveys, as proposed elsewhere (Bromiley and Rau, 2014). A strong activity ontology warns that abstract counts are likely to mislead about praxis on the ground: surveys imply no economy of research effort if they must be verified by close observation as well (Jarzabkowski et al., 2015). Rather, the research efficiency required for systematic and direct comparison is normally better found by precision in the choice of focal practices and selectivity in the choice of episodes.

Conclusion Strategy is a fitting place for convergence in Organization Theory. Strategy links with so much else in organizations, from work to culture. Of course, different traditions have already made their own substantial contributions to understanding strategy. Thus, Process Theory has developed an appreciation of long-run processes of strategy formation and change. Institutional Theory illuminates how strategic practices such as divisionalization gain societal reach through institutional as well as market forces. Strategy as Practice researchers, meanwhile, have uncovered the role of praxis, the micro initiatives and struggles that can derail strategic processes and reinterpret strategic practices. However, the recent turn towards a strong ontology of activity now provides a common platform helping these traditions to draw from one another and work together. I have proposed here a notion of Strategy as Process to convey that sense of strategy as activity over time, as something that is always in process itself. I have proposed too the notion of Strategy as Institution, to reinforce how this activity relies on institutionalized practices at the same time as continually reinterpreting them. Process Theory now infuses its well-established strategy processes with a much stronger appreciation of the activity that drives them. Institutionalist Theory now incorporates a sense of agency into the practices that give this activity wider reach. Strategy as Practice research can take advantage of this growing sympathy between traditions, in particular to reinforce its connections between micro-praxis and larger phenomena, whether processes or practices. Process and Institutionalist traditions have, by and large, been noticeably more ambitious in temporal and spatial reach. By putting both long-run processes and societal practices so firmly on the table, Process and Institutionalist traditions can provide important models for extending the range Page 11 of 14

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of Strategy as Practice research.

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Jarzabkowski, P., Burke, G., & Spee, P. (2015). Constructing spaces for strategic work: A multimodal perspective. British Journal of Management, 26(S1), S26–S47. Jarzabkowski, P., Kaplan, S., Seidl, D., & Whittington, R. (2015), On the risks of studying practices in isolation: Linking the what, who and how in strategy research. Strategic Organization, forthcoming. Johnson, G., Melin, L., & Whittington, R. (2003). Guest editor's introduction. Micro strategy and strategizing: Towards an activity-based view. Journal of Management Studies, 40(1), 3–22. Johnson, G., Prashantham, S., Floyd, S. W., & Bourque, N. (2010). The ritualization of strategy workshops. Organization Studies, 31(12), 1589–1618. Kaplan, S., & Orlikowski, W. J. (2013). Temporal work in strategy making. Organization Science, 24(4), 965–995. Kim, W. C., & Mauborgne, R. (2005). Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant. Cambridge MA: Harvard Business Press. Knights, D., & Morgan, G. (1991). Corporate strategy, organizations and subjectivity: A critique, Organization Studies, 12(2), 251–273. Langley, A. (2007). Process thinking in strategic organization. Strategic Organization, 5(3), 271. Langley, A. & Lusiani, M. (2015). Strategic Planning as Practice, in Golsorkhi, D., Rouleau, L., Seidl, D., & Vaara, E. (Eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Strategy as Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Langley, A., Smallman, C., Tsoukas, H., & Van de Ven, A. H. (2013). Process studies of change in organization and management: Unveiling temporality, activity, and flow. Academy of Management Journal, 56(1), 1–13. Langley, A., & Tsoukas, H. (2010). Introducing ‘perspectives on process organization studies'. Process, Sensemaking, and Organizing, 1, 1–26. Lawrence, T., Suddaby, R., & Leca, B. (2011). Institutional work: Refocusing institutional studies of organization. Journal of Management Inquiry, 20(1), 52–58. Lepore, J. (2014). The disruption machine: What the gospel of innovation gets wrong. The New Yorker, June 23, 2014, //www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/06/23/140623fa_fact_lepore Mantere, S., Schildt, H. A., & Sillince, J. A. (2012). Reversal of strategic change. Academy of Management Journal, 55(1), 172–196. Melin, L. (1992). Internationalization as a strategy process. Strategic Management Journal, 13(S2), 99–118. Mintzberg, H., & Waters, J. A. (1985). Of strategies, deliberate and emergent. Strategic management Journal, 6(3), 257–272. Mirabeau, L., & Maguire, S. (2013). From autonomous strategic behavior to emergent strategy. Strategic Management Journal, 35(8), 1202–1229. Nicolini, D. (2012). Practice Theory, Work, and Organization: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Orlikowski, W. J. (2002). Knowing in practice: Enacting a collective capability in distributed organizing. Organization Science, 13(3), 249–273. Pettigrew, A. M. (1985). The Awakening Giant: Continuity and Change in Imperial Chemical Industries (p. 41). Oxford: Blackwell. Powell, T. C., Lovallo, D., & Fox, C. (2011). Behavioral strategy. Strategic Management Journal, 32(13), 1369–1386. Rouleau, L. (2005). Micro-practices of strategic sensemaking and sensegiving: How middle managers interpret and sell change every day. Journal of Management Studies, 42(7), 1413–1441. Samra-Fredericks, D. (2003). Strategizing as lived experience and strategists’ everyday efforts to shape strategic direction. Journal of Management Studies, 40(1), 141–174. Scott W. R. (2014), Institutions and Organizations: Ideas, Interests and Identities ( 4th ed. ). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Seidl, D., & Whittington, R. (2014). Enlarging the strategy-as-practice research agenda: Towards taller and flatter ontologies. Organization Studies, 35(10), 1407–1421. Slager, R., Gond, J. P., & Moon, J. (2012). Standardization as institutional work: The regulatory power of a responsible investment standard. Organization Studies, 33(5–6), 763–790. Smets, M., Morris, T., & Greenwood, R. (2012). From practice to field: A multi-level model of practice-driven Page 13 of 14

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institutional change. Academy of Management Journal, 55(4), 877–904 Sminia, H. (2009). Process research in strategy formation: Theory, methodology and relevance. International Journal of Management Reviews, 11(1), 97–125. Spee, A. P., & Jarzabkowski, P. (2011). Strategic planning as communicative process. Organization, 32(9), 1217–1245. Suddaby, R., Seidl, D., & Lê, J. K. (2013). Strategy-as-practice meets neo-institutional theory. Strategic Organization, 11(3), 329–344. Tsoukas, H., & Chia, R. (2002). On organizational becoming: Rethinking organizational change. Organization Science, 13(3), 567–582. Vaara, E., & Whittington, R. (2012). Strategy-as-practice: Taking social practices seriously. The Academy of Management Annals, 6(1), 285–336. Van de Ven, A. H. (1992). Suggestions for studying strategy process: A research note. Strategic Management Journal, 13(5), 169–188. Van de Ven, A. H., Poole, M. S., & Angle, H. L. (2000). Research on the Management of Innovation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whittington, R. (2003). The work of strategizing and organizing: For a practice perspective. Strategic Organization, 1, 117–126. Whittington, R. (2006). Completing the practice turn in strategy research. Organization Studies, 26, 4: 613–634 Whittington, R. (2007). Strategy practice and strategy process: family differences and the sociological eye. Organization Studies, 28(10), 1575–1586. Whittington, R., Cailluet, L., & Yakis-Douglas, B. (2011). Opening strategy: Evolution of a precarious profession. British Journal of Management, 22(3), 531–544. Wolf, C., & Floyd, S. W. (2013). Strategic planning research toward a theory-driven agenda. Journal of Management, 0149206313478185. Zorn, D. M. (2004). Here a chief, there a chief: The rise of the CFO in the American firm. American Sociological Review, 69(3), 345–364. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n24

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Time, Temporality, and Process Studies

Contributors: Juliane Reinecke & Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Time, Temporality, and Process Studies" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n25 Print pages: 402-416 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Time, Temporality, and Process Studies Juliane ReineckeShahzad (Shaz) Ansari ‘Look at this gateway! Dwarf!’ I continued, ‘it hath two faces. Two roads come together here: these hath no one yet gone to the end of. This long lane backwards: it continueth for an eternity. And that long lane forward–that is another eternity. They are antithetical to one another, these roads; they directly abut on one another:–and it is here, at this gateway, that they come together. The name of the gateway is inscribed above: ‘This Moment.' But should one follow them further–and ever further and further on, thinkest thou, dwarf, that these roads would be eternally antithetical?'– ‘Everything straight lieth,’ murmured the dwarf, contemptuously. ‘All truth is crooked; time itself is a circle.' (Nietzsche, 1961)

Introduction The £1 million ‘Cambridge Chronophage’ or ‘Cambridge time eater’ decorating the corner of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, UK, was 14 minutes and 55 seconds late when unveiled by the physicist Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time, in 2008. It features a giant grasshopper on top of a gold-encrusted dial gnawing into time. The voracious creature ‘gulps down time’ every 59th second ‘so you can see the seconds being eaten up’ as its inventor described (Daily Mail, 2008). But it has a twist. Most of the time, the timepiece runs erratically, and even moves backwards. It is accurate only every five minutes. The timepiece illustrates the seeming paradox that time seems to be constant, external, and objective but is often experienced as fluid, internal, and subjective. While a clock depicts objective clock-time, we rarely experience time uniformly. An hour can fly by when we are busy, or seem endless when waiting for a late train, but seem long or short in retrospect. Similarly, while the clock drives the relentless pace and rhythm of modern organizational life from hourly productivity to time-to-market to annual reports, complex processes, such as innovation and change, can rarely be scheduled by the clock. Process scholars have called for expanding our notion of time to better understand the temporal aspects of organizational change and processes. As our opening quote by Nietzsche suggests, we tend to impose a linear logic on temporality, even if there may be no beginning or end of time, only unfolding moments and ongoing change. Through inventing clocks and calendars as an external standard of reference based on time flowing into the future, we narrow down temporality or the inextricably linked temporal dimensions – past, present, and future – into isolable instants, or ‘this moment'. This has a profound influence on how we interpret and experience reality. To be sure, one can study time, such as rhythms, duration, and frequency, without taking an explicit process lens. One can also study processes without paying (too) much attention to their temporality. However, we argue that the question of time and temporality is relevant in terms of two interrelated dimensions: (1) the lens of the researcher and (2) the lens of organizational participants. Page 2 of 16

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First, as the lens of the researcher, temporality shapes the epistemological stance towards phenomena. This makes the temporal lens particularly pertinent for process scholars, who view the organization as an ongoing accomplishment in a perpetual state of creation, emergence, and becoming (Hernes & Weik, 2007; Langley et al., 2013). Time and temporality therefore play a key role in organizational process studies, as processes occur in and over time. ‘No concept of motion is possible without the category of time', as Sorokin and Merton (1937: 615) argued. Second, temporality is a fundamental feature in the world of practitioners, and subject to managerial intervention and control. For practitioners, a temporal lens affects how they view themselves and their environment. By moving away from viewing time as objective and external, we can not only begin to appreciate how time itself is organized in various ways, but also how emerging sociotemporal orders shape versions of reality. The remainder of the chapter unfolds as follows. We begin my looking at different notions of time and temporality, clock-time and process-time. We then examine the epistemological implications of process-time. We then move to the phenomenological level and consider how sociotemporal orders emerge through organizations but also shape organizational realities.

Time and Temporality Issues of time and timing have pervaded Western society. Time represents ‘a sociotemporal order which regulates the structure and dynamics of social life’ (Zerubavel, l981: 2). The very rise of management as a scientific discipline exemplified by Taylor's (1911) ‘time and motion’ studies, and use of the clock as a ‘tool for social control’ (Bluedorn & Waller, 2006; Thompson, 1967). Contemporary management is pervaded by concepts and beliefs such as ‘just-in-time', ‘time is money', and ‘lag time'. While time, in particular clock-time, is often a taken-for-granted dimension of organizational life, organizational scholars have challenged a unitary conception of time. What time is, and how time is experienced and socially organized – temporality – differs within and across individuals, organizations, cultures, geographies, and societies (Adam, 1994; Bluedorn & Waller, 2006). Scholars have distinguished time conceptions along East/West, event/clock, social/astronomical-natural, qualitative/quantitative, concrete/abstract, relative/absolute, cyclical/linear, subjective/objective, and endogenous/exogenous dimensions (e.g., Bluedorn & Denhardt, 1988; Chen & Miller, 2011; Jacques, 1982; Orlikowski & Yates, 2002; Sorokin & Merton, 1937). However, most often, we think of time in terms of clock-time, linear and absolute, and contrast it with some ‘other’ time, a flow or ‘becoming'. Below, we refer to this distinction as clock-time and process-time. Clock-time. The clock-time view is often linked to Western thought (Ancona et al., 2001b), whereby time is considered an independent variable that provides an objective and quantifiable measure of motion, events, and actions – a neutral ‘arbiter of time’ (Smith, 1997). This view is rooted in the Judeo-Christian concept of linear time beginning with creation and ending with the apocalypse. Consistent with Newtonian conceptions, time is portrayed as calculable, and absolute, or as ‘chronos’ or ‘clock-time'. Clock-time is divisible into measurable, standardized, and context-free units in which time is ‘calibrated into a standard gauge against which we associate events’ (TenHouten, 2005: 66). Clock-time allows the present moment to be detached from the past and future, and for phenomena to be viewed as isolable entities independent of and emancipated from events (George & Jones, 2000; Mead, 1932). The clock always ‘ticks even if nothing occurs’ (TenHouten, 2005: 36). For Sorokin and Merton (1937), clock-time emerged as a mutually comprehensible frame of reference that replaced local systems of time reckoning and enabled people to synchronize and coordinate their activities according to a common temporal scheme. Thus, while in their view, the notion of objective clock-time may be a fiction, it is a pragmatic construction that emerged from the requirements of social interactions. Clock-based structures have thus been at the heart of the progressive rationalization of society, allowing management Page 3 of 16

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‘to represent the world as an intelligible whole, rendering it readily manipulable for instrumental purposes’ (Knights & Odih, 2002: 151). Clock-time is naturalized as a resource (Zerubavel, 1981) that is conducive to economic metaphors, such as ‘time is money', that is ‘not passed but spent’ (Thompson, 1967: 61). Indeed, clock-time orientation has become the dominant temporal orientation in modern capitalism, influencing goal prioritization and resource allocation (Adam, 1994). Its dominance has led to what Bluedorn and Waller (2006: 357) have termed the enclosure of the ‘temporal commons’ – the ‘shared conceptualization of time and the set of resultant values, beliefs, and behaviors regarding time', whereby the use of time is now judged exclusively by the market-sanctioned metric of efficiency. Process-time. In this view, time is not an autonomous category that is independent of events, processes, or phenomena but rather is characterized as nonlinear, qualitatively determined, and endogenous to events and processes (Chia, 2002). In Bergson's philosophical account, time is qualitative, subjective, and mentally experienced as ‘pure duration', which cannot be measured by reference to an external standard: clock-time. Qualitative time resonates with processual approaches in organizational studies that embrace Eastern thought; there is no beginning or end of time, but unfolding moments and ongoing transformations (Chia, 2010). Process-time is seen to flow beyond ‘an arbitrary stopping of the clock’ to assess the state of the world at any point, and to create pockets of stability in the sea of process complexity (Hernes & Maitlis, 2010; Langley & Tsoukas, 2010). Consistent with Einstein's notion of time being relative and contextual, or ‘a local, internal feature of the system of observation’ (Adam, 1994: 56; Chia, 2002), process-time is indexical to events, activities, and experiences (Abbott, 2001). This gives rise to the possibility of multiple presents, multiple pasts, and multiple futures. Process-time is subjective with indeterminate trajectories and plural timelines (Ancona et al., 2001b). Process-time is also related to the notion of kairos (event time) that shapes people's attention through their recognition of specific social and natural events rather than through meeting deadlines.

The Temporal Lens of the Researcher: Epistemological Implications How a researcher conceptualizes time and makes assumptions about time and temporality leads to different understandings of organizational phenomena (Abbott, 2001). Huy (2001: 602) argued that conceptions of time are important to organizational theory as they ‘determine the nature of the organizational problems that will attract attention, how those problems will be coped with, and what will constitute satisfactory solutions'.

Rethinking the Relationship between Past-Present-Future A researcher's conception of time has important implications for the relationship between past, present, and future. While linear, compartmentalized clock-time lends itself to seeing the past, present, and future as three separate things, process-time challenges us to see them as an indivisible flow. In process conceptions, past, present, and future are not seen as a succession of isolable instants or indistinguishable ‘knife edge nowpoints’ (Joas, 1997: 171). Instead, they form a ‘temporal spread’ (Gell, 1992: 223) or an intertwined ‘chordial triad’ (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998) with a ‘continuous progress of the past [as it] gnaws into the future, and swells as it advances, leaving its bite or the mark of its teeth on all things’ (Chia, 2002: 864). Viewing the past, present, and future as indivisible also implies that organizations are continually in the making (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). The Present: Duration. As Mead (1932) put it, the present is the ‘the seat of reality'. For Bergson (1988: 188), it arises in the experience of duration, which lacks the distinction that separates events, and brackets off pieces of time into divisible units: ‘Every movement, in as much as it is a passage from rest to rest, is absolutely indivisible'. Clock-time is thus a ‘counterfeit’ representation of lived durée produced by converting experiences into discrete and measurable moments. Marina Abramović's ‘The Artist is Present’ is a remarkable illustration of lived durée. At the 2010 show in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Abramović performed a Page 4 of 16

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736-hour 30-minute silent piece in which she sat immobile in the museum's atrium while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her. ‘You are affected by duration: your perception and your reality become different … The idea of spending time and not making a result, this is really essential … It is like a soft matter that we can't explain. Something else takes place', the artist stated (Abramović, 2013: 95). The Past: Malleable Memories. Process-time implies that the past is not a historically fixed object. Instead, the past, or at least our knowledge of it, is malleable and open to reinterpretation and renegotiation. Actors ‘continually reconstruct their view of the past in an attempt to understand the causal conditioning of the emerging present’ (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998: 968/7). The past is ‘up for grabs’ (Kaplan & Orlikowski, 2013); and every new present rewrites the past, conditioned by present interests and desires (Mead, 1932). Bakken, Holt, and Zundel (2013: 16) write, ‘The past … is no longer an array of events fixed onto a timeline but, rather, a constantly shifting sea of meaning that gets reconfigured every time we invoke it'. Consider how the idea of a malleable past can radically alter one's conception of social change: For Hegel or Marx, the present had to be first negated in order to allow a new, revolutionary future to come into being. In contrast, Walter Benjamin's messianic ‘Jetztzeit’ (= now time) conceived of revolution as an ongoing latent presence. Abbott (2001: 223) argues that the past is not infinitely plastic nor can our mental reconstructions freely remake the past. The ‘constructing’ of the past is ultimately constrained by the stickiness of empirical reality. However, the past is ‘brought into the attentive present by memory and desire', and the meaning of a prior past may be rewritten from the perspective of the emergent present. The Future: Potentiality. Much of managerial activity concerns the desire to plan and control an uncertain future; anticipating trends, forecasting revenues, and planning ahead. While this endeavour lies at the core of much theorizing in strategy and innovation, prevailing theories view organizational and institutional change as a linear progression from the past to the future. Indeed, we tend to extrapolate from the past as a basis for projecting sense into an uncertain future (Kaplan & Orlikowski, 2013). Lord, Dinh, and Hoffman (2015: 263) borrow from quantum mechanism to propose a view that mentally reverses the arrow of time to emphasize a future that flows into the present rather than flow from the present. Viewing the future as a ‘superpotentiality state’ may help grasp the occurrence of rare and unpredictable events (‘black swans'). Similarly, developments that seem like a logical progression when viewed retrospectively were often serendipitous enactments of one of many potentialities, such as Intel's invention of microprocessors in the early 1970s (Lord et al., 2015). Future-making is then viewed as an ‘unowned process’ of change driven by a series of incremental and unexpected accumulations of circumstance, chance events, and unintended consequences (MacKay & Chia, 2013). Organizational scholars who take the temporal spread seriously have evoked the concept of temporal sensemaking to understand how organizational members engage with the present based on memories of the past and anticipations of the future (e.g., Gephart, Topal, & Zhang, 2010; Wiebe, 2010). In their study of a Danish toy manufacturer, Schultz & Hernes (2013) studied how a reimagined past can be used to reconstruct the emergent present. Organizational actors invoked the past to reconstruct the organization's present identity. Or through projectivity – the future-oriented dimension of sensemaking (Gephart et al., 2010) – actors can imaginatively generate possible future trajectories of action to reconfigure present relations and structures (Kaplan and Orlikowski, 2013).

Beyond a ‘Snapshot Epistemology' The way we understand time and its relationship to social phenomena has important implications for how we conceptualize phenomena. Examples include the nature of organizational change (Abbott, 2001; Huy, 2001; Thompson, 2011; Tsoukas & Chia, 2002), dynamics of institutionalization (Granqvist & Gustafsson, ForthcomPage 5 of 16

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ing; Lawrence, Winn, & Jennings, 2001), decision making (Lord et al., 2015), entrepreneurship and innovation management (Dougherty et al., 2013; Garud, Gehman, & Kumaraswamy, 2011), and sustainable development (Reinecke & Ansari, 2015). Many prevailing studies in management, according to Langley et al. (2013: 4), are grounded in clock-time and ‘tend to ignore time, reduce it to a lag effect, compress it into variables (e.g., describing decision making as fast or slow, or environments as dynamic or stable), or reduce its role to … “comparative statics” (re-evaluating variance-based relationships at successive times)'. A process perspective, in contrast, moves from treating time as an independent variable on the ‘x axis’ to viewing temporality is an intrinsic part of the very processes being studied. Temporal assumptions are also closely intertwined with how we conceptualize organizational phenomena; and, concomitantly, how we relate to them: as unowned processes or as rationally controllable objects (cf., MacKay & Chia, 2013). For this reason, Thompson (2011: 754) calls on researchers to pay more attention to the epistemological dimensions in our theoretical constructs: ‘Some constructs highlight the entitative aspects of a phenomenon, whereas others highlight its more situated, contingent, and emergent aspects.’ He cautions that epistemology and ontology can easily ‘drift’ out of alignment, such as when stable entities at the ontological level are treated as processes; and vice versa, when fluid processes are treated as static entities. For instance, a large proportion of management scholarship is concerned with studying organizational, strategic, or institutional change. However, while time is inherent in the definition of change itself, it remains largely implicit (Huy, 2001). In punctuated equilibrium models, change is assumed to be episodical and radical – long periods of stability are punctuated by compact periods of change. Change is thereby reduced to a series of static positions, while ‘it is whatever goes on between these positions’ that capture change (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002: 571). However, as Orlikowski (1996) noted, thinking derived from punctuated equilibrium poses problems for more dynamic models of organizing, precisely because they are premised on the primacy of organizational stability, and not change. A static, entitative epistemology may thus be inappropriate for explaining emergent processes unfolding over time. However, many theoretical constructs are primarily entitative, which take ‘snapshots’ of processes and end up misrepresenting them (Thompson, 2011). Abstracting a concept from the flow of experience typically involves a ‘temporal slicing’ of the overall experience and may mask important aspects. While a ‘snapshot epistemology’ may be suitable for ontologically stable entities such as buildings, it may be less appropriate to understand emergent processes, such as change, creativity, learning, and knowing. Rather than employing research methodologies that ‘freeze’ moments into representable snapshots that erroneously attribute entitative existence to processes, researchers need to take temporality seriously in order to capture the dynamic of unfolding process (Langley et al., 2013; Hernes, 2014). Tsoukas and Chia (2012) therefore call for approaching change, not as an abstract concept but as a performance enacted in time that can only be captured from within the flow of experience. An emphasis on unfolding dynamics and emergence – a ‘moving picture’ – is more appropriate as an epistemological grounding for understanding change than is a focus on stable entities and attributes of individuals or systems (Langley et al., 2013; Hernes, 2014). In sum, conceptualizations about time and temporality are critical to how we understand and interpret various organizational phenomena. While our field tends to be dominated by clock-time orientation, a process-time orientation can enable alternative interpretations about phenomena of concern.

Conceptual Challenges of Process-Time Page 6 of 16

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When temporality is seen as intrinsic to phenomena, it is no longer possible to view organizational change as the difference between a ‘state of affairs a’ and ‘state of affairs b', as change is ongoing (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). Conceptually, however, the implications of process-time reveal the limitations of boxing organizational processes into a static snapshot of stable categories. Tsoukas and Chia (2002) note the paradox that our conceptual frameworks of representing change by conceiving it, in one way or another, as a series of static positions actually denies change itself. The ‘process models’ we build tend to objectify processes in terms of packing them into static boxes, arrows, or spirals. Bergson (1988: 189) notes the inability to depict change by drawing lines and arrows: ‘these points have no reality except in a line drawn, that is to say, motionless. And by the fact that you represent the movement to yourself successively in these different points, you necessarily arrest it in each of them … But how should progress coincide with a thing, or a movement with an immobility?' The challenge is to convert complex processes into text and figures – a static medium. This is precisely what the artist Hiroshi Sugimoto attempted to do in his series Theatres (1978); avoid freezing the flow of things while using the snapshot medium of photography (Belting, 2013). To capture the moving picture in the snapshot medium of the photography, he keeps his shutter open for the entire length of a film's projection on screen. Sugimoto's long exposures produce a different type of photographic image from the sharp slice into time that a snapshot usually is. However, this does not mirror the movie in an indexical way. The total sum of motion results in blank white screens, offering memories of light whose abundance deceive the viewer in their emptiness. As social scientists seeking to account for the lived experiences of organizational actors (Tsoukas & Knudsen, 2003), it would be rather unsatisfactory to offer ‘blur'. Practice scholars who have taken on the task of accounting for how change is accomplished focus on situated agency unfolding in time A practice ontology of time purports to bridge the subjective–objective dichotomy underlying research on time in organizations. Orlikowski and Yates (2002) argue that actors produce and reproduce a variety of temporal structures through their everyday action, which in turn shape the temporal rhythm and form of their ongoing practices. This highlights how temporality is constituted in action, negotiated, and socially organized (Langley et al., 2013). Hernes (2014: 38) pushes this view even further by suggesting a notion of ‘active temporalities’ which views events not only related but constitutive of one another. Others have turned to a narrative approach. Abbott (2001) advocates explanations that focus on understanding trajectories over time to capture the set of nested durations that make up the present. To summarize, while snapshots do not capture emergent processes, in practice we often need to represent processes as various types of outcomes. Even our language leads us to represent and express our experience of reality into ‘static’ texts, symbols, and words. It is worth being mindful of how these pragmatic necessities tend to distort reality and conceal process dynamics.

The Temporal Lens of the Organizational Participant: Phenomenological Implications While a rethinking of time involves reconceptualizing many of the epistemological and ontological commitments of our research lens, we can study time as an empirical phenomenon in its own right. This would involve examining how people relate to time, use time, or experience it. Once we take time as the object of study in itself, we can also begin to appreciate how different concepts of time are inscribed into our everyday world, and, in turn, shape practices, organizations, and their environments. We can also explore how people structure their and others’ lives and environments along temporal dimensions, and thereby contribute to the inscription of certain temporal conceptions into activities. Time is not merely experienced subjectively and introspectively, but it is an inherently social phenomenon, and the construction of temporality is an intersubjective process (Mead, 1932). A useful concept to understand Page 7 of 16

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how temporality is socially produced in organizing is the notion of temporal structuring (Orlikowski & Yates, 2002). Through temporal structuring, people implicitly or explicitly draw on existing repertoires of temporal structures and thereby (re) produce (and occasionally change) temporal orientations (Orlikowski & Yates, 2002). Temporal structures are manifested in project deadlines, logs, schedules, and other time-calibrated devices to enable entrained organizational behaviours (Gersick, 1994). In an attempt ‘to order the intrinsic flux of human action’ (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002: 567), they divide tasks and activities into temporal sequences, from scheduling the working day, to milestones and project timelines to annual or quarterly reporting and timebound performance management practices. As a result, temporal structures such as linear timelines become woven into the fabric of organizational life (Yakura, 2002). In sum, while organizational actors may view clocktime as merely the background against which things happen, clock-time is socially produced and reproduced by these actors. Temporal structuring is employed not just to manage time and temporally coordinate activities within and beyond organizations. It also allows practitioners to frame their social world in different ways. Temporal structures shape what problems appear salient, how those problems are coped with, and what constitutes satisfactory solutions (Huy, 2001). For example, the choice of time scales or temporal intervals shape our understanding of phenomena, such as efficiency (Zaheer, Albert, & Zaheer, 1999) or institutionalization (Lawrence et al., 2001), and different time-scale choices lead to different diagnoses and prognoses. Through temporal structuring, practitioners can inject ontologies – object or process – into their everyday life and shape the phenomena they are dealing with. This provides a useful perspective to understand the way in which practitioners operationalize constructs within the organizational environment.

Clashing Temporal Structures: The Problem of Ontological ‘Hardening' For practitioners seeking to render the messy world of their practice governable and controllable, clock-time structuring is a formidable tool for ‘arresting, fixing, stabilizing and regularizing what would otherwise be a wild, amorphous, and hence unlivable world’ (Chia, 2002: 867). Clock-time solidifies the world into objects, chronological sequences, static snapshots, and sequences with starting and end-points, which promises greater stability and control (Chia & Holt, 2008). As Thompson (2011: 769) argues, ‘entitative constructs are likely to be more easily implemented, controlled, and measured and are, thus, potentially attractive to managers who may be under pressure to deliver predicted outcomes and to minimize unexpected consequences'. However, complex processes are never fully amenable to clock-time discipline, and the attempt to objectify them might prove deeply problematic. For instance, ‘tacit knowledge’ that is embodied at the level of experienced reality is hard to capture, codify, and store in a timeless and disembodied form (Thompson, 2011). Understanding phenomena as dynamic requires that we consider it as part of a moving picture (cf., Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). Practitioners who adopt a process-time view are likely to be able engage more with a socially embedded side to organizational life, but one that may seem less amenable to prediction and control (Thompson, 2011). While reified clock-time is a useful tool to coordinate and share our experiences in time, a process view can keep us from being enslaved and blinded by our own invention to coordinate and share our experiences.

Types of Temporal Structures In order to understand how temporal structuring shapes the way in which phenomena are understood and conceptualized, it is worth taking a closer look at the different types of temporal structures. Reinecke and Ansari (2015) identified three competing temporal structures rooted in clock-time and process-time conceptions, respectively: (1) snapshot versus moving picture, (2) temporal symmetry versus asymmetry, and (3) long-term versus short-term temporal depth. Page 8 of 16

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Snapshot versus Moving Picture. A snapshot captures a static picture of a phenomenon at a certain point in time; a moving picture, as literally in motion picture film, captures movement unfolding over time (Thompson, 2011). By depicting the world in snapshots, activities no longer appear as concrete processes but are frozen, and the world appears to be populated by stable entities. Such deliberate ‘interruptions of flow’ (Hernes & Maitlis, 2010: 52) would conceal the dynamic processes preceding and succeeding the point where the snapshot is taken. But they may be needed to render phenomenon controllable and measurable. For instance, the UK's Research Excellence Framework freezes academic activities into snapshots of research outputs. But the ‘timeless logic of a standardized indicator’ is likely to conceal the ‘real-time nature’ of research processes (Strathern, 2000: 317ff). Temporal Symmetry versus Asymmetry. ‘Temporal symmetry’ ‘involves synchronizing the activities of different individuals’ (Zerubavel, 1981: 65). Zerubavel (1981) points to an important function of sociotemporal coordination, which is the creation of collective life and predictable social patterns: schedules and calendars marking the start of the working day at 9 am, holidays, school term dates, or collective events such as sports events. Temporal synchronization became critical to social and industrial organization when the Industrial Revolution brought the railroad: Train schedules that required a uniform, regularized, and temporally standardized time format. While in the early 1800s, there were over 300 ‘sun’ times in the United States alone (Koukkari & Sothern, 2007), the key tool for temporal symmetry was introduced with the Greenwich Mean Time becoming the yardstick for all timepieces as well as the 24 standardized time zones. In organizations, temporal symmetry is manifested in timelines such as ‘Gantt charts’ used for scheduling, budgeting, and project management, which embody mono-temporal assumptions (Yakura, 2002). However, many have argued that organizational and institutional life is pluri-temporal (Nowotny, 1992) and marked by polychronicity (Souitaris & Maestro, 2010). Timelines then risk imposing ‘temporal complementarity among temporally asymmetric worlds’ (Zerubavel, 1981: 60). Long versus Short Temporal Depth. Bluedorn and Waller (2006: 366) define ‘temporal depth’ as ‘the temporal distances into the past and future that individuals and collectivities typically consider when contemplating events that have happened, may have happened, or may happen'. It can lead to short or long-termism (Laverty, 1996). For instance, what we consider a solution in real time (e.g., subsidies for corn-based ethanol fuel) may generate unintended problems over time (e.g., worldwide corn shortages and rising food prices) (Garud et al., 2011). Temporal depth pertains not only to the future but also describes the temporal horizon extending into the past, pointing to the role of memory, history, and tradition. These competing temporal structures have important implications for organizational and field level phenomena. Below, we discuss two examples: 1) sustainable development and 2) strategy and innovation – which illustrate the role of temporal structuring in managing complex processes, emerging temporal disjunctures, and the risks they create. See Table 25.1.

Table 25.1Temporal disjunctures

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Temporal Disjunctures in Sustainable Development Development thinking and practice tend to be steeped in Western ideologies of linear progress. Donors, investors, and buyers continue to demand representational evidence of their resources being ‘well spent', and use clock-time metrics to measure development progress. However, when progress cannot be necessarily scheduled by the clock, using linear metrics for assessing progress may detract from the complexity of human development processes. Such temporal disjunctures between clock and process-time were at the heart of a conflict within Fairtrade certification, which we observed in our ethnographic study. Fairtrade promises consumers a guarantee that their purchase of Fairtrade-labelled products contributes to ‘social-economic development’ of poor producers in developing countries. Sustainable development could be viewed both as ‘process’ and ‘product’ depending on the type of temporal structures that were privileged (Reinecke & Ansari, 2015). A snapshot view emphasizes objective measurement of concrete outcomes (development as product). For instance, Fairtrade developed a certification system that emphasized the need to measure development progress against a set of ‘objectively measurable’ performance indicators at fixed points in time, imposing clock-time on development. In contrast, a process view portrays development as a continuous flow and can capture what occurs ‘in between’ snapshots (development as process). Similarly, a symmetric view leads to privilege uniformity in the development process. In contrast, an asymmetric view emphasizes development as variable/contextual with differentiated abilities and contextual differences that require acknowledging plural development paths. Finally, temporal structuring also shapes what counts as ‘development'. Shallow temporal depth leads to focus on tangibly quantifiable, short-term deliverables to show development outcomes to consumers and donors. In contrast, a long temporal depth emphasizes long-term changes and a focus on intangible goals, with development seen to be ‘taking time’ in order to address underlying causes for poverty. Temporal disjunctures are starkly pronounced in other areas of sustainable development where businesses have imported the temporal structures from financial reporting templates into nonfinancial domains to make impact assessment comprehensible for market audiences (Etzion & Ferraro, 2010). For instance, ‘integrated reporting’ is premised on integrating the ‘triple bottom line’ of economic, social, and environmental developPage 10 of 16

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ment (van Bommel, 2014). Although highly interdependent, these pillars starkly differ in their temporal horizons (Gao & Bansal, 2013; Slawinski & Bansal, 2015). The shallow temporal depth of financial reporting cycles is likely to struggle to accommodate ‘nature's temporalities’ (Hofmeister, 1997), or the vastly different time scales of human developmental processes that span generations. Whose priorities, definitions, and metrics will prevail in how sustainability is managed is deeply contested (Levy, Reinecke, & Manning, 2016), revealing how time is valued differently among competing businesses and societal stakeholders.

Temporal Disjunctures in Strategy and Innovation Different conceptions of time also affect strategy and innovation management (Dougherty et al., 2013; Garud, Gehman, & Kumaraswamy, 2011; Mintzberg & Waters, 1982). Innovation may not follow an ‘orderly, managerially imposed timeline and timetable comprised of discrete, measurable activities with predictable durations, sequencing, and interactions’ (Saunders et al., 2004: 24). First, there is much emphasis on measurable outputs such as patent counts, new products launched per year, or tangibles such as R&D budgets. But entraining, adapting, and synchronizing to these external and internal pacers such as annual targets (Gersick, 1994) can divert attention from the key issues needed to promote serendipitous breakthroughs. Second, regarding asymmetries, innovation journeys are complex and nonlinear with many serendipitous moments that cannot always be scheduled by the clock or the calendar, as Garud et al. (2011) showed in the context of 3M Corporation. Innovation and the evolution of technological systems are also characterized by the presence of temporal asynchronies (Ansari & Garud, 2009). Complementary products and services may not evolve in symmetry. User preferences may shift or get clarified in-use as they interpret innovations in unanticipated ways, and new technologies may enter the picture (Ansari & Garud, 2009; Ansari & Phillips, 2011). What appeared to be false starts or dead ends in real time can serve as the foundation for innovation ‘when the time is right'. Calendar-bound metrics can also mask the dynamics of the messy and often nonlinear innovation process, and impede radical innovations and breakthrough products. In the context of complex innovation in the biopharmaceutical industry, Dougherty et al. (2013) note a temporal tension between scientists motivated by learning events and managers demanding linear clock-based progress in the production of commercial products. The danger is that clock-time shifts attention and efforts to existing solutions and predefined problems, rather than ill-defined problems and the breakthrough solutions needed to solve these problems. What looks like a promising idea at point a might turn out to be suboptimal, whereas a ‘slow’ idea might take off in time. Third, regarding temporal depth, short-termism and associated ‘speed traps’ (Perlow, Okhuysen, & Repenning, 2002) can impede critical investments in capability building for long-term competitive advantage, and is one of the most common problems associated with a one-dimensional and instrumental relationship to time. It has also been associated with the paradox of intertemporal choice; ‘decisions and outcomes that pursue a course of action that is best for the short term but suboptimal over the long run’ (Laverty, 1996: 826). The intertemporal paradox is at the core of the notion of ambidexterity – purported tension between shortterm exploitation requiring tightly controlled time management and longer-term exploration processes needed to generate opportunities in the future (Garud et al., 2011). Temporal leadership is needed to operate simultaneously in the present and the future (Ancona et al., 2001a). In addition, as depth can also be past oriented, it is important to consider that innovation is not necessarily a break from the past, but rather a continuation, where the past can be rethought, mobilized, and brought Page 11 of 16

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forward (Kaplan & Orlikowski, 2013). Companies such as 3M emphasize the ‘tradition of innovation'. By innovating from the past, the past becomes as much a resource for innovation as a vision for the future.

Conclusion As we are ‘working against time’ to make the deadline to complete this chapter, we are reminded of the following anecdote. Karl Marx, who analyzed temporal disciplining of capitalist production, became himself subjected to the temporal discipline of intellectual production (see Harvey, 2008). Six months behind schedule, Marx's publisher threatened to commission someone else with writing the manuscript for ‘Capital’ to speed up publication. Needless to say that the result would not have been the ‘Capital'. Indeed, the process of intellectual discovery and scientific research is rarely linear and eludes clock-based scheduling and industry requirements for regular tangible output. Most creative processes, including academic writing, involve iteration, serendipity, multiple cycles of refinements, revisions, and creative leaps (Klag & Langley, 2013). In this chapter, we considered the implications of adopting clock- and process-time perspectives from the lens of the researchers as well as from the lens of the organizational actors we study. We referred to the former as the epistemological dimension and the latter as the phenomenological dimension. These two dimensions from the vantage point of two types of actors (researchers and organizational participants) can form a 2 × 2 matrix with four quadrants as depicted in Figure 25.1 (Roe, 2008).

Figure 25.1Temporal assumptions and epistemological and phenomenological dimensions

In Quadrant 1, researchers with a process-time epistemology study how organizational actors experience processes in time. The emphasis is not on how actors measure or record their activities through clock-based temporal markers but on the subjective and intersubjective accounts of their experiences (Roe, 2008). In Quadrant 2, researchers with a process-time lens examine actors enacting clock-time such as deadlines. It may reveal how clock-driven temporal structures, such as deadlines influence behaviours, and how people consequently reproduce clock-time. In Quadrant 3, researchers attribute clock-time existence to phenomena which can only be grasped through a process-time lens. In Quadrant 4, researchers with a clock-time lens study actors enacting clock-time, such as the rate of new product development or the rate at which new opportunities emerge and disappear in an industry (Nadkarni, Chen, & Chen, 2016). Temporal Brokerage and Ambitemporality. As Roe (2008) argues, multiple approaches to knowledge can coexist, and one need not consider a particular set of assumptions as inherently superior over another set of assumptions. Experienced time can be measured, and measured time can be experienced. Yet it is helpful for scholars to understand the conceptual and methodological challenges each quadrant poses. One would Page 12 of 16

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expect less conflict in Quadrant 1 and 4 versus Quadrant 2 and 3, where process-time and clock-time collide. From the perspective of researchers, a collision can lead to epistemological and ontological ‘drifts’ or the misalignments that occur when stable entities at the ontological level are treated as processes; and when fluid processes are treated as static entities (Thompson, 2011). From the perspective of organizational participants, a world deeply embedded in the lingua franca of clock-time requires them to engage in ‘temporal brokerage’ (Reinecke & Ansari, 2015) to negotiate the space for alternative temporalities expectations in temporally complex domains. Reinecke and Ansari (2015) developed the notion of ‘ambitemporality’ to understand how Fairtrade reconciled clock-time (demanded by markets seeking tangible outputs) and processtime (demanded by human development agents seeking intangibles such as a sense of empowerment). The organization developed an ambitemporal approach that allowed it to accommodate nonlinear development processes in producer contexts, while maintaining linear timelines of progress desired in consumer markets. Ambitemporality may help organizations manage paradoxes (Smith & Lewis, 2011), such as time paradoxes between clock-time and process-time amid conflicting goals. This position is consistent with Eastern thought, where dichotomies such as emic/etic are seen not as Cartesian dualities but as Taoist interdependencies, and it can enable organizations to manage dualities such as clock-time and process-time (Chia, 2010). In sum, clock-time and process-time express the duality of time: time as measured and time as experienced. They are related to different aspects of the human condition: clock-time is related to time as constitutive of the flow of social life and is therefore as an important mechanism of coordination in collective undertakings. Clock-time thus provides a useful fiction, but it is less able to capture the flow, emergence, serendipity, and indeterminacy of processes. Instead, process-time is related to the inner/subjective life of the human being. The intersubjective (clock-time) and the subjective (process-time) are two irreducible aspects of human existence. However, clock-time has become a highly institutionalized, reified, and objectified social construction with a profound influence on both researchers and practitioners in terms of how they coordinate and share their experiences and how they deal with nature's cycles such as ageing and the finitude of life on this planet. It is thus time to scrutinize clock-time assumptions, consider the implications of process-time, and examine how the duality of time plays out in different organizational contexts.

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies

The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Sustainability as Process

Contributors: Gail Whiteman & Steve Kennedy Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Sustainability as Process" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n26 Print pages: 417-431 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Sustainability as Process Gail WhitemanSteve Kennedy

Introduction I use the term VUCA to describe the world – volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. It is very difficult for people to get a total picture. The food, water, energy nexus is so inter-related that it is for most people too difficult to know where to start and where to end. Paul Polman, CEO Unilever (2011)1 Despite growing attention, sustainability ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’ are hard to delineate using simple inputoutput variance models. Importantly, climate change is only one of the many processes that the Earth depends upon to generate a safe operating space for humanity, all of which are undergoing rapid change (Rockström et al., 2009). In addition, social problems such as hunger, poverty, growing unemployment, and the continuing lack of basic human needs and rights are intertwined with ecological pressures. Collectively these dynamics threaten the viability of human societies on a planetary scale (Steffen et al., 2015). Clearly, something more than an input-output relationship is needed to describe the complexity of how the Earth's system relates to consumption and production practices. To date, however, the growing body of research on corporate sustainability tends to sidestep complexity and ambiguity (Whiteman et al., 2013). In this chapter, we argue that process thinking has much to offer research and practice in sustainability. To set the stage, we start with an illustrative example of the empirical complexity facing the city of Toledo, Ohio, as it struggles to define ‘sustainability.’ We then review the theory on process thinking to identify insights relevant for organizing for sustainability, linking these to our illustrative example and to existing literature on organizational sustainability. We close with an agenda for future research.

Toledo and Lake Erie: The Need for a Processual View of Sustainability The city of Toledo, Ohio, is located on the shore of Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes situated between the border of Canada and the United States of America. The lake creates an important microclimate for agriculture: along its shores, there are significant fruit and vegetable production in both Canada and the United States. Yet during the 1970s and 1980s, Lake Erie was infamous for its polluted water, heavy industry, shipping traffic, and invasive species. The lake was also marred with growing Dead Zones caused by eutrophication due to excess phosphorus in the water. In order to deal with the severe situation, the Canadian and U.S. governments enacted a variety of stringent regulations, and Lake Erie recovered significantly (IJC, 2014). However, in August 2014, Toledo issued a complete water ban because of severe algae toxicity in Lake Erie related once again to phosphorus. Over 400,000 residents had to use bottled water that was trucked in by the Army after retail inventories were depleted. This event caught many citizens and municipal managers off guard. After several days, the Mayor of Toledo announced to the press that the problem was ‘over’ and drank a glass of local tap water to prove it. While one may attempt to frame the Toledo example as a rare or isolated event, ecologists warn that the situation in Toledo is far from an isolated example – nutrient overloads (Nitrogen and Phosphorus) in water, air, and land are one of the key planetary processes that are past safe threshold levels, and these are related to industrial practices (Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2015). Indeed, toxic algae blooms have affected the coasts of Brittany in France and along the South China Sea, among other locations. Surprisingly, organizational studies of sustainability have completely overlooked nutrients as a topic of interest (Whiteman et al., Page 2 of 15

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2013). We argue that to deeply understand sustainability in this context, a more open, holistic analysis of various actors (human and nonhuman) including organizations over space and time is valuable. We next discuss how process thinking can contribute to this.

Process Thinkers: The Issue of Sustainability Only a handful of organizational studies on sustainability explicitly integrate the work of process philosophers such as Bateson, Deleuze, Guattari, Ingold, Naess, and Whitehead into their conceptual or empirical research on sustainability (de Jonge and Whiteman, 2014; Newton, 2002; Purser, 1997). However, processual accounts of organizational sustainability help to open up the ‘black box’ of practices over time and space. In doing so, the complexity of relationships between humans and Earth systems forms the backdrop to deeper accounts of organizing for sustainability. In this section, we review five main tenets of process thinking (Helin et al., 2014) and consider how these relate to the empirical context of Toledo and Lake Erie: • • • • •

Temporality Wholeness Openness Force Potentiality

Table 26.1 summarizes this discussion and identifies related organization studies on sustainability.

Table 26.1 Summarizes this discussion and identifies related organization studies on sustainability

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Temporality The story of Toledo and Lake Erie is a story told over time. At one moment, organizations operating within the city's boundaries may appear to be ‘sustainable’ in an economic, social, and perhaps ecological sense. Yet, at another moment, there appear to be clear indications of ‘non-sustainability’ – e.g., toxic algal blooms and water problems. Indeed, citizens were caught ‘off guard’ by the 2014 water ban. A broader and more dynamic understanding of temporality within the social-ecological system surrounding Toledo and the larger Lake Erie water basin would suggest that such situations should come as no surprise. Indeed, three years earlier, Lake Erie experienced a massive algal bloom – the largest at that time in its history – covering more than 5,000 km2 (IJC, 2014). Unlike mechanistic ontologies, which seek to understand cause-and-effect relations across discrete temporal scales (beginning and end), process philosophers take the idea of flux and movement as central organizing concepts for temporality. According to Hernes (2014: 13–14), ‘The passing of time and the way actors deal with being in time shape and reshape how individuals, groups, organizations, markets, and technologies are understood, and consequently how interaction between dispersed entities of different kinds is undertaken and how the interaction is given meaning and, hence, agency with the passing of time.’ An explicit analysis of temporality helps us make sense of the Toledo example. While temporality is generally understudied within organization theory (Hernes, 2014; Langley et al., 2013), a number of studies have underscored temporal disconnections between natural and organizational environments (Bansal & Knox-Hayes, 2013; Purser, 1997; Slawinski & Bansal, 2015; Whiteman & Cooper, 2011). These studies emphasize that organizational environments compress time (Bansal & Knox-Hayes, 2013), which may become unsynchronized with natural environments, leading to environmental degradation. Page 4 of 15

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Existing research also suggests that time is an essential feature of organizing for sustainability (Bansal & DesJardine, 2014; Hahn et al., 2015; Rivoli & Waddock, 2011; Slawinski & Bansal, 2012, 2015). For instance, explicitly incorporating inter-temporal considerations within organizational practices helps firms develop the ability to balance short- and long-term needs and multiple stakeholder demands related to complex sustainability projects (Slawinski & Bansal, 2015). In a related way, Garud and Gehman (2012) present a ‘durational perspective’ on temporality which illustrates how organizational practices on sustainability (in this case, electric vehicles) are forged by our ‘backing and forthing’ in time utilizing memories of past and expectations of future happenings. Furthermore, organizational ‘narratives serve as essential coordination mechanisms not only in real time, but also over time’ (Garud & Gehman, 2012: 985). However, many of the existing organizational studies on sustainability do not apply a process perspective since time is treated as ‘something that happens to things’ (Langley et al., 2013). For instance, changes in organizational commitment to sustainability over time are based on resource-based and institutional factors (Bansal, 2005), and institutional forces across time encourage firms to achieve an average social performance but high/low environmental performance (Bansal et al., 2014). While useful, this approach to research design may miss granularity in a more complicated setting. In contrast, a temporal view of sustainability from a process perspective requires one to acknowledge and embrace the ongoing movement of different dimensions of a broader ecosystem and to analyze the neverending encounters and events that connect an uncertain, volatile, ambiguous and complex social-ecological world. From a process perspective, the world is continually in a state of ‘becoming’ and does not rest in static or steady end-states (Helin et al., 2014: 5). Importantly, the natural world and humans all share the same process of ‘becoming’ in equal measure (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004). According to Hernes (2014: 2), ‘Thinking about process is about coming to grips with the phenomenon of being in the flow of time. It is not about the flow of things, but about the things of flow. The things of flow include the actors who find themselves having to organize the world around them in the flow of time.’ Time, then, can be understood as ‘lines of becoming’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004; also see Ingold 2011, p. 14). Societies, ecosystems, geological systems, and economic systems all follow different temporal ‘lines of becoming.’ Process thinking embraces such movements and flow – the intransient sense of endless becoming across space and time – rather than fixed steady states or ‘clock time’ (Helin et al., 2014: 5). An organizational study of sustainability in Toledo benefits from an intergenerational time horizon where key events from the 1970s and 1980s (perhaps earlier) relate to the current (and future situation) in Lake Erie. This kind of historical analysis would uncover that the eutrophication problem that plagued Lake Erie in the 1970s was a result of different root causes of phosphorus overload – from insufficient waste water sewage treatment (e.g., in Detroit) and too high a concentration of phosphorus in household detergents, issues that were corrected with regulation and improved waste water treatment (IJC, 2014). However, over time, other factors – such as fertilizer use in agriculture and urban lawns – again increased phosphorus in the water table (IJC, 2014). Water quality in Toledo can be effectively conceptualized as a movement over time and in flux, dependent upon an ever-changing set of organizing practices across various industries and across various actors (successive local, regional and national governments, citizens, and private sector actors). Toxic algae blooms in the current decade are a systemic result of an overload of nutrients over time: ‘The phosphorus that caused the algae bloom didn't just happen yesterday,’ said Ken Nobis, president of the Michigan Milk Producers Association. ‘It took a long period of years to collect in the Lake Erie basin. We have done a lot in the past 10 years to reduce the amount of phosphorus feeding our farms.' Process thinkers also encourage us to study the passage of time through the signifying power of events Page 5 of 15

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(Hernes, 2014). Variations in the structures and processes of events are critical to the role they play in producing or indeed preventing institutional change related to sustainability (Schüssler et al., 2014). Thus, key events – such as the burning of the Detroit River, the emergence of regulations, the recent water ban, and the mayor's flamboyant drink of water to signal the ‘end’ of the problem in Toledo – can play central temporal roles in the emergence of sustainable practices within flux. Sustainability from a process perspective is not a fixed state, but continually in the process of becoming, across intergenerational time frames. Firms and other organizational actors (including municipalities) need the capability to go back and re-examine abandoned practices, and also to re-narrate strategy as it unfolds to ‘make sense of what has happened (that may imply renegotiating the origins of an initiative) and what may yet transpire (that may imply renegotiating the future)’ (Garud & Gehman, 2012: 991). Importantly, process studies suggest that a lack of temporal (and spatial) synchronicity increases vulnerability when ecosystems become dynamic after periods of relative stability (Purser, 1997; Whiteman & Cooper, 2011). Consequently, claims that Toledo's water quality is now ‘safe’ are best viewed as temporary – the sustainability of Toledo's water is an ongoing practice within a state of flux, which is shaped also by organizational narratives that may or may not incorporate systemic factors over time (Garud & Gehman, 2012).

Wholeness Natural scientists emphasize the wholeness of the Earth system and reject an atomistic approach to understanding ‘sustainability’ problems (Rockström et al., 2009). Process thinkers also embrace holism (Helin et al., 2014). An appreciation of wholeness collapses the dualistic divide between ‘humans’ and ‘nonhumans,’ and ‘humans’ and ‘nature,’ including organizations. According to Chia (2014): ‘Process philosophy helps us understand that we are part of the environment and if we poison it, we poison ourselves. It is a relational view. We have to become better able at making sense of our environment.’ In our Toledo example, we can see this exemplified – as human activity pursues its desire for greater agricultural productivity, the same practices overload the regional fresh water table with nitrogen and phosphorus, which results in toxic algae, poisoning the water over the period in August 2014. This happens because of the wholeness of the social-ecosystem within which Toledo lies. A key implication of process philosophy is thus the holistic view of continual change, where, for example, the pollution of Toledo is framed as an act of polluting ourselves as we simultaneously seek to feed ourselves. However, the world as one does not mean the emphasis lies singularly on the total ‘whole’ (which all individual things are a part of). Instead, there is a dynamic interplay between individual things that ‘different constellations make up the totality, a totality that in total may have a stable connotation to it, but that is in fact the constant flux of all movement and change in the world, and all the things that exist in those moments’ (de Jonge & Whiteman, 2014: 440). Ignoring ‘wholeness’ leads to the disconnection of organizations from the natural environment, and narrowly frames sustainability through linear analyses of single issues (Gladwin et al., 1995; Purser et al., 1995; Shrivastava, 1994; Starik & Rands, 1995). A process view of sustainability explicitly encourages organizational scholars to integrate the role of the nonhuman living world of ecosystems. In addition to living entities, the ecologically material world of nonliving things (such as geology, algae, nitrogen, and phosphorus emissions) have important roles within the production of the whole Earth ‘system,’ and have effects upon the continual becomings of the living world, and vice versa (Whiteman & Cooper, 2011). The implication for process studies is that humans, nonhumans, and the material world are inseparable, and Page 6 of 15

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inextricably co-create the world as we know it (De Jonge & Whiteman, 2014). Numerous process philosophers agree with this point (Helin et al., 2014). However, most of the empirical organizational research on sustainability has not adopted a holistic approach (Whiteman et al., 2013: 2). Yet a linear or atomistic view of single-issue topics like toxic emissions, waste, or sustainability reporting misrepresents the holistic interplay which is evident in contexts such as Toledo.

Openness Following closely from the idea of the dynamic interplay between wholeness and individual beings, process philosophers also emphasize ‘openness’ in life relations. Tim Ingold (2011: 4) describes this perspective well: ‘It is of the essence of life that it does not begin here or end there, or connect a point of origin with a final destination, but rather that it keeps on going, finding a way through the myriad of things that form, persist and break up in its currents. Life, in short, is a movement of opening, not of closure.’ Sustainability, then, is one of many movements within this weaving. Openness as a dimension of process thinking is related to wholeness in that some process philosophers such as Arne Naess believe these dimensions to be intrinsically intertwined. Naess’ relationalism has been interpreted ‘as a type of interconnectedness thinking in which all boundaries between the perceiver and the perceived vanishes at the moment of identification’ (De Jonge & Whiteman, 2014: 437), where openness and interconnectedness lead from and through wholeness. However, there are some important differences in emphasis among process philosophers in terms of holism as opposed to interconnectedness and openness. For example, the French process philosopher Guattari (2000) rejects the idea of holism while at the same time embracing openness and interconnectedness: the key is in tracing interconnected paths of becoming. Or, put another way, Hernes (2014: 13) explains, ‘I tentatively regarded process as the becoming of entangled actors.' Early work in organizational sustainability recognized the conceptual importance of openness particularly with respect to human interactions (Gladwin et al., 1995; Hart, 1995; Purser et al., 1995; Rowley, 1997; Shrivastava, 1994). This is most notable in the explosion of research on stakeholder theory (Donaldson & Preston, 1995; Parmer et al., 2010). However, few studies have adopted an open-systems perspective (Whiteman et al., 2013). Instead, studies tend to adopt a closed, linear, or single-issue view of sustainability (cf. Bansal & Hoffman, 2012) and ignore many of the open-systems interactions that underpin what we know about the Earth (Rockström et al., 2009; Whiteman et al., 2013). In contrast, Garud and Gehman's (2012) relational analysis of the emergence of electric vehicles over time identifies the need for organizational actors (including policymakers) to collaboratively develop bricolage capabilities to bring together and shape human and nonhuman material interactions: ‘Actors are neither insiders nor outsiders, but instead are part of ongoing entanglements’ (p. 983). Returning to our Toledo example, this suggests that an organizational study on sustainability could use the city or the Lake Erie water system as the focal unit of analysis (to capture ‘wholeness'), and include empirical investigations of the entangled actions of multiple actors (to capture ‘openness') including those shaping the agricultural value chain (regulators, seed manufacturers, farmers, fertilizer manufacturers, retailers, transportation, etc.), as well as shipping, retail, and water management. Openness also implies an understanding of how the actions of nonhuman actors (Whiteman & Cooper, 2011) or ‘actants’ (Latour, 2005) also contribute to the evolving context in Toledo such as the open dynamics between farming, algal blooms, and water quality. Processual accounts of ‘lines of becoming’ are not exclusive to the living world, but also include the relationalism of the material, nonliving world (Ingold, 2008). With our illustrative example in Toledo, the ecological maPage 7 of 15

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teriality (Whiteman & Cooper, 2011) of Lake Erie plays a role. According to the International Joint Commission between Canada and the United States, the topography of Lake Erie is intrinsically linked to environmental and health risks. Lake Erie is ‘the shallowest of the Great Lakes, the warmest and the most susceptible to eutrophication and the effects of climate change’ (IJC, 2014: 2). These perhaps are the most obvious examples of open interactions across social-ecological systems. Process analyses should also include more subtle interactions. For example, in 1999, satellites tracked the influx of a 16 km plume of mayflies converging on islands within Lake Erie – a signal that the lake once again housed clean water. In addition, the phosphorus overload from both rural and urban sources is compounded by the effects of climate change – warmer temperatures and heavier rains flush more phosphorus into the lake (IJC, 2014). An open view of sustainability also puts greater emphasis on the need to pay attention to the strength of weak cues through ecological sensemaking – the ability to ‘make sense of material landscapes and ecological processes’ (Whiteman & Cooper, 2011: 889) – a key organizing feature of a process approach to sustainable practice.

Force Scientific analyses illustrate that toxic algal blooms in Lake Erie over the last decade ‘have resulted in impaired water quality, with impacts on ecosystem health, drinking water supplies, fisheries, recreation and tourism, and property values’ (IJC, 2014: 3). With over 11 million people living in the Lake Erie basin, this is a system ‘dominated by big cities and sprawling farmland with little forest cover … severely impacted by human activities’ (IJC, 2014: 3). In this crowded context, the forceful effects of phosphorus overload are becoming abundantly clear (IJC, 2014). What may be less clear at first glance are the complexities of the forces surrounding Toledo. For instance, the biological characteristics of the lake make it the most productive of all the Great Lakes. Yet invasive species and climate change compound the effects of phosphorus overload, with heavy rainstorms resulting in more phosphorus entering the lake through greater runoff water (IJC, 2014). From a social-economic perspective, various forces have been driving this situation over time. For example, 63% of the watershed is used for agricultural purposes, and the Lake Erie basin is very densely populated. A processual discussion of force challenges conventional perspectives of agency – where one person acts upon another, or upon nonhumans and inert materials. That is, ‘Bringing things to life, then, is a matter not of adding to them a sprinkling of agency but of restoring them to the generative fluxes of the world of materials in which they came into being and continue to subsist’ (Ingold, 2011: p. 29). Furthermore, the idea of wholeness as it relates to sustainability suggests that the world itself as a totality contains force. That is, ‘[p]roducers, both human and non-human, do not so much transform the world, as play their part from within the world's transformation of itself’ (Ingold, 2011: 6). Human agency is thus embedded within the larger forces of life unfolding with force. And so too is the material world of nonliving elements. Garud and Gehman (2012) similarly argue that people are not primarily reactive to the environment but have agency to shape sustainability as they are themselves embedded in the larger system. The implication here for sustainability is that the Earth system, in whole and in parts, in life and in materiality, is endowed with force. That is, process thinkers ‘recognize that for things to interact they must be immersed in a kind of force field set up by the currents of the media that surround them’ (Ingold, 2011: 93). Ingold calls this forceful interaction ‘meshwork,’ while systems thinkers call these ‘feedback loops’ (Rockström et al., 2009; Whiteman et al., 2013). Recent organizational research has also examined the empirical linkages between ecological Page 8 of 15

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forces and the embedded agency of human actors within social-ecological force fields (Linnenluecke et al., 2012; Whiteman & Cooper, 2011). These scholars do not position nature as a ‘thing’ or ‘object’ but as a living entity with ‘materiality’ and force. Social forces are more strongly reflected in the organizational literature on sustainability, particularly in institutional accounts of the force of regulation, voluntary initiatives, and other normative forces (Boons et al., 2013; Hoffman, 1997; Lounsbury et al., 2012; Schüssler et al., 2014; Walker et al., 2014). These forces are evident in our example. The institutional force field is complicated, encompassing 17 metropolitan areas, 2 national governments, and 5 state and provincial governments (IJC, 2014). Because of the extremity of the water toxicity problem, Ohio regulators banned local farmers from applying manure (rich in phosphorus) on frozen farmland because it would be washed into Lake Erie.2 In addition, global retail giant Wal-Mart is using its market power to push for ‘precision agriculture’ where farmers are trained in how to optimize the use of fertilizers.3 Other companies in the agricultural value chain such as Cargill and Kellogg's are also participating. While such approaches act as forces to reduce the unnecessary use of fertilizers (and reduce the likelihood of toxic algae blooms), Lake Erie also suffers from a variety of climate change pressures that may lead to lower water levels, which in turn will have implications for agriculture and water quality. The whole system is larger than its singular parts, all of which are under continual movements of change. The important point is that from a process perspective, the organizing forces for sustainability (or degradation) are various kinds of nested relations across human and natural beings and material elements which collectively give rise to ‘sustainability.’ Within the Toledo example, the organizing forces include but are not narrowly restricted to human beings; thus crops, fertilizer, detergents, nutrient emissions, water flows, climate change, and algal blooms also have organizing force – through critical feedback loops into the socio-ecological system. The implication for organizational studies of sustainability is that complexity and the processual forces of relational meshwork among humans, organizations, nonhumans, and the ecologically material world are essential features which cannot be reduced into studies on corporate reporting or toxic release inventories. The Earth thus has shared agency and interdependency with humans and other living organisms and material features of the landscape (Latour, 2014; Newton, 2002; Whiteman & Cooper, 2011). As an active subject, the Earth system is a ‘fully-fledged actor’ (Latour, 2014) possessing its own force, as well as ecological tipping points (Lenton et al., 2008) and planetary boundaries (Rockström et al., 2009). Thus, rather than seeking to understand the ‘independent’ actor, studies should examine the factors shaping and maintaining network configurations in which power and human agency is embedded, and process studies investigate the independency of natural and social forces (Newton, 2002).

Potentiality According to process philosophers, potentiality ‘is a curious mélange of time and force’ (Helin et al., 2014: 8) and ‘involves imagination about how things might become in light of the possibilities that lie ahead, but also about how things of the past might be perceived differently’ (Hernes, 2014: 5). Management scholars have long identified the potentiality of organizations to contribute to ecological and social harm (Bansal & Hoffman, 2012). Encouragingly, recent studies geared toward re-imagining the potentiality of sustainable practices appeared in the 2013 special issue in Organization. In order to practically challenge business-as-usual scenarios and more deeply address climate change issues, social imaginary of alternative ways of organizing can encourage sustainable innovation and transformation (Garland et al., 2013; Garud & Gehman, 2012; Wright et al., 2013). Page 9 of 15

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Potentiality from a process perspective also incorporates a holistic, open perspective and demands that organizational actors recognize their inherent embeddedness within specific places. ‘[P]lace is a multifaceted subject of analysis where people, nature, politics, culture, history, and, indeed, organizations lead to the creation and continued transformation of place, rather than place being a preformed phenomenon, fixed social fact, or canvas on which history plays out’ (Guthey et al., 2014: 4). This emerging stream of literature (Burley et al., 2007; Guthey et al., 2014; Hope Alkon, 2004; Shrivastava & Kennelly, 2013; Thomas & Cross, 2007; Walck & Strong, 2001) seeks to understand the dynamic interplay between organizations and their socio-spatial environments and to delineate implications for sustainable management practices. While some process philosophers such as Arne Naess explicitly recognize the importance of ‘place-based’ research to understand sustainability (De Jonge & Whiteman, 2014), most of the existing studies in this area do not directly engage with philosophical discussions. Instead, they build upon geographers’ understandings of ‘places’ as a richer framework than the more abstract and denature idea of ‘space’ (see Hernes, 2004). Research on organizations and place seeks to identify how organizations and managerial practices interact with geographic locations and specific locales, which result in various forms of production and consumption, as well as emotional and cognitive attachments (Burley et al., 2007; Hope Alkon, 2004; Guthey & Whiteman, 2009; Kennedy et al., forthcoming; Shrivastava & Kennelly, 2013; Walck, 2004; Whiteman & Cooper, 2000). Organizational research also indicates that ecological sensemaking (Whiteman & Cooper, 2011) can help managers engage with hidden potentiality in the natural world by paying attention to weak cues of change and movement. Empirical work in this area remains far from the mainstream; however, in practice, managers that have faced extreme weather events – such as Superstorm Sandy or the Victorian bush fires (Linnenluecke et al., 2012) – are keen to understand how to make sense of subtle cues in the natural environment and how to adaptively manage for future events. From a process perspective, the ‘meshwork’ (Ingold, 2011) of interconnected becomings collectively creates the potentiality – and sustainability or lack thereof – of the world. Since the world is never in a finished, end state, but continues to unfold, the potentiality and goal of sustainability is not a static point on the horizon. Thus, the potentiality of Toledo emerges from the endless becomings of organizations, citizens, consumers, and regulators as well as the becomings of the ecologically material forces of the natural world. Given the power of social narratives to shape future states (Garud & Gehman, 2012; Wright et al., 2013), the description of root causes, possible solutions, and future scenarios for Lake Erie can be a powerful organizing mechanism: e.g., ‘the single most important solution for the restoration of Lake Erie water quality is the reduction of phosphorus inputs’ (IJC, 2014: 23). Potentiality narratives may also include targets for fertilizer use in precision agriculture, the banning of phosphorus on frozen ground or in fertilizers used in urban lawns, and the increase in green infrastructure (e.g., coastal wetland areas) (see IJC, 2014). In addition, other visions of a green future in the Lake Erie basin include renewable energy. For instance, by the end of the first decade in the 21st century, major corporations like GE and Samsung were analyzing the feasibility of wind farms in Lake Erie – a sustainable way to take advantage of the lake's fierce storms. It is in this human–nonhuman ‘meshwork’ (Ingold, 2008) that the practices of sustainability emerge.

Implications of Process Thinking We identify three areas where process studies can make a contribution to future organizational studies in sustainability: research on scaling up sustainable practices; organizing as a process of place-making (or destroying); and embeddedness. Page 10 of 15

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Research on Scaling up Sustainable Practices While sustainability itself may be an ill-defined term, the ‘practices of sustainability’ are increasingly commonplace in the boardrooms of many companies. CEOs, like Paul Polman from Unilever in our opening quote, actively mobilize for a revolution in capitalism, and at the same time recognize that they are implicitly or explicitly managing within an interrelated world in a state of perpetual flux. One may not know where to start and where to end, but there is growing commitment to movement and change. A process approach to sustainability takes this as its core (Langley & Tsoukas, 2010). Yet managing the complexity of nested Earth-society and economic systems is daunting, and the practice of sustainability is truncated (and likely ineffective) when one adopts a linear approach to problems and solutions like those facing the city of Toledo. That is, the organizational practices of sustainability cannot be captured by an analysis of local water quality, nor with an assessment of the sustainability reports of Wal-Mart, Kelloggs, or the local farmers. Indeed, the firm itself may be the ‘wrong’ unit of analysis because it does not encourage an open view of the dynamic interplay of a relational and embedded human and nonhuman system within the watershed. A process view explicitly situates sustainable ‘practices’ within an ongoing movement of human and nonhuman activity over time which collectively enhance (or detract) from the potentiality of future generations of people, places, and ecologically material landscapes. A process approach to understanding sustainability can add value to organizational studies precisely because process thinkers do not exclusively consider a linear or single-issue factor like pollution, nor do they limit analysis to single companies or sectors. Rather, a process approach investigates the nested role of companies and other organizing forces (state regulators, consumers, regulators) within the continually changing Lake Erie ecosystem across space and time. According to Ingold (2011: 14): ‘Whether our concern is to inhabit this world or to study it – and at root these are the same, since all inhabitants are students and all students inhabitants – our task is not to take stock of its contents but to follow what is going on, tracing the multiple trails of becoming, wherever they lead.’ The key here is to focus on practices that affect the social and ecological world, and to privilege the researcher role as an active actant (Latour, 2005). Future studies can also help explain how organizations integrate intertemporal dimensions of sustainability within managerial practices and in particular use collaborations to help confront inter-temporal tensions (Slawinski & Bansal, 2015).

Organizing as a Process of Place-Making (and Place-Destroying) De Jonge and Whiteman (2014: 449) close their book chapter on Arne Naess by asking readers to consider ‘What kind of potentialities are discovered when we accept the never-ending flux of interactions amongst our intrinsic field of relations?’ Sustainability and its reverse occur not in the abstract, but in concrete places that consist of human–nonhuman relations, various kinds of material processes (social, technical and ecological) over time and space (Elmes et al., 2012; Guthey et al., 2014; Shrivastava & Kennelly, 2013). A place-based approach to researching sustainability can help us understand how organizing practices can restore or destroy the endowed forces of nonhuman things. It can also contribute to appreciating how human and nonhuman forces interconnect across time. Such studies can unlock important mysteries: e.g., how did catastrophic events such as the BP oil spill, Deepwater Horizon, come to occur and play out? How do ongoing events and practices in and around Toledo, Ohio, affect the sustainability of this place? Or to reverse it: when organizations work well, are reliable, and high performing in terms of sustainability, what processes account for these positive practices located in and across specific places?

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Embeddedness Process thinking for sustainability encourages an explicit recognition of the impact of embeddedness – both social and ecological – within the field of human–nonhuman interactions. While social embeddedness has a long history in organizational studies (e.g., starting with Granovetter, 1985), the role of ecological embeddedness on sustainability practices is less well studied (Whiteman & Cooper, 2000). Nevertheless, Worthy (2008: 148) provides empirical support for the idea that ecological disembeddedness leads to ‘that phenomenal dissociation – defined as the lack of immediate, sensual engagement with the consequences of our everyday actions and with the human and nonhuman others that we affect with our actions – increases destructive tendency and that awareness is not enough to curb destructiveness.' More work is required to identify how embeddedness can facilitate organizational responses to a changing natural environment and how firms may develop and entrench such processual knowledge of wholeness and openness in order to integrate human and nonhuman feedback on organizational practices across time and space.

Conclusion For the past twenty years, organizational scholars have recognized that companies have powerful impacts across social, ecological, and economic processes (Levy & Lichtenstein, 2012). Indeed, one may argue that organizational attention to sustainability has never been higher – both in terms of the amount of scholarly research conducted (Bansal & Hoffman, 2012) and the amount of civic and private sector attention paid to social and environmental issues (UN Global Compact & Accenture, 2013). Yet few of the existing studies have adopted a systemic process perspective to understand the complexities of the world in which we live. In this chapter, we have argued that process thinking has much to offer organizational studies of sustainability precisely because process thinkers embrace systemic dynamism. From a process perspective, ‘sustainability’ is a movement of various potentialities that is affected by time, space, interconnectedness, and imagination. The world, while damaged, is constantly moving toward becoming something potentially different. Actions connect different potentialities within a dynamic, nested human–nonhuman system. Our example of nutrient overload affecting the water supply of Toledo, Ohio, illustrates how five key dimensions of process thinking help to unravel the complexities of such social-ecological contexts, and how process studies can contribute to sustainability research. Sustainability practices such as those affecting Lake Erie and the city of Toledo, Ohio, play out at multiple scales, and across spatial and temporal dimensions. What may appear to be a local event may actually be a subtle cue that the surrounding system is passing a tipping point and indeed be linked to more systemic issues across space and time. A process lens on sustainability thus demands a systemic and relational view of the corporation as one organizing force within a hive of multi-stakeholder activities that affect social, ecological, and economic subsystems. We end with a call for more research to understand how social and ecological embeddedness impacts organizing practices for sustainability; studies designed to identify how organizing practices are as a process of place-making and destroying, and more process studies on business practices that attempt to scale up solutions for social and environmental problems.

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1 http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/unilever-ceo-paul-polman-interview 2 http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/proposed-rule-for-farms-aims-to-improve-lakeerie/2014/11/29/82c0a442–77e1–11e4–8893-97bf0c02cc5f_story.html 3 http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/03/16/wal-mart-has-fertilizer-plan/6428637/

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Entrepreneurship as Process

Contributors: Todd H. Chiles, Sara R. S. T. A. Elias & Qian Li Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Entrepreneurship as Process" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n27 Print pages: 432-449 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Entrepreneurship as Process Todd H. ChilesSara R. S. T. A. EliasQian Li

Introduction Browse any article on organizational entrepreneurship, and you are almost guaranteed to find entrepreneurship discussed as a process. Remarkable too is the sheer number and variety of processes addressed – from opportunity discovery and creation processes, to firm start-up, growth, and exit processes, to broader market and institutional processes. And these are but a few examples! It is little surprise that ‘entrepreneurial process’ currently ranks as the ‘hottest’ topic in entrepreneurship research (Kuckertz, 2013). For the past generation, ‘the entrepreneurial process’ has been a ubiquitous phrase in the organizational entrepreneurship literature. In recent years, ‘entrepreneuring’ – a term that serves as shorthand for entrepreneurship as process – has begun to appear regularly in the scholarly literature. More importantly, pioneering scholars placed ‘process’ at the very heart of entrepreneurship, identifying it as one of the main perspectives in entrepreneurship (Gartner, 1985) and one of the focal areas for future entrepreneurship research (Low & MacMillan, 1988). Recently, entrepreneurship scholars have revitalized these points, proclaiming ‘process is our fundamental object of enquiry’ (McMullen & Dimov, 2013: 1505; see also Chiles et al., 2007; Steyaert, 2007; Moroz & Hindle, 2012). This chapter provides a review and discussion of entrepreneurial process scholarship, taking a unique philosophical approach that highlights differences in the fundamental assumptions and knowledge claims made by entrepreneurial process scholars. Philosophy sensitizes us to the fundamental assumptions we hold about the nature of reality, our place in it, and how we come to know it (Tsoukas & Chia, 2011). Recognition of our own philosophies is important because we tend to be unaware of philosophical assumptions, yet we incorporate them tacitly in our scholarly work (Tsoukas & Chia, 2011; Meyer et al., 2005). Indeed, our philosophical assumptions profoundly influence the metaphors we invoke, the questions we ask, the theories we adopt, and the methodologies we employ (Chiles et al., 2010a). To a large degree, they even determine the very phenomena and problems we choose to study (Meyer et al., 2005). More generally, such assumptions powerfully influence the trajectories of entire fields of inquiry in terms of overall theoretical progress and cumulative knowledge advancement (Scherdin & Zander, 2014). Despite the importance of philosophical assumptions, organizational entrepreneurship scholars, like their colleagues in other areas of organization studies, tend to neglect them (Scherdin & Zander, 2014). At the same time, we scholars have a strong ‘tendency to cling on to our preferred views and to dismiss theories [methodologies, metaphors, and questions] that do not conform to our own operating premises and hence to avoid sustained questioning of our own assumptions’ (Tsoukas & Chia, 2011: 4). To make matters worse, researchers overwhelmingly use a ‘gap spotting’ and ‘gap filling’ approach – that is, scholars find or construct gaps in the literature that need to be filled and then fill them – in order to make a scholarly contribution, which means ‘they rarely challenge the literature's underlying assumptions in any significant way’ (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2011: 249). Taken together, these points underscore a pressing need in organization studies generally – and organizational entrepreneurship specifically – to embrace a more reflexive approach in which scholars challenge the assumptions underlying others’ work, as well as their own, in order to produce more interesting and influential research (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2011). In this chapter we employ process philosopher Stephen Pepper's (1942) classic typology of four ‘world hypotheses’ as a means of advancing a more reflexive approach to processual entrepreneurship research in organization studies. Pepper's typology offers a particularly useful framework for both organizing and understanding the different types of formal knowledge produced and philosophical assumptions espoused by a diverse group of scholars (Tsoukas, 1994). Accordingly, this typology is well suited to our goal of making sense of the remarkably diverse entrepreneurial process literature in a way that is both structured and informed by an approach sensitive to researchers’ most basic assumptions. Page 2 of 14

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We begin by explaining Pepper's typology. Next, we turn to review selected literature that treats entrepreneurship as a process. Our selection – most of which has not been previously reviewed – is heavily influenced by our own philosophical assumptions (specifically, the importance of relativism and contextualism), research interests (which focus on imagination, emergence, and creation), and methodological preferences (particularly qualitative analysis and process research). At the same time, the literature review is sensitive to the dominant assumptions (which prioritize realism and mechanism), common perspectives (which focus on discovery, effectuation, and enactment), and pervading methods (which rely on quantitative analysis and variance research) current in organizational entrepreneurship research.

Pepper's Typology Pepper (1942) identifies four worldviews around which various schools of philosophical thought cohere: formism, mechanism, organism, and contextualism. Each worldview derives from a ‘root metaphor’ around which commonsense evidence congeals, and is, as Tsoukas (1994: 763) observes, ‘characterized by a different set of assumptions concerning the logical structure of the social world.’ Each worldview, according to Pepper, is autonomous and represents a distinct type of knowledge. Thus, he argues that it is unreasonable to compare one worldview to another in order to determine the ‘best’ worldview and to discredit other worldviews. In fact, Pepper suggests all four perspectives are necessary to illuminate entrepreneurial processes.

Theoretical Binaries While each worldview shines a unique light on a particular phenomenon, they collectively ‘arrange themselves in two groups of two each’ (Pepper, 1942: 142). Pepper called the first set of theoretical binaries ‘analytic’ and ‘synthetic’ and the second ‘integrative’ and ‘dispersive.’ Analytic theories approach problems from ‘the top down,’ noting first the overarching concern, then reducing this general concern to specific elements (Chiles et al., 2010a: 147). Formism and mechanism represent worldviews that profess a whole can be reduced to its parts. In contrast, synthetic theories ‘work from the bottom up,’ discerning first specific data, then focusing on how the data form broader patterns (Chiles et al., 2010a: 147). Accordingly, the whole is the primary object of study, rather than the parts. Organicism and contextualism are synthetic theories in that they both examine a problem in its entirety, rather than studying isolated details of the problem. While analytic and synthetic theories understand how problems can be addressed as wholes or parts, integrative and dispersive theories concern the ways in which the parts work – or fail to work – together. Integrative theories assume parts coexist in a realm of systematic order and predictable outcomes (Chiles et al., 2010a). As such, integrative theories are fundamentally inconsistent with ‘cosmic chance’ (i.e., uncertainty) and enthusiastically embrace determinate order (Pepper, 1942: 143), such as one finds in or near equilibrium. Mechanism and organicism are integrative theories that assume harmony among parts. These theories oppose dispersive theories, which suggest disparate parts of a whole do not exist harmoniously, but rather continually clash as each attempts to express its own uniqueness (Chiles et al., 2010a). Thus, dispersive theories embrace an unpredictable, uncertain, largely indeterminate world (Pepper, 1942), such as one finds far from equilibrium. Formism and contextualism exemplify dispersive theory and examine ways in which parts function in chaotic ways.

Root Metaphors Formism is analytic and dispersive; its root metaphor is similarity. This worldview highlights our ability as human beings to categorize, catalog, or classify phenomena in order to ‘capture similarities and differences between discrete objects of study without being necessarily concerned to offer an account of the underlying Page 3 of 14

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mechanisms that are responsible for any similarities and differences identified’ (Tsoukas, 1994: 763). Formism comes in two versions. In its ‘soft’ version, formistic thinking enables scholars to make sense of things based on their own unique conceptual categorization schemes (typologies) and other scholars’ acceptance of them, such as Burrell and Morgan's (1979) four paradigms, and, as we employ in this chapter, Pepper's (1942) four worldviews (Tsoukas, 1994). In its ‘hard’ version, formistic thinking allows researchers to reflect an independent reality by empirically generating objective classification systems (taxonomies), such as the periodic chart of the elements in chemistry and the clustering of industries into strategic groups in strategy (Tsoukas, 1994). Mechanism's root metaphor is, not surprisingly, the machine. Scholars adopting this worldview conceptualize phenomena as simplified systems situated in equilibrium and composed of discrete parts and their interrelationships. As an analytic, integrative theory, mechanism understands problems as ‘a small set of well-developed variables, embedded in a nomological net’ (Chiles, 2003: 288). The primary and secondary variables comprising such abstract models can be quantitatively operationalized and the relationships between them tested with statistical techniques. Utilizing data and outcomes from the past, mechanistic models and their associated quantitative and statistical methods provide researchers the power to accurately predict specific outcomes in the future. True to the scientific method, mechanistic scholars pursue positivistic research. Such research (often pursued in a hypothetico-deductive fashion) seeks to make accurate observations about an objective reality that exists ‘out there’ in the world, describe quantitatively established regularities of which such a world consists, offer predictions about future outcomes and recommendations for future courses of action based on such prior regularities, and produce knowledge that is not only valid and reliable, but also generalizable to other populations, contexts, and times (Tsoukas, 1994). Organicism's root metaphor is the integrated whole (Tsoukas, 1994) or, more specifically, the historic process in which fragments of events – connected in contradictory, conflicting, and competing ways – are progressively integrated into a coherent whole (Pepper, 1942). Informed by synthetic, integrative theories, organic processes, as Tsoukas (1994: 769) explains, involve ‘the unfolding of a logic that is immanent into the object of study.’ For example, a human fetus develops into an infant, a toddler, a child, an adolescent, an adult, and eventually dies, and a business venture evolves through life-cycle stages from start-up, to growth, to maturity, and ultimately to either revitalization or decline. Such processes unfold in an orderly fashion from stage to stage and tend toward equilibrium and hence greater determinateness (Chiles et al., 2010a; Tsoukas, 1994). Other examples of organic processes include Hegelian dialectics, variation-selection-retention evolution, punctuated equilibrium, Kirznerian discovery, and Schumpeterian creative destruction (Chiles et al., 2010a; Tsoukas, 1994). Given organicism's interest in historical processes, it is indeed ironic that this worldview ‘consistently explains time away’ (Pepper, 1942: 280). Whereas ‘[o]rganicism takes time lightly or disparagingly,’ Pepper (1942: 281) argues, ‘contextualism takes it seriously.’ For this reason, contextualism's root metaphor is the historic event – not a completed event that is effectively ‘dead’ and must be ‘exhumed’ from the past, but rather the historic event that is ‘alive’ in the present, the event ‘going on now, the dynamic dramatic active event’ (Pepper, 1942: 232). Contextualists are not interested in an isolated event or action, but rather action in context, the contextualized act, continually changing over time. In contrast with mechanistic and organistic scholars who evacuate or downplay time (and hence change) in their work, contextualists view change as an inherent and omnipresent feature of the world, the source of not only instability, but also novelty and difference. In contrast with formistic scholars who highlight the similarity of events, contextualists spotlight events’ uniqueness: ‘Every moment is qualitatively different and should be treated as such’ (Tsoukas, 1994: 767). As a result, contextualists emphasize the emergence of qualitative novelty, the continual mutation of existing patterns into new ones, and the creation and continual re-creation of novelty that naturally occurs as individuals act and interact over time (Chiles et al., 2010a; Tsoukas, 1994). Additionally, unlike their mechanistic colleagues, who emphasize ‘quantities,’ contextualists stress ‘qualities.’ Finally, in sharp contrast with mechanistic and organistic scholars, contextualists Page 4 of 14

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readily embrace the subjectivity, uncertainty, unknowability, and unpredictability associated with indeterminate processes, such as those found far from equilibrium (Chiles et al., 2010a). While contextualists accept the disorder and messiness inherent in such processes (Steyaert, 2004), they also acknowledge the concurrent existence of order (Pepper, 1942) and the synthetic, dispersive qualities of a contextual worldview.

Literature Review Given our focus on Pepper's typology, we intended to organize our review using his four worldviews; however, a large majority of the selected articles employed multiple worldviews (see Figure 27.1). Accordingly, we chose to structure our review by two broad types of articles: ‘philosophically pure’ articles (single-worldview articles), which Pepper recommended, and ‘philosophically eclectic’ articles (multiple-worldview articles), which Pepper generally discouraged. We then focus on one key process that emerged in both types of articles as a central feature of the entrepreneurial process and appeared, either implicitly or explicitly, in slightly over half of our articles: the process of imagination. Summaries of the ten theoretical and 27 empirical articles comprising our review can be found in Tables 27.1 and 27.2, respectively.

Figure 27.1Selected entrepreneurship research organized by pepper's worldviews

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Table 27.1Selected theoretical entrepreneurship research

Table 27.2Selected empirical entrepreneurship research

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Table 27.2

Selected empirical entrepreneurship research

Authors

Research questions

Baker & Nelson, 2005

How do entrepreneurs create something out of nothing in resource-constrained environments?

Research methods

Primary processes

Process Contribution to understanding entrepreneurial processes meaning"

Inductive field study of 25 small Bricolage and enactment businesses in an economically processes depressed U.S. region and case study of 4 young knowledge-intensive firms, involving interviews and observations How does the improvisation Inductive theory-building study of 25 Improvisation and bricolage process unfold, if at all, in training and consulting firms, 21 processes within the knowledge-based start-ups? software firms, and 22 faculty startstart-up process Does the process involve ups, involving interviews, direct strategic actions? What and participant observation, and resources does improvisation archival data draw upon? How does improvisation affect firms' competencies and routines? How does an entrepreneur's Hypothetico-deductive quantitative Affective, creativity, and positive affect and study of 99 entrepreneurs engaged innovation processes creativity influence in start-up process; Survey included within the founding innovation in their firm? 1 question regarding number of process innovations in the last 5 years

Sequence

Berends et al., 2014

How does new product development (NPD) unfold over time in small firms?

Sequence

Chiles et al., 2013

What theoretical concepts does Inductive analysis of excerpts the radical Austrian school's from 10 books and 1 article kaleidic metaphor embody? and deductive case study of 12 entrepreneurs' life stories based on Do those concepts have any interviews, documents, and on-site counterpart .1n entrepreneurs' perceptions of their own observations lived experiences?

Forward-looking imaginative Sequence processes; Opportunity creation and exploitation processes

Kaleidic metaphor developed and grounded to better understand entrepreneurs' creative imaginations as a wellspring of disequilibrium creation processes. Assumptions about opportunity discovery, creation, and exploitation processes challenged. Entrepreneurs invited to play with a kaleidoscope to facilitate discussion and understanding.

Chiles et al., 2004

How do organizational collectives emerge?

Processes of organizational emergence comprised of creation and re-creation processes

Sequence

Complexity theory used to understand how organizational collectives emerge as a result of fluctuation, positive feedback, stabilization, and recombination processes. Entrepreneurdriven disequilibrium market processes engender ongoing novelty creation, exhibit 'punctuated disequilibrium' change, and generate a unique processual order. Provides muchneeded test of theory at the collective level.

Cornelissen et al., 2012

How do nascent entrepreneurs Micro-ethnographic studies of 2 use metaphors in speech nascent entrepreneurs in the U.K. and gesture to convince aerospace manufacturing and others of a new venture's technology industries, involving feasibility and, thus, to gain audio and video analysis of and sustain their support? interviews and interactions

Sensegiving, sensemaking, embodiment, and metaphorically imaginative processes within the new venture creation process

Sequence

Sensegiving used by entrepreneurs to gain and sustain support for novel ventures. Metaphor in speech and gesture allows entrepreneurs to give sense to new ventures while addressing the high uncertainty and low legitimacy characteristic of commercialization's early stages. Sensegiving helps emphasize agency, control, predictability, and taken-for-grantedness.

Dolmans et al., 2014

How do perceived, anticipated, and relative resource positions influence entrepreneurial decision making and creativity?

In-depth case studies of 3 Dutch hightech start-ups in the telecom and solar energy industries, involving interviews and archival data

Decision-making, creativity, Sequence sensemaking, and imaginative resource (re)combination processes

Resource positions - viewed as perceived, dynamic, multidimensional, relative, and transient - explored to understand entrepreneurs' subjective processes of creativity and decision making. Anticipated resource positions, which might change over time, emerge from entrepreneurs' subjective forward-looking imaginative acts.

Garud & Karnoe, 2003

How does a bricolage approach that begins with a low-tech design but ramps up progressively prevail over a high-tech breakthrough approach?

Comparative study of the Danish and American wind turbine industry over 50-80 years

Emergence and Sequence transformation processes of technological paths characterized by distributed and embedded agency; Bricolage and breakthrough processes

Technology entrepreneurship is a complex, emergent process constituted and transformed by numerous micro-processes. Bricolage processes, which provide a low-tech path marked by modest resources, offer the potential to overcome advantages conferred by breakthrough processes, which provide a high-tech path backed by large-scale resources.

Gielnik et al., 2012

How does the interplay of Hypothetico-deductive study using Opportunity identification 2 designs - a correlational field divergent thinking and and creative processes study and an experiment - of 98 diversity of information affect entrepreneurs' Ugandan small business owners/ creativity in the opportunity managers in the manufacturing and service industries, involving face-toidentification process? face interviews

Entity

Business growth achieved through opportunity identification processes, which are facilitated by entrepreneurial creativity. In the early stages of the creative process, information diversity moderates the impact of divergent thinking on generating novel venture ideas.

Goss et al., 2011

How does emancipatory Case study of a social entrepreneur, Processes of entrepreneuring-asentrepreneurship unfold Jasvinder Sanghera, attempting to emancipation, microover time through the alter conventional practices and fluctuating balance between amend U.K. law on forced marriage, level interactions, and power-as-practice agency and organized drawing on autobiographical processes of constraint? narrative

Sequence

Entrepreneuring-as-emancipation viewed as emerging from social interactions and power rituals comprising both agency and constraint. The dynamic interplay of agency and constraint in the entrepreneurial process described as 'power-as-practice.' Key to this process are emotional dynamics that unfold in response to micro-level interactions within a particular social context.

Greenwood & Suddaby, 2006

How can actors envision Case study of Big Five accounting firms, 1977-2002, drawing on and enact changes to the institutional contexts in interviews and archival data which they are embedded? Why and under what circumstances are embedded elites enabled and motivated to act as institutional entrepreneurs in highly institutionalized contexts?

Sequence

Process model of institutional entrepreneurship shows how elite actors deliberately introduce new organizational forms from the center of mature and highly institutionalized fields based on adverse performance, boundary bridging, boundary misalignment, and resource asymmetry processes. Central to the model is that fields do not necessarily gravitate toward equilibrium.

Baker et al., 2003

Baron & Tang, 2011

Multimethod longitudinal study of five small Dutch manufacturing firms, combining 352 event counts (analyzed using Gamma analysis) and qualitative data from interviews, e-mails, and documents

100-year longitudinal case study of Branson, Missouri's musical theaters, combining primary data from interviews, documents, questionnaires, and on-site observations with archival data analyzed using Poisson regression

Effectuation and causation processes within NPD processes

Institutional change processes

Sequence

Entity

Process model of bricolage shows how entrepreneurs in resource-constrained environments are able to create unique products and services by recombining previously worthless resources they have on hand and repurposing them in ways that challenge institutional norms. Improvisational processes are common in knowledge-intensive start-up processes, and can occur alongside conventional design-precedes-execution (DPE) processes in start-ups. Improvisational start-up processes are more likely than DPE start-up processes to involve network bricolage. Process by which founders interpret their firm's past and present in light of an envisioned future can shape the firm's emerging strategy. New venture creation processes can be understood in terms of how a founding entrepreneur's positive affect promotes creativity, and how creativity, in turn, increases the number and radicalness of a firm's innovations. Relationship between these individual-level mechanisms and between creativity and firm-level innovation is stronger in highly dynamic environments than in more stable ones. Small firms employed both effectuation and causation processes throughout the NPD process, with effectuation dominating the early stages and causation the later stages. Effectuation-based NPD processes are resourcedriven, stepwise, and open-ended. Provides much-needed test of effectuation theory in a real-life context, one that effectuation scholars have not previously explored.

Gregoire et al., 2010

What cognitive process(es) support(s) individual efforts to recognize opportunities? What is the role of prior knowledge in this process(es)?

Hypothetico-deductive mixed-methods study of 9 executives in the marketing services and life sciences industries, involving 18 think-aloud verbal protocols analyzed using logistic regression

Cognitive processes in Entity recognizing opportunities

Model developed and tested to identify cognitive processes of structural alignment in the opportunity recognition process. Prior knowledge plays a key role, allowing individuals to make different cognitive connections, and, in turn, either assisting or constraining the opportunity recognition process.

Hill et al., 2014

How does a climate for innovation relate to new venture effectiveness?

Hypothetico-deductive quantitative lab study of 101 undergraduate student dyads training, planning, and practicing for a new venture start-up computer simulation. Measures from surveys and simulations taken at 3 points in time

Co-founding team processes

Entity

Process model shows how a co-founding team's innovation climate is related to co-founding team process variables (team member exchanges, team learning, collective efficacy) that are, in turn, related to the co-founded venture's performance.

Hmieleski et al., 2013

What variables moderate the relationship between entrepreneurs' improvisational behavior and firm performance?

Hypothetico-deductive quantitative study of 201 new ventures in 114 different U.S. industries, involving mailed surveys

Processes of entrepreneurs' improvisational behavior and firm performance, moderated by dispositional and environmental factors

Entity

As a form of entrepreneurial action, improvisational behavior, and its effect on firm performance, is explored in the context of new venture development processes to show that, within dynamic environments, improvisational behavior is an effective tool when entrepreneurs are moderately optimistic. Provides new insight into firm performance, learning, and self-regulation.

Jack et al., 2008

How and why do entrepreneurial networks change and develop over time?

Longitudinal case study of 3 founding entrepreneurs in the Scottish oil industry, involving ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews at 3 points in time, 1998-2004

Networking processes as the enacting of socially constructed entrepreneurial environments

Sequence

Framework illustrates the complementarity of different process theories to a broader, hybrid theory of change and development of entrepreneurial networks over time. Relational dynamics and social construction emphasized to depict the entrepreneurial networking process as one of enacting environments.

Jones & Massa, 2013

How do novel practices that challenge cultural assumptions gain recognition and legitimacy and ultimately become agents of institutional change?

Comparative case study of one focal Processes of legitimation, extreme case (Wright's Unity Temple) adaptive emulation, and and 3 other cases (Larkin Building, institutional change and Madison Square Presbyterian evangelizing Church, St. Thomas Church), involving archival research methods

Sequence

Interplay of ideational, material, and identity processes explored to understand the institutionalization of novel ideas. Two specific legitimation processes - institutional evangelism and adaptive emulation - are at the root of the collective process by which novel practices are both created and maintained.

Khaire, 2014

How is the worth that underlies the legitimacy of a new industry constructed?

Longitudinal case study of India's high-fashion industry, mid-1980s to 2006, drawing on interviews, articles, surveys, documents, on-site observations, and quantitative data

Lichtenstein & Kurjanowicz, 2010

How do nascent entrepreneurs' Longitudinal case study of 375 unique organ1z1ng moves, decisions and actions taken by co-founders of 'The Republic of especially tangible ones (decisions and actions), Tea' during the 38-week start-up process, based on their real-time lead to the emergence of new ventures? correspondence in 138 faxes/letters

Lichtenstein et al., 2007

How and why are new firms established, and why are some founders more successful than others?

Meyer et al., 1990

How can diverse theories of Historical case study of San Francisco organizational change Bay area hospitals, 1960s to 1980s, be classified? How do based on dataset assembled over 16 organizations respond years from interviews, observations, entrepreneurial ly to surveys, documents, and secondary discontinuous industry-level data; longitudinal field study with 4 waves of interviews conducted at changes? 6-month intervals, 1987-1989, at 30 hospitals How do the temporal dynamics Longitudinal mixed-methods study of the U.S. satellite radio market, midof legitimacy, identity, and entrepreneurship unfold in 1990s through 2005, involving a the emergence of a new historical narrative developed from market category? secondary data; Hypotheses tested using content analysis How do entrepreneurs Longitudinal, inductive multipleaddressing nascent markets case study of 5 new U.S. firms shape their organizational at confluence of the computing, boundaries over time? electronics, and telecom industries, involving in-depth interviews and archival data How do institutional Longitudinal, inductive case study of Spanish haute-cuisine chef, entrepreneurs initiate change? Ferran Adria, involving interviews, observations, and secondary data

Navis & Glynn, 2010

Santos & Eisenhardt, 2009

Svejenova et al., 2007

Hypothetico-deductive quantitative study of 109 entrepreneurs engaged in the start-up process, using mixed-gender PSED dataset (two waves of closed-question phone interviews 12 months apart)

Socio-cognitive processes of Sequence the construction of worth of new industries

Process model shows how entrepreneurs and multiple field constituents construct the worth of new industries in consumers' minds by engaging in one or more sociocognitive processes: cognitive framing, curation, certification, commentary, critique, co-presentation, comparison, and commensuration. These processes help broader audiences make sense of the new industry and understand its worth.

Organizational emergence and organizing processes

Sequence

Complexity theory and Gartner's 'tangibility' of entrepreneurial actions used to explain how nascent entrepreneurs' day-to-day organizing moves, especially tangible ones, build momentum and lead to organizational emergence. A disequilibrium process story blending narrative accounts and visual timeseries maps of organizing moves grounds both theories.

Organizational emergence and organizing processes

Entity

Complexity-theoretic approach shows organizations more likely to emerge when nascent entrepreneurs pursue organizing activities at high rates, spread out over time, and occurring later in the start-up process. Confirms efficacy of this approach to disequilibrium processes of organizational emergence.

Change processes of firmlevel adaptation and metamorphosis and industry-level evolution and revolution

Sequence

New market category emergence, legitimacy, and identity processes

Sequence

Processes of shaping organizational boundaries and constructing new markets

Sequence

Institutional change processes

Sequence

Framework sensitive to assumptions about the nature and level of change resolves inconsistencies in the literature to distinguish four basic types of change processes. All four animate the history of industries: evolution---?adaptation---7 revolution---?adaptation and metamorphosis. Discontinuous industry-level change frustrates and disorients managers, but allows them to assume the role of entrepreneurs, enacting novel strategies and structures to seize new opportunities in redefined markets. Integrative model illustrates identity and legitimation processes in the emergence of new market categories, and highlights the interplay of interpretations, attention, and actions of both entrepreneurial ventures and their audiences. Explains how new market categories are institutionalized through sensegiving and sensemaking processes. Framework spotlights three processes by which entrepreneurs shape organizational boundaries and construct new markets: claiming, demarcating, and controlling a market. Underlying power logic illuminates how soft-power strategies (e.g., timing) allow entrepreneurs to dominate nascent markets through subtle persuasion. Process model shows how entrepreneurs initiate change through creativity, theorization, reputation, and dissemination processes. Entrepreneurs' novel ideas challenge conventional practices, which, in turn, generate paradoxes of logics and identity, ultimately creating the potential for institutional change. Lefebvre's 'work time' and lvanchikova's 'natural time' used to understand how multiple rhythms associated with co-founders' everyday actions and with the organization itself interact in the process of organizational emergence and creation. Provides novel way of looking at entrepreneurial processes that goes beyond the process meaning of sequential temporality. Process model of postdeath organizing shows four periods disintegration, demise, gestation, and rebirth - through which organizational founding arises after organizational death. Process facilitated by the cognitive, behavioral, and affective dynamics experienced by individuals who, interested in saving a dying organization, end up founding and organizing a new one.

Verduyn, 2010

How do the rhythms of co-founders and of the organization itself interact to affect the emergence and creation of new organizations?

Walsh & Bartunek, 2011

How does organizational death Inductive multiple-case study of Emergent processes of 6 defunct organizations in the give rise to a distinctive organizational founding; process of organizational equipment, publishing, education, Postdeath organizing founding? agriculture, and electronics processes industries, involving semi-structured interviews and archival data

asee footnote in Table 27.1.

Longitudinal case study of the rhythms Emergence/creation of 2 co-founders of 'The Republic of processes; Temporal Tea' and of the organization itself dynamics (rhythms) of during the 38-week start-up process, processes based on co-founders' real-time correspondence in 138 faxes/letters

Sequence

Sequence

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‘Philosophically Pure’ Articles Pepper argues that, in theory, each worldview is autonomous and mutually exclusive. Thus, he advocates philosophical purity as a cognitively superior approach vis-à-vis philosophical eclecticism. Consistent with this recommendation, nearly one quarter of the articles we reviewed were situated in a single worldview. All such ‘philosophically pure’ articles, except one (Baker et al., 2003), clustered in two worldviews: mechanism (Baron & Tang, 2011; Hill et al., 2014; Hmieleski et al., 2013) and contextualism (Goss et al., 2011; Hjorth, 2013; Johannisson, 2011, Steyaert, 2004, Valliere & Gegenhuber, 2014). This may well be the only point of convergence for two worldviews that share no common ground: mechanism is analytic/integrative, while contextualism is synthetic/dispersive (see Figure 27.1). What might explain this convergence? We believe many mechanistic scholars take it for granted that the only legitimate way to conduct research is to do so from a mechanistic worldview, making them more likely to base their research on this and only this worldview. In contrast, many contextualistic scholars are keenly aware of their (and others') philosophical assumptions and assiduously avoid potential confusion that may result from indiscriminately mixing several worldviews.

‘Philosophically Eclectic’ Articles By mixing worldviews, Pepper argues, authors create internal inconsistencies, which lead to theoretical confusion and ‘cognitive loss’ (1942: 112). Simply put, multiple worldviews ‘get in each other's way’ (Pepper, 1942: 332). With roughly three quarters of the articles we reviewed situated in multiple worldviews, we encountered a number of such instances. Although sometimes frustrating, such mixing is not uncommon in entrepreneurial process scholarship, with criticisms of ontological vacillation and confusion dotting the extant literature (e.g., Moroz & Hindle, 2012). Worse yet and likely a result of philosophical eclecticism, according to Pepper (1942: 113), is scholars’ use of ‘empty abstractions’ in which concepts have lost touch with their root metaphors. In our review, for example, we observed many authors (including ourselves) using the term ‘mechanism’ in organic, formistic, or contextualistic arguments. On the other hand, Pepper allows ‘reasonable eclecticism in practice’ (1942: 330), acknowledging the value of each worldview in shedding different light on a phenomenon and the wisdom of using all four worldviews to illuminate it. This approach parallels Langley's (1999) ‘alternative templates’ strategy for making sense of process phenomena. In our review, three particularly effective eclectic approaches stood out. First, some authors used formism to separate one worldview from another. Such an approach is especially important when pairing the radically different worldviews of mechanism and contextualism – a combination that, if not addressed mindfully, ‘reveals all the evils of eclecticism’ (Pepper, 1942: 148). Sarasvathy (2001) and Berends et al. (2014), for example, use formistic decision-making logic to separate mechanistic causation from contextualistic effectuation processes. Such an approach is, of course, not limited to mechanism and contextualism. Formistic knowledge could also separate, for example, mechanistic recognition, organic discovery, and contextualistic creation processes (Chiles et al., 2010a). Second, others used formism – in which each and every category of a formistic typology was itself deeply rooted in another non-formistic worldview – to structure arguments that were in turn solidly based on the very same non-formistic worldview. For example, Jack et al. (2008) used a typology of process theories, each and every theory of which was organic, to structure their organic explanation of how entrepreneurial networks change and develop over time. Third, still others working in a contextualistic vein effectively integrated other worldviews in service of contextualism. Chiles et al. (2004: 506), for example, did just this by assigning the mechanistic aspects of their research a ‘supporting role’ in service of contextualism. This general argument follows from contextualism's truth criterion of ‘successful working’ (Pepper, 1942: 270): Page 9 of 14

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A powerful implication of this truth criterion is that on contextualistic grounds one can adopt the analytic strategy of an alternative worldview in a given situation if doing so is useful toward some end. For example, a philosophical contextualist might adopt a mechanistic theory because it is useful in identifying ways of ‘controlling’ behavior. Strategic integration of this sort does not violate Pepper's warning against the destructive effects of eclecticism, because no integration of the underlying root metaphors is implied. (Hayes et al., 1988: 101)

The Process of Imagination Imagination, while largely neglected in the extant entrepreneurship literature, is an important thread running through many of the articles we reviewed. Most articles, regardless of the extent to which they address imagination, point to one key notion: imagination is fundamental to the entrepreneurial process. However, with the exception of one conceptual (Hjorth, 2013) and two empirical (Chiles et al., 2013; Dolmans et al., 2014) articles, very few address imagination in great depth. This finding might be because many of these studies invoke imagination as part of a broader process, such as decision making via effectuation (Sarasvathy, 2001; Wiltbank et al., 2006; Berends et al., 2014), sensemaking in processes of venture creation (Cornelissen & Clarke, 2010), sensegiving in entrepreneurial contexts (Cornelissen et al., 2012), and generating novel business ideas (Gielnik et al., 2012). Other studies do not mention imagination per se, but they address processes that can be viewed as being synonymous with imaginative ones. For instance, Bingham and Kahl (2014) emphasize the importance of future expectations and of forward-looking processes for anticipatory learning, Jack et al. (2008: 151) address the co-creation of ‘broad visions of the future,’ and Baker et al. (2003) stress the importance of imagined futures and expectations for the entrepreneurial process. Regardless of the terminology, more light still needs to be shed not only on imagination, but also on the process of imagination. Moreover, we know little about other processes that inform – and are informed by – imaginative processes. For example, with the exception of Hjorth (2013) and Cornelissen et al. (2012), no articles explore the interplay of imaginative and embodied processes; nor do any articles, save Dolmans et al. (2014) and Chiles et al. (2004, 2013), address the connection between individual-level imaginative processes and higher-level disequilibrium processes occurring within firms and markets. Importantly, the vast majority of articles invoking imagination did so from a contextualistic perspective (but see Baker et al., 2003; Gielnik et al., 2012; Jack et al., 2008; Jones & Massa, 2013). Imagination is inherently a relational process that unfolds as a response to context (Hjorth, 2013), allowing entrepreneurs to continually create novelty in their ongoing interactions with others (Chiles et al., 2013; Dolmans et al., 2014; Jack et al., 2008; Johannisson, 2011). Moreover, Chiles et al. (2013) argue that such imaginative processes play an important role in the partially ex nihilo creation of novelty – an argument that emphasizes prospective agency without denying retrospective agency. Such creative imagination processes are consistent with not only contextualism's unique ‘horizontal cosmology,’ which spotlights the infinite analyzability of phenomena (Pepper, 1942: 251) and their causes (Hayes et al., 1988), but also contextualism's notion of ‘spread,’ which draws attention to the quality of a present event being suffused with the past and the future (Pepper, 1942: 239). Methodologically, contextualist scholarship can be achieved by taking a qualitative approach to research (Tsoukas, 1994; Chiles et al., 2010a). Perhaps not surprisingly, the majority of the selected articles invoking imagination, either substantively or moderately, do take such an approach. In fact, the only fully quantitative study (Gielnik et al., 2012) and the two mixed-methods studies (Chiles et al., 2004; Berends et al., 2014) in our selection only invoke imagination in passing. Moreover, most of the fully qualitative articles, with the exception of Baker et al.'s (2003) inductive theory-building study and Cornelissen et al.'s (2012) micro-ethnographic study, apply case study methods (e.g., Bingham & Kahl, 2014; Chiles et al., 2013; Dolmans et al., 2014; Greenwood & Suddaby, 2006; Jack et al., 2008). Page 10 of 14

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Future Directions Our review suggests a number of directions for future research. Here, we focus on two. First, our review suggests the value of exploring imagination – an important, but largely neglected ‘wellspring of the entrepreneurial process’ (Chiles et al., 2013: 278). While others have suggested entrepreneurs’ imaginations drive higherlevel disequilibrium processes (Chiles et al., 2010a,b; Dolmans et al., 2014), we emphasize the importance of understanding the process of entrepreneurial imagination and the interplay of such imaginative processes with lower-level processes. Doing so spotlights the entrepreneur, placing at center stage the individual level of analysis – a focal level often neglected in multilevel process research (Langley et al., 2013). Notwithstanding our efforts to include articles addressing imagination in our review, almost no articles address in any depth the process of imagination itself (but see Hjorth, 2013). For example, we know little about how entrepreneurs’ backward-looking knowledge or retrospective sensemaking affect their forward-looking imaginations, i.e., their prospective sensemaking – much less how such backward- and forward-looking processes intertwine over time. Moreover, while Cornelissen et al. (2012) and Hjorth (2013) address the interplay of entrepreneurs’ imaginative activities and embodied experience, they do not – despite the deeply interwoven nature of imaginative, embodied, and unconscious processes (Modell, 2003) – broach unconscious processes. Johannisson (2011) acknowledges the existence of imaginative and embodied processes in entrepreneurship and Cornelissen and Clarke (2010) recognize the importance of all three processes in entrepreneurship, but neither explores the interplay of these processes. So, exciting work remains to be done in order to better understand how imagination unfolds over time and in interchange with embodied and unconscious processes. Philosophically, we advise researchers to resist the urge to pursue this line of inquiry using the dominant approach in entrepreneurship studies because of the difficulty conceptualizing and operationalizing imagination and the processes by which it unfolds using mechanistic models and techniques. In fact, a mechanistic worldview, we believe, may have prejudiced some scholars against the very concept of imagination in entrepreneurship research – a belief consistent with philosopher Mark Johnson's (1987: 140) statement that there is ‘a deep prejudice against [the concept of imagination] in Western thinking.’ Instead, we recommend researchers adopt non-mechanistic worldviews, especially contextualism (Pepper, 1942). As we have argued, contextualism not only takes time more seriously than the other worldviews, but also is sensitive to bottomless causation, the reach of the past and future into the present, and the continual emergence of novelty (Hayes et al., 1988; Pepper, 1942). These qualities, along with the fact that other worldviews can be integrated if used in the service of contextualism (Hayes et al., 1988), make it a particularly attractive worldview with which to study the process of entrepreneurial imagination. Methodologically, researchers engaging in contextualist scholarship to study the interplay of imaginative, embodied, and unconscious processes may choose from a number of qualitative techniques. The vast majority of the articles we reviewed applied case study methods, which are certainly useful for exploring imaginative processes; however, other techniques may prove better suited to a more nuanced, processual understanding of entrepreneurial imagination. For instance, scholars may opt for in-depth interviews in order to ground current theoretical understandings in the lived experiences of entrepreneurs while further exploring the embodied and unconscious processes by which entrepreneurs engage their imaginations. Specifically, they may consider taking an intersubjective approach to interviewing that would allow them to engage in a conversation and, as a result, in a negotiation of meaning with their informants regarding the interplay of imaginative, embodied, and unconscious processes (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009). Alternatively, researchers may pursue one-on-one ethnography with a focus on participant observation and ‘spect-acting’ (Gill, 2011) – a technique in which researchers actively engage in, rather than passively observe, field action. Such ethnographic techniques would address a pressing need for entrepreneurship researchers to engage in more extended, direct, real-time interaction with process phenomena. Second, we offer directions for future research that rest solidly on our reflexive approach. Our particular approach followed Alvesson and Sandberg (2011: 251–252) in ‘identifying’ and ‘articulating’ the ‘assumptions underlying existing literature.’ Moreover, consistent with Alvesson and Sandberg (2011: 252), we used PepPage 11 of 14

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per's typology as an important resource ‘to open up and scrutinize’ such assumptions. On the basis of our review of the literature using this philosophically informed, reflexive approach, we conclude with three recommendations for studying entrepreneurship as a process: • (1) Render Your Assumptions Explicit. While several articles rendered their philosophical assumptions explicit and a few others did so at least partially, the vast majority of articles we reviewed did not. This often resulted in confusion, to one degree or another, in the form of an indiscriminate commingling of concepts from several worldviews. In order to clarify our thinking and clean up our languaging, we propose authors render their ontological and epistemological assumptions explicit – not only for single-worldview articles but also, and especially, for multiple-worldview articles. • (2) Take Process Seriously. A prominent theme among mechanistic articles was what we termed ‘a process sandwich,’ which invokes a classic ad where Wendy's calls McDonald's out for offering undersized burgers on oversized buns, leaving customers asking: ‘Where's the beef?’ We often found articles’ front and back ends framed in processual terms, but their core, i.e., their methods and results, not taking process very seriously. For example, time was condensed in Likert-scale questions, reduced to lagged effects, collapsed into variables of a cross-sectional analysis, or ignored completely. We encourage our mechanistic colleagues to consider process-oriented techniques such as time-series regression, event history, and gamma analysis, and research designs that temporally sequence the administration of measures such as mobile-phone experience sampling. • (3) Avoid Getting Trapped in a Validation Frame. A common occurrence in non-mechanistic articles we reviewed was that authors (ourselves included) got trapped in what Locke (2011: 614) calls a ‘validation epistemology.’ That is, authors often undermined their non-mechanistic worldviews by unwittingly elevating one or more parts of the mechanistic trinity: validity (e.g., by focusing on minimizing retrospective bias), reliability (e.g., by stressing the calculation of inter-coder reliability), and generalizability (e.g., by framing the inability to generalize to a broader population as a limitation). Following Pepper (1942), we urge our organic, formistic, and contextualistic colleagues to resist judging their research by the standards of mechanism and be mindful of the philosophical assumptions underlying their chosen worldview.

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agement, 8(3): 276–307. Chiles, T.H., Meyer, A.D., & Hench, T.J. 2004. Organizational emergence: The origin and transformation of Branson, Missouri's musical theaters. Organization Science, 15(5): 499–519. Chiles, T.H., Vultee, D.M., Gupta, V.K., Greening, D.W., & Tuggle, C.S. 2010a. The philosophical foundations of a radical Austrian approach to entrepreneurship. Journal of Management Inquiry, 19(2): 138–164. Chiles, T.H., Tuggle, C.S., McMullen, J.S., Bierman, L., & Greening, D.W. 2010b. Dynamic creation: Extending the radical Austrian approach to entrepreneurship. Organization Studies, 31(1): 7–46. Cornelissen, J.P., & Clarke, J.S. 2010. Imagining and rationalizing opportunities: Inductive reasoning and the creation and justification of new ventures. Academy of Management Review, 35(4): 539–557. Cornelissen, J.P., Clarke, J.S., & Cienki, A. 2012. Sensegiving in entrepreneurial contexts: The use of metaphors in speech and gesture to gain and sustain support for novel business ventures. International Small Business Journal, 30(3): 213–241. Dolmans, S.A.M., van Burg, E., Reymen, I.M.M.J., & Romme, A.G.L. 2014. Dynamics of resource slack and constraints: Resource positions in action. Organization Studies, 35(4): 511–549. Gartner, W.B. 1985. A conceptual framework for describing the phenomenon of new venture creation. Academy of Management Review, 10(4): 696–706. Gartner, W.B., & Brush, C.G. 2007. Entrepreneurship as organizing. In M.P. Rice & T.G. Habbershon (Eds.), Entrepreneurship, 3: 1–20. Westport CT: Praeger. Garud, R., & Karn?e, P. 2003. Bricolage versus breakthrough: Distributed and embedded agency in technology entrepreneurship. Research Policy, 32(2): 277–300. Gielnik, M.M., Frese, M., Graf, J.M., & Kampschulte, A. 2012. Creativity in the opportunity identification process and the moderating effect of diversity of information. Journal of Business Venturing, 27(5): 559–576. Gill, R. 2011. The shadow in organizational ethnography: Moving beyond shadowing to spect-acting. Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, 6(2): 115–133. Goss, D., Jones, R., Betta, M., & Latham, J. 2011. Power as practice: A micro-sociological analysis of the dynamics of emancipatory entrepreneurship. Organization Studies, 32(2): 211–229. Greenwood, R., & Suddaby, R. 2006. Institutional entrepreneurship in mature fields: The Big Five accounting firms. Academy of Management Journal, 49(1): 27–48. Grégoire, D.A., Barr, P.S., & Shepherd, D.A. 2010. Cognitive processes of opportunity recognition: The role of structural alignment. Organization Science, 21(2): 413–31. Hayes, S.C., Hayes, L.J., & Reese, H.W. 1988. Finding the philosophical core: A review of Stephen C. Pepper's World Hypotheses. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 50(1): 97–111. Hill, A.D., Wallace, J.C., Ridge, J.W., Johnson, P.D., Paul, J.B., & Suter, T.A. 2014. Innovation and effectiveness of co-founded ventures: A process model. Journal of Business and Psychology, 29(1): 145–159. Hjorth, D. 2013. Absolutely fabulous! Fabulation and organisation-creation in processes of becoming-entrepreneur. Society and Business Review, 8(3): 205–224. Hmieleski, K.M., Corbett, A.C., & Baron, R.A. 2013. Entrepreneurs’ improvisational behavior and firm performance: A study of dispositional and environmental moderators. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 7(2): 138–150. Jack, S., Dodd, S.D., & Anderson, A.R. 2008. Change and the development of entrepreneurial networks over time: A processual perspective. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 20(2): 125–59. Johannisson, B. 2011. Towards a practice theory of entrepreneuring. Small Business Economics, 36(2): 135–50. Johnson, M. 1987. The Body in the Mind. University of Chicago Press. Jones, C., & Massa, F.G. 2013. From novel practice to consecrated exemplar: Unity Temple as a case of institutional evangelizing. Organization Studies, 34(8): 1099–1136. Khaire, M. 2014. Fashioning an industry: Socio-cognitive processes in the construction of worth of a new industry. Organization Studies, 35(1): 41–74. Kuckertz, A. 2013. What's hot in entrepreneurship research 2013? https://entrepreneurship.uni-hohenheim.de/uploads/media/What_s_hot_in_Entrepreneurship_Research_2013.pdf Accessed March 14, 2014. Kvale, S., & Brinkmann, S. 2009. InterViews. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Langley, A. 1999. Strategies for theorizing from process data. Academy of Management Review, 24(4): 691–710. Page 13 of 14

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Langley, A., Smallman, C., Tsoukas, H., & Van de Ven, A. 2013. Process studies of change in organization and management: Unveiling temporality, activity, and flow. Academy of Management Journal, 56(1): 1–13. Lichtenstein, B.B., & Kurjanowicz, B. 2010. Tangibility, momentum, and the emergence of The Republic of Tea. In W.B. Gartner (Eds.), Entrepreneurial Narrative Theory Ethnomethodology and Reflexivity: 75–95. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Digital Press. Lichtenstein, B.B., Carter, N.M., Dooley, K.J., & Gartner, W.B. 2007. Complexity dynamics of nascent entrepreneurship. Journal of Business Venturing, 22(2): 236–61. Locke, K. 2011. Field research practice in management and organization studies: Reclaiming its tradition of discovery. Academy of Management Annals, 5(1): 613–52. Low, M.B., & MacMillan, I.C. 1988. Entrepreneurship: Past research and future challenges. Journal of Management, 14(2): 139–161. McMullen, J.S., & Dimov, D. 2013. Time and the entrepreneurial journey: The problems and promise of studying entrepreneurship as a process. Journal of Management Studies, 50(8): 1481–1512. Meyer, A.D., Brooks, G.R., & Goes, J.B. 1990. Environmental jolts and industry revolutions: Organizational responses to discontinuous change. Strategic Management Journal, 11: 93–110. Meyer, A.D., Gaba, V., & Colwell, K.A. 2005. Organizing far from equilibrium: Nonlinear change in organizational fields. Organization Science, 16(5): 456–473. Modell, A.H. 2003. Imagination and the Meaningful Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Moroz, P.W. & Hindle, K. 2012. Entrepreneurship as a process: Toward harmonizing multiple perspectives. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 36(4): 781–818. Navis, C., & Glynn, M.A. 2010. How new market categories emerge: Temporal dynamics of legitimacy, identity, and entrepreneurship in satellite radio, 1990–2005. Administrative Science Quarterly, 55(3): 439–471. Pepper, S.C. 1942. World Hypotheses. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Santos, F.M., & Eisenhardt, K.M. 2009. Constructing markets and shaping boundaries: Entrepreneurial power in nascent fields. Academy of Management Journal, 52(4): 643–671. Sarasvathy, S.D. 2001. Causation and effectuation: Toward a theoretical shift from economic inevitability to entrepreneurial contingency. Academy of Management Review, 26(2): 243–263. Scherdin, M. & Zander, I. 2014. On the role and importance of core assumptions in the field of entrepreneurship research: A neurophilosophical perspective. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research, 20(3): 216–236. Shane, S.A., & Venkataraman, S. 2000. The promise of entrepreneurship as a field of research. Academy of Management Review, 25(1): 217–226. Steyaert, C. 2004. The prosaics of entrepreneurship. In D. Hjorth & C. Steyaert (Eds.), Narrative and Discursive Approaches in Entrepreneurship: 8–21. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Steyaert, C. 2007. ‘Entrepreneuring’ as a conceptual attractor? A review of process theories in 20 years of entrepreneurship studies. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 19(6): 453–477. Svejenova, S., Mazza, C., & Planellas, M. 2007. Cooking up change in haute cuisine: Ferran Adrià as an institutional entrepreneur. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 28(5): 539–561. Tsoukas, H. 1994. Refining common sense: Types of knowledge in management studies. Journal of Management Studies, 31(6): 761–780. Tsoukas, H., & Chia, R. 2011. Why philosophy matters to organization theory. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 32(1): 1–21. Valliere, D., & Gegenhuber, T. 2014. Entrepreneurial remixing: Bricolage and postmodern resources. International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, 15(1): 5–15. Verduyn, K. 2010. Rhythm analyzing the emergence of The Republic of Tea. In W.B. Gartner (Ed.), Entrepreneurial Narrative Theory Ethnomethodology and Reflexivity: 153–166. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Digital Press. Walsh, I.J., & Bartunek, J.M. 2011. Cheating the fates: Organizational foundings in the wake of demise. Academy of Management Journal, 54(5): 1017–1044. Wiltbank, R., Dew, N., Read, S., & Sarasvathy, S.D. 2006. What to do next? The case for non-predictive strategy. Strategic Management Journal, 27(10): 981–998. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n27 Page 14 of 14

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies From the Process of Innovation to Innovation as Process

Contributors: Raghu Garud, Joel Gehman, Arun Kumaraswamy & Philipp Tuertscher Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "From the Process of Innovation to Innovation as Process" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n28 Print pages: 451-465 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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From the Process of Innovation to Innovation as Process Raghu GarudJoel GehmanArun KumaraswamyPhilipp Tuertscher Well, I was doing some experiments with a new polymer system and I made this material and said, ‘This is interesting.’ When I looked at it under the microscope, it was beautiful! Little crystalline-like spheres. Clear polymer spheres that kind of sparkled in the light. The first time I saw it, I said, ‘This has got to be something.’ Then I started telling people about it. (as quoted in Lindhal, 1988) These are the reflections of Spence Silver, who stumbled upon an impermanent adhesive that eventually became the foundation for Post-it Notes. Of course, one could view Silver's discovery as a random event that could happen to anybody. But Silver was not anybody. He was a trained chemist who was experimenting beyond the frontiers of what was already known in his field. And, it was a deep knowledge of chemistry that led Silver to find beauty in the material he had discovered. In other words, Silver's discovery was the result of his disciplined search for something novel. But novelty for its own sake may just remain a hopeful monstrosity (Goldschmidt, 1940). After all, as Francis Bacon (1625) noted in his essay ‘Innovations': ‘As the births of living creatures at first are ill-shapen, so are all innovations’ (Bacon, 1867: 176). For instance, even Silver's 3M colleagues considered the substance he had stumbled upon an oddity. Many were indifferent when Silver asked them to help him find an application for the substance: For the most part, I didn't succeed at getting people excited about the adhesive. These people are busy. They're not just sitting around waiting for the wild-eyed scientists from Corporate Research to come in and say, ‘Hey, I've got something really nifty. You should try it out.’ I managed to get it into the labs, but it became a dead issue rather quickly. (as quoted in Lindhal, 1988) Ultimately, it took a series of transformations by a number of people at 3M and beyond before the substance found an application as a temporary adhesive in Post-it Notes. As Silver noted, The discovery sort of starts the ball rolling. There are so many hoops that a product idea has to jump through. It really takes a bunch of individuals to carry it through the process. It's not just a Spence Silver or an Art Fry. It's a whole host of people. (as quoted in Lindhal, 1988) The development of 3M's Post-it Notes exemplifies a process perspective on the emergence of novelty offered by Usher (1954) in his historical analysis of innovations. Usher concluded that ‘acts of insight,’ such as Silver's, are part of a longer chain of events. Specifically, knowledgeable individuals (such as Silver) perceive an incomplete yet emergent pattern that, once a ‘stage has been set’ by bringing together relevant actors and artifacts, may lead to insight and subsequent development. This process is full of serendipitous events; therefore, specific moments of insight and their subsequent developmental paths cannot be predicted precisely. Nevertheless, these moments are shaped by the arrangements in place and the efforts of multiple people who transform and give meaning to the materials at hand. In this chapter, we revisit Usher's model, which offers a holistic view of the process of innovation, one driven by potentialities. We then show how it provides an appropriate framework to explore innovation as process, which we introduce in more depth. Subsequently, we explore the complexities associated with innovation, which allows us to progress from a synoptic view on the process of innovation to a performative view of innovation as process. Although this distinction may appear to be a mere play on words, it constitutes a fundamental ontological shift in our understanding of innovation. We explore the implications of this shift in greater detail in the discussion section.

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Usher's (1954) A History of Mechanical Inventions offered an early process view on how innovations emerge. In proposing his model, Usher moved away from both a ‘transcendentalist’ view in which innovations emerge through the unexplainable intuitive actions of heroic inventors, and a ‘mechanistic’ view in which the emergence of innovation is inevitable and determined by past events. Instead, Usher proposed that invention implies an act of insight – an act that goes beyond the exercise of normal or known skills.1 He also noted that a number of such acts of insights lead to major inventions (what he labeled ‘strategic inventions') through a process of cumulative synthesis, with each serving as a stepping-stone for others. In other words, innovation is a collective and distributed accomplishment. Usher's work caught the attention of several scholars including Ruttan (1959), who contrasted Usher's process of cumulative synthesis with Schumpeter's (1939) process of creative destruction. As Ruttan (1959) noted, Schumpeter did not offer a theory of the process underlying creative destruction, or the micro-details of how innovations unfold. By comparison, Usher's process model opened the black box of innovation.

Steps of Usher's Model Although the act of insight itself is a pivotal moment, it is but one step in a longer ‘genetic sequence of four steps’ (Usher, 1954) (see Figure 28.1a for a summary). Usher's genius was to recognize that even prior to any ‘eureka moment,’ actors may perceive an incomplete or unsatisfactory pattern. He noted that, in many cases, the problem is an unfulfilled want, whose gratification is made possible by the presence of some fortuitous conditions. Usher labeled these conditions as a setting of the stage, in which the elements necessary for a solution are brought together through some particular configuration of events or thought. Usher drew upon work by Köhler (1925), who observed that apes were able to accomplish acts of insight under certain conditions (e.g., perception of a stick as a tool) and not others (e.g., when such stimuli were absent). So too is the case with humans, where the setting of the stage serves as the basis for providing mediated contingencies that engender systematic efforts to find solutions to perceived problems through trial and error.

Figure 28.1Usher's process of cumulative synthesisSource: Usher, A. P. 1954. A History of Mechanical Inventions, Revised ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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By drawing attention to the role of upstream events and activities in fostering acts of insight, Usher was well ahead of his time in understanding the process of innovation. For instance, his emphasis on the importance of context in providing essential ingredients2 contrasts sharply with a romanticized view of heroic individuals who, through sheer will and genius, are able to come up with innovations. Yet, even in Usher's model, individuals have a role. Specifically, acts of insight emerge through the resolution of tensions generated by the association of ideas from across multiple domains of activities (what Koestler, 1964, labeled ‘bisociation'). As an illustration, Koestler offers events leading up to Archimedes’ eureka moment. According to Koestler, two separate fields, F1 (the problem of the crown) and F2 (the overflow of the bathtub), were simultaneously open in Archimedes’ mind, thereby generating a creative tension, without which the favorable chance constellation that led to his eureka moment may not have occurred. However exciting the emergence of a novel idea may be, Usher (1954: 65) highlighted that any act of insight must be ‘studied critically, understood in its fullness, and learned as a technique of thought or action.’ This is yet another step of Usher's model that he labeled critical revision and full mastery. This involves considerable effort, and requires gaining mastery of newly perceived relations and working these relations into the entire context of which they are a part.

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By emphasizing critical revision, Usher showed deep appreciation of developmental steps that unfold subsequent to an act of insight. Even today, many think of innovation as an outcome – a novel idea or an end product. In contrast, Usher showed that emergent ideas are but part of a longer sequence of steps, which may eventually result in valuable products and services only if they are carefully nurtured. Specifically, Usher noted that critical revision is likely to trigger new acts of insight that, in turn, build upon prior steps in nonlinear ways. Overall, Usher labeled the process of emergence, elaboration, and implementation of novelty as representing cumulative synthesis of many ongoing efforts (see Figure 28.1b). Cumulative synthesis involves the various steps found in the emergence of any individual innovation that in turn set the stage for others that follow. For instance, the very perception of an incomplete pattern may require an act of insight, or the act of insight may lead to the solution of a major problem resulting in a strategic invention. Usher took pains to explain that considerable uncertainty surrounds any act of insight, thereby making it impossible to predict the timing or the precise configuration of a solution in advance. As a result, ‘the chance that appears in such events [novelty emergence] exhibits the contingency of systems of events that disclose patterns and exhibit many interdependencies in a universe that is not wholly determinate … It is a chance occurrence in the sense of being unforeseen and unplanned’ (Usher 1954: 79). Others did not accord Usher's model the status of theory as it could not be used for prediction – a key operational criterion for assessing a theory of technical innovations at the time (Gilfillan, 1935). Yet, it offered important guidelines as to how one can try and ‘beat the odds’ stacked against innovation (Garud, Nayyar, & Shapira, 1997). For instance, individuals can actively cultivate different interpretive schemes and opposing fields that place contradictory requirements, thereby embracing the tension that provokes the perception of incomplete patterns and, eventually, acts of insight (Dougherty, 1992; Hargadon & Sutton, 1997). Policymakers and managers may actively intervene to set the stage to facilitate acts of insights and to enable critical revision (Ruttan, 1959). Such interventions are performative (Austin, 1962; Callon, 2010; Pickering, 1994); that is, they may be purposeful, but the specific sequence of events that unfold cannot be fully predicted.

Asynchrony and Diachrony Mintzberg (2005) noted that we are often compelled to provide a linear account of a nonlinear world. Usher too confronted this problem in trying to develop a model of a process that is essentially nonlinear. Usher's approach was to first provide a linear account (his four-step sequential model) and then to break the linearity by noting that different elements of the model fold unto one another (much like a fractal). Specifically, Usher noted that cumulative synthesis is characterized by ‘discontinuities and indeterminate resistances so that it cannot be described as a sequence of reflex actions, or as a necessary process in the sense of a mechanically deterministic process’ (Usher, 1954: 65). These observations draw attention to the temporal connections across the different steps of Usher's model. While the perception of an incomplete pattern is ongoing and acts of insight may occur at opportune moments, the setting of the stage and critical revision involve different tempos. In other words, the process of innovation is characterized by multiple time scales and not by a single linear conceptualization of time (Braudel, 1958; Lee, 2012; Tomich, 2012). Multiple time scales generate asynchronies across the different steps of Usher's process – for instance, between the emergence of different components of an innovation and the infrastructure required for its development and implementation. As shown in Figure 28.2, which depicts the emergence of the video cassette recorder (VCR), the innovation process itself is uneven (Rosenberg, 1982).

Figure 28.2Asynchrony and diachrony in the emergence of the VCRSource: Page 5 of 16

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Adapted from Irvine, J., & Martin, B. R. 1984. Foresight in Science: Picking the Winners. Dover, NH: Pinter.

Considerations of asynchrony draw attention to issues such as ‘time pacing’ (Brown & Eisenhardt, 1997; Gersick, 1994) and ‘momentum’ (Hughes, 1969). Yet, despite such attempts to orchestrate the process, unanticipated roadblocks emerge in and through action (Pickering, 1993), requiring changes in business plans (Doganova & Eyquem-Renault, 2009). There also can be delays in the emergence of the infrastructure (Ansari & Garud, 2009), resulting in partial implementation (Whittington, Pettigrew, Peck, Fenton, & Conyon, 1999). Such delays allow incumbent technologies to make progress (Abernathy, Clark, & Kantrow, 1983; Henderson, 1995), thereby reducing performance gaps between the old and the new. As a consequence, the overall development and implementation of innovations can be dampened or delayed (Garud, Tuertscher, & Van de Ven, 2013). The adoption of innovations may even result in initial dips in productivity as existing sociotechnical orders are disrupted (McAfee, 2002). This implies diachrony, wherein perceptions of outcomes can change dynamically Page 6 of 16

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over time. Indeed, what is considered to be a mistake at a given time may turn out to be valuable later, and vice versa (Garud, Gehman, & Giuliani, 2016). For instance, an idea may not be valuable due to a lack of complementary assets, as Brown (1997) described in the case of Xerox PARC's development of its Alto personal computer designed to work in a distributed network. But when these assets emerge, latent ideas can suddenly become valuable. As Brown (1997: 96) noted, ‘Now, some dozen years later, our original views of client-server and networking architectures are allowing that to happen.’ Such diachrony has been documented in many different domains, including the emergence of science (Irvine & Martin, 1984).

Innovation as Process Implicit in Usher's four-step model of the innovation process is a largely ‘synoptic view’ of the process of innovation, in which ‘the entity that undergoes change is shown to have distinct states at different points in time’ (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002: 570), and thus, the journey has a beginning, middle, and ending (Van de Ven & Poole, 2005). Those who subscribe to such a view embrace tools such as the stage-gate model (Cooper, 2001) that prescribes a temporal sequence of ever-tightening and exogenously applied selection criteria. Actors place their bets on specific trajectories, one of which eventually wins out. Success and failure are unequivocally defined. In contrast, a performative view (see Table 28.1) conceives of change as being implicated in the sayings and doings of the various actors involved (Austin, 1962; Callon, 2010). This perspective acknowledges the indeterminacy and openness of an ongoing process, and the futility of trying to control it by using linear approaches such as the stage-gate model. Indeed, success and failure are no longer unequivocally defined.3 Instead of proceeding through a series of discrete stage-gates, actors strategically mobilize events from the past, present, and future in pursuit of their projects and initiatives. The context is not given. Rather, actors contextualize innovations by creating, strengthening, or breaking linkages between social and material elements (Garud, Gehman, & Giuliani, 2014). The mechanism involved is not diffusion (Rogers, 2003), but translation (Callon, 1986; Czarniawska & Sevón, 1996). Table 28.1Assumptions underlying synoptic and performative view of innovation process Synoptic View

Performative View

Actors contextualize their initiatives by actively reinforcing or Contexts are exogenous, with actors adaptde-coupling links and continually re-drawing their relational ing and then getting locked in to a path. boundaries. The beginning, the middle and the end are The beginning, the middle and the end are mobilized and fixed events between which innovations are modified by actors to constitute innovation journeys in-therefined. making. Overall perspective is one of the processes of innovation, driven by linear stage-gates with success and failure defined unequivocally

Overall perspective is one of innovation as process, driven by non-linear, ongoing translations between multiple social and material elements, remembered, experienced, and imagined.

Complex Adaptive Process We briefly explore what a performative view of innovation entails by unpacking the layers of complexities imPage 7 of 16

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plicit in the process of cumulative synthesis articulated by Usher. A core feature of Usher's model is the emergence of novelty through a nonlinear recombination of already existing ideas. Here, we see a direct connection with research on complex adaptive processes. Complex adaptive processes result from the interaction of a large number of entities, whose actions are driven by simple rules. The complexity can be represented as a ‘fitness landscape’ (Kauffman, 1993), the topography of which is determined by the number of entities (N) and the degree of interdependence among them (K). Recombination of entities occurs through a process of search across this landscape and results in the emergence of novel outcomes (Levinthal, 1997). Besides shaping search, fitness landscapes also serve as selection environments. That is, what survives is determined by how adapted the emergent variations are to exogenous fitness landscapes. We illustrate the implications of considering such complexity with an example from the 3M Company, which has nurtured a number of technology platforms to enable recombination. These technology platforms are intellectual spaces within which clusters of related ideas and artifacts with potential are brought together and kept alive to facilitate potential cross-pollination. Cross-pollination within and across these platforms occurs through a variety of mechanisms such as technology fairs, rotation of people, and narratives of innovation (Bartel & Garud, 2008). These spawn ‘garbage can’ – type dynamics (Cohen, March, & Olsen, 1972) as aptly summarized by Art Fry: At 3M we've got so many different types of technology operating and so many experts and so much equipment scattered here and there, that we can piece things together when we're starting off. We can go to this place and do ‘Step A’ on a product, and we can make the adhesive and some of the raw materials here, and do one part over here, and another part over there, and convert a space there and make a few things that aren't available. (as quoted in Nayak & Ketteringham, 1986: 66–67) Overall, this perspective emphasizes the role played by nonlinear recombination in the emergence of novelty, thereby breaking away from the vestiges of determinism that remain in the linear, synoptic view of innovation (see Lichtenstein, 2014, for a more thorough review). However, it leaves underspecified the micro-mechanisms underlying recombination, subsequent entrenchment, and progressive evolution of the fitness landscapes themselves. Specifically, what is required is a perspective that highlights the relational facets of interactions that unfold during the emergence of innovations (or what Stacey, 2001, termed ‘complex responsive processes').

Complex Relational Process Usher highlighted emergence of novelty as a ‘cultural achievement … based upon the accumulation of many small acts of insight by individuals’ (Usher, 1954: 68). By characterizing ongoing distributed work involved in the emergence of novelty as a cultural achievement, Usher's observations connect innovation with research on complex relational processes (Bakhtin, 1981; Garud et al., 2013; Sawyer, 2003; Tsoukas, 2009). From a relational perspective, actors are not atomistic agents working within contexts. Rather, they attempt to ‘translate’ their efforts by associating with others and experimenting with material artifacts (Akrich, Callon, & Latour, 2002). Such ‘translation is a process, never a completed accomplishment’ (Callon, 1986: 196). Specifically, the identities and preferences of the actors involved and the utility of the artifacts that become entangled are outcomes of the process involving experimentation, bricolage, and improvisation (Garud & Karn?e, 2001). Coming back to 3M and the discovery of Post-it Notes, having stumbled upon the weak adhesive substance, Silver decided to tell anyone who would listen, but for most part did not get any response. Yet, he continued to talk about this piece of junk, and thereby kept it alive. A series of experiments unfolded over time, undertaken by a host of people who engaged with different kinds of materials. For instance, the glue was applied to a board on which paper could be stuck, but this effort was not successful. Eventually, it was Art Fry who Page 8 of 16

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had another act of insight, when he realized that the weak glue could be applied to a piece of paper which could then be used as a bookmark.4 The overall process was one of unfolding relationality (Garud, Simpson, Langley, & Tsoukas, 2015). In the process, the identities of the people involved and the functionality of the materials that became associated continually shifted and emerged.

Complex Temporal Process Finally, according to Usher, the process of cumulative synthesis is ongoing, with elements of one innovation strand informing other innovation strands over time. He wrote: ‘In historical analysis, it would be unusual not to find that several strategic inventions were involved in any achievement of large social importance’ (Usher, 1954: 69). Even ideas and artifacts not considered to be useful at a given time, if they are kept alive, can serve as solutions to problems encountered in the future. That is, innovation is mostly about going ‘back to the future,’ a process of finding future utility from past efforts. But what are the mechanisms underlying such ‘backing and forthing'? To answer this question, we need to view innovation as a complex temporal process (Garud, Gehman, & Kumaraswamy, 2011). Here, the past, present, and future are all connected within a field of experience (Tsoukas & Hatch, 2001) – what the French philosopher Henri Bergson called duration (durée). The present is experienced in the entwining of the past and future that are continually reconstructed in everyday activities (Mead, 1932; Ricoeur, 1984; Simpson, 2014). Consequently, different memories of the past and different imagined futures will generate different experiences in the unfolding present (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Schultz & Hernes, 2013). To fully understand what temporal complexity implies, let us revisit Silver's recollection of his experiences. During the course of an experiment to create strong adhesives, Silver ‘wanted to see what would happen if I put a lot of it into the reaction mixture’ (as quoted in Lindhal, 1988). It was then that Silver stumbled on the glue that did not glue. When asked whether the discovery of this weak adhesive was a mistake, Silver replied, ‘No, it was not a mistake, but a solution looking for a problem,’ and that ‘when I looked at it under the microscope, it was beautiful!’ (as quoted in Lindhal, 1988). Silver's act of insight represents a serendipitous discovery (Merton & Barber, 2004) that occurred during an opportune moment, or kairos in Greek mythology. Such kairotic moments represent the capacity to understand the strategic importance of the unexpected. This capacity, in turn, is informed by a capacity to see across time to visualize the strategic importance of anomalies. Overall, acts of insight occur as actors cultivate opportune moments within time (kairotic moments) and by going back into the pool of accumulated knowledge even as they imagine future worlds.

Summary Table 28.2 summarizes the key elements of the three perspectives on complexity with regard to the innovation process. In contrast to linear variance-based (Mohr, 1982) understandings of innovation, a complex adaptive perspective draws attention to nonlinear dynamics and emergence (Dougherty and Dunne, 2011). The shift from a complex adaptive perspective to a complex relational perspective is accomplished by endogenizing context to offer a flat, relational ontology (Latour, 2005). In turn, the shift from a complex relational perspective to a complex temporal perspective is accomplished by endogenizing time to offer an intertemporal ontology (e.g., Bergson, 1913; Ricoeur, 1984). With each shift, the synoptic view of the process of innovation as a sequence of genetic steps is progressively transformed into a performative view of innovation as process.

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Table 28.2Complexity perspectives on innovation

Process of Innovation versus Innovation as Process We began by exploring the process of innovation using Usher's (1954) model as a launching pad. The four steps of the process – perception of an incomplete pattern, setting of the stage, the act of insight, and critical revision and full mastery – aptly describe any innovation journey. The process ranges from the emergence of problems and solutions, to the development and implementation of potentially valuable products and services (Van de Ven, Polley, Garud, & Venkataraman, 1999). En route, multiple actors with different frames of reference and different levels of inclusion become involved (Garud & Karn?e, 2003), thereby shaping the innovation journey through contestation and justification (Tuertscher, Garud, & Kumaraswamy, 2014). Moreover, the journey itself is full of ups and downs, false starts, and dead ends (Figure 28.3).

Figure 28.3Ups and downs during an innovation journeySource: Adapted from Jolly, V. K. 1997. Commercializing New Technologies: Getting from Mind to Market. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

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These observations provide scholars an opportunity to pursue fresh avenues for research. For instance, what are the relationships between early stages of innovation and later stages given the asynchronies and diachronies involved? How do entrepreneurs manage the many competing demands along the way, such as between employees, investors, customers, and partners with different motivations? Is it possible that the more groundbreaking an invention is, the more difficult it is to develop, implement, and gain acceptance? Questions such as these are informed by a synoptic understanding of process (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002), in which innovation is conceptualized as a series of discrete steps. Departing from these assumptions, we articulated a performative view by considering the complexities associated with any innovation journey. Beginning with a complex adaptive perspective, we then considered complex relational and complex temporal perspectives. The latter two perspectives entailed endogenizing context and time, respectively. Such a progressive shift in perspectives generated a performative view of innovation as process. A performative view suggests a very different research agenda founded on a paradox that actors confront as they deal with unfolding relational and temporal horizons. On the one hand, actors must be committed to their projects based on their beliefs to convince and enroll the necessary stakeholders and resources. On the other, given the uncertainties involved, innovation journeys will necessarily have ups and downs, and these actors must also be ready to ‘discredit’ their own beliefs and convictions (Weick, 1996). Consequently, it is critical to understand the narratives that entrepreneurs offer to generate legitimacy for their innovations while retaining the flexibility to deviate in concert with emergent circumstances (Garud, Schildt, & Lant, 2014). Scholars interested in studying innovation journeys from a performative view may find it necessary to embrace new templates and methods (Gehman, Treviño, & Garud, 2013; Langley & Abdallah, 2011; Langley, Smallman, Tsoukas, & Van de Ven, 2013). For instance, it is important to embrace the notion of symmetry (Latour, 2005). Symmetry implies the need to consider the role of both social forces and material properties when examining innovation processes. Symmetry also applies to events – an event can hold different implications Page 11 of 16

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for different actors depending upon the actor-networks in which they are entangled. Symmetry also requires developing theories that can explain both successes and failures, given that virtuous and vicious cycles are possible at any time (Pinch & Bijker, 1987). By being sensitive to these symmetries, researchers can offer more holistic understandings of innovation as process. A second implication of performativity is that any innovation is realized in practice (Pickering, 1993). This leads us to conceptualize an innovation journey as involving translation instead of diffusion. Any articulation of an innovation is but an intervention that inevitably encounters misfires or overflows (Callon, 2010). When felicitous conditions are not present, those involved may find it necessary to ‘pivot’ (Ries, 2011). Innovation, from this perspective, is an ongoing unfinished accomplishment (Garud, Jain, & Tuertscher, 2008). Another implication is the futility of identifying first movers in an innovation journey (an implication of the synoptic view). Instead, from a performative view, we are always in the ‘thick of time’ (Garud & Gehman, 2012), with temporal experiences being narratively constituted. Such narrative constitution is exemplified by Steve Jobs's (2005) account, in his commencement speech at Stanford University, of how he connected the dots looking backward in order to go forward: Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later. Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

Conclusion Everyday, in our personal and professional lives, we innovate. Nothing matters more to our success and our survival – and yet we struggle with our understanding of the process of innovation. Sometimes it is messy; sometimes it is elegant; usually it is both and more. Our difficulty in grasping the process of innovation is vexing. Successful innovation brings us joy and confidence and well-being. It generates long-term sustainable growth. Once we've tasted this wonderful experience, we want to experience it again – but we are frequently confounded. The process is nonlinear, and it cannot be managed in traditional ways. By following our best practices and instincts, we can generate a Post-it Note or a valuable new pharmaceutical like imiquoimod, or we can hit a dry hole. (Coyne, 1999: vii) In this observation by Dr. William Coyne, erstwhile Senior Vice President of Research and Development at 3M Company, we see both the allure of innovation and the mystery surrounding it – ‘while successful innovation [as noun] brings us joy, the process [as verb] is such that one cannot manage it in traditional ways.’ Indeed, this is the fundamental paradox of innovation that we explored in this chapter. As we move from a variance view to a synoptic view, and then to a performative view, we see that our efforts to manage the process of innovation ‘in traditional ways’ may diminish the very possibilities of accomplishing innovation! To resolve this paradox, we must view innovation as process in and of itself. Our intention in this chapter is to provide some initial thoughts on what such a change in perspective entails. Page 12 of 16

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Notes We thank Ann Langley and Hari Tsoukas for their helpful comments. 1He noted that acts of skill include all learned activities whether such learning is an achievement of an isolated individual or a response to instructions by other individuals. Inventive acts of insight, however, are not learned and result in new organizations of prior knowledge and experience. 2Note how these steps resonate with Whitehead's (1933: 179) observations on creativity: ‘The initial situation with its creativity [setting of the stage] can be termed the initial phase of the new occasion. It can equally well be termed the ‘actual world’ relative to that occasion. It has a certain unity of its own, expressive of its capacity of providing the objects requisite for a new occasion, and also expressive of its conjoint activity whereby it is essentially the primary phase of a new occasion … This basic situation, this actual world, this primary phase, this real potentiality – however you characterize it – as a whole is active with its inherent creativity, but in its details it provides the passive objects which derive their activity from the creativity of the whole. The creativity is the actualization of potentiality [act of insight], and the process of actualization is an occasion of experiencing.' 3What may be a failure to one group may be a success to another. For instance, in the case of information systems, Cecez-Kecmanovic, Kautz, and Abrahall (2014) highlighted the inherent indeterminacy of success and failure, proposing instead a performative perspective that conceived of success and failure as relational effects performed by sociomaterial practices (Orlikowski & Scott, 2008) including developers, managers, technologies, and other actants. Moreover, failure at one point in time could be a success at another and vice versa (Garud & Nayyar, 1994). For instance, 3M's Spence Silver's unsuccessful efforts to generate a strong adhesive led to the discovery of a temporary adhesive (potentially a failure), which was then successfully employed in Post-it Notes. 4Art Fry's assignment of functionality represents ‘interpretive flexibility’ (Pinch & Bijker, 1987), which is driven by abduction (Peirce, 1965).

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Power and Process: The Production of ‘Knowing’ Subjects and ‘Known’ Objects

Contributors: Cynthia Hardy & Robyn Thomas Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Power and Process: The Production of ‘Knowing’ Subjects and ‘Known’ Objects" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n29 Print pages: 466-479 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Power and Process: The Production of ‘Knowing’ Subjects and ‘Known’ Objects Cynthia HardyRobyn Thomas Over the past decade there has been, as noted by the editors of this handbook, an increasing interest in the study of temporal evolution, unfolding activities, incessant change, movement, and fluidity in organizations. This perspective, which has come to be known as ‘process organization studies', aims to ‘capture the dynamic, continuous and endogenous nature of change and changing, whether intended or not’ as stated by the editors in their original proposal for this edited volume. Early research on organizational processes includes Mintzberg's studies of emergent strategy (Mintzberg & Waters, 1985), Pettigrew's (1985) examination of organizational change, and Weick's (1995) work on sensemaking. More recently, process researchers have engaged more directly with process philosophers such as Whitehead, Bergson, James, and Rescher. In doing so, they have sought to delineate what constitutes a sensitivity to process (e.g., Van de Ven & Poole, 2005), as well as to develop a vocabulary and methodology with which processual dynamics can be examined more easily (e.g., Langley, 2009). In this chapter, we examine the interrelationship between process studies of organizations and the work on power in the organizational literature. In the first part, we revisit the theoretical assumptions underpinning different approaches to studying processes and then explore whether they are consistent with different conceptualizations of power. In this way, we are able to identify whether and how the investigation of power relations can contribute to the understanding of organizational processes. We demonstrate that the greatest potential lies at the intersection of a discursive view of power and performative or ‘strong’ process research. In the second part of the chapter, we explore this intersection in more detail by identifying two key lacunae in the performative process literature – agency and stabilization – which have led to considerable confusion regarding the status of the ‘knowing’ (and acting) subject and its role in initiating and guiding processes, as well as how processes stabilize sufficiently to produce recognizable, ‘known’ objects. We conclude the chapter showing how, by incorporating a discursive view of power, performative process theorists can help to resolve this confusion.

Part I: Studies of Process and of Power In this section, we first clarify the assumptions that differentiate process theorizing from ‘non-process’ research, as well as those that differentiate what are commonly referred to as the synoptic or ‘weak’ and performative or ‘strong’ approaches to process. We then turn our attention to power and identify three different perspectives: studies on the social psychology of individual power-holders; studies that explore how individuals mobilize power in organizations; and critical studies of power and discourse. We examine how the first approach to power is incompatible with process studies, while the second displays similar assumptions as those underpinning synoptic process studies. We show how a discursive view of power aligns closely with a performative view of process although, so far, very few studies have brought these two research domains together.

What Are Process Studies of Organizations? To establish what process studies of organizations comprise, theorists have typically contrasted a process approach with research that is not process oriented. The latter adopts a causal analysis of independent variables to explain change in an organizational entity or observes differences on selected dimensions. Van de Ven and Poole (2005) refer to such work as ‘variance’ studies. The concepts used in this work are relatively static: classifications and descriptors are stable and fixed as studies compare entities that have moved from one stable state to another. The interest is in the differences in an entity at two different points in time, not about Page 2 of 17

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how it got from one state to the other. The approach thus involves thinking ‘about’ things rather than thinking from ‘within’ them (Shotter, 2006). Time is considered only as a medium in explanations of change that privilege outcomes and end-states, while largely ignoring how they were arrived at (Chia, 1999). In contrast, the aim of process studies of organizations is to establish what is occurring, rather than what is ‘there'. Process research challenges the taken-for-granted understanding that the world is an immutable system of categories and things, where ‘objects of attention appear as bounded entities which exist against a background’ (Cooper, 2005: 1689). So, for example, process studies of organizational change see the organization as constantly in flux – in a state of becoming, rather than a pre-existing entity (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002), while process studies of strategy focus on how strategy emerges from particular practices, as a result of which individuals and activities become labelled as ‘strategic’ (Chia & MacKay, 2007). Table 29.1 provides a summary of how key theorists differentiate process research from non-process research.

Table 29.1A classification of the process literature

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Table 29.1 also shows that, within the process literature, researchers often differentiate between two different theoretical positions – typically referred to as a synoptic (weak) and performative (strong) views of process (Van de Ven & Poole, 2005; Bakken & Hernes, 2006). Synoptic process research remains entitative, according to many commentators (Bakken & Hernes, 2006), and is only quasi-processual (Nayak & Chia, 2011). Accounts provide an overview or sequence of events, stages, or cycles in the development of an entity (Van de Ven & Poole, 2005). Processes occur among stable entities as they interact and, while these entities may change as a result of the interactions, they remain analytically distinct from each other and from the processes in which they are embedded. This work adopts a transactional view of time, focussing on the temporal occurrence of significant events, where change is still an exception, albeit the object of inquiry: [The synoptic approach] is ‘weak’ in the sense that the a priori assumption is of the world as consisting of entities, whose interactions constitute processes. In other words, processes take place whenever entities, such as individuals, interact. In this sense, individuals are seen as existing ontologically prior to the processes they engage in; they give shape to processes, while remaining intact throughout their participation in the processes. (Bakken & Hernes, 2006: 1600) The synoptic process approach is underpinned by a substance ontology: it retains a conception of a world of ‘things'. Attention remains on the organization rather than on organizing; and the interest in movement is circumscribed by a focus on the stable entity that emerges from it (Tsoukas, 2005). A performative process approach is founded on a ‘becoming’ ontology, rather than the ontology of ‘being’ that characterizes synoptic process studies (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). The former sees entities as ‘constituted out of the flow of process', where ‘substantiality is subordinated to activity’ (Rescher, 1996: 42–43, quoted in MacKay & Chia, 2013: 211). Change is the norm: it is ceaseless and unremitting, and from it, entities emerge only insofar as they appear fixed. Thus, both organization and individual ‘exist’ only as temporary stabilizations of ongoing processes: Writers tending towards a ‘strong’ [performative] process view … work from an ontological viewpoint of the world as process, where entities, as far as they are seen to exist, are products of processes rather than existing prior to them. If anything, they are what Rescher (2003: 53) refers to as ‘manifestations of processes'. (Bakken & Hernes, 2006: 1600) Nayak and Chia (2011) argue that, rather than exploring a reality that is becoming (i.e., how social entities change over time as in the synoptic process approach), the performative approach is concerned with understanding a becoming that appears to be real (i.e., how entities are temporarily stabilized). Time is socially constructed. Researchers are interested in the complexity of micro-processual adjustments and in what these processes accomplish (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). As a result, considerable attention is given to the practices of which processes are comprised (Chia & MacKay, 2007). In this ‘post-processual’ view (Chia & MacKay, 2007), ontological primacy is given to the ‘situated and recurrent nature of everyday activity’ as practices become the starting point of analysis (Orlikowski, 2010). [This] stance 1) places ontological primacy on practices rather than actors; 2) philosophically privileges practice-complexes rather than actors and things as the locus of analysis; and 3) makes the locus of explanation the field of practices rather than the intentions of individuals and organizations. (Chia & MacKay, 2007: 230) Practices are ‘embodied, materially mediated arrays of human activity centrally organized around shared practical understandings’ (Schatzki, 2001: 2). Certain practices become ‘bundled’ (Schatzki, 2006) or ‘ordered’ (Chia, 2002) i.e., linked, coordinated, and patterned. These patterns influence how entities emerge as Page 5 of 17

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‘theoretical reifications’ (Nayak & Chia, 2011: 284) or ‘manifest instantiations of practice-complexes’ (Chia & MacKay, 2007: 219).

How Is Power Studied in Organizations? Organizational researchers have also studied power in quite different ways. One body of research explores how individuals in organizations exercise power as part of a deliberate strategy to achieve intended outcomes. Here the focus is on the sources of power that allow actors, including those who do not possess ‘legitimate’ authority, to influence organizational decisions and actions (see Hardy & Clegg, 2006). As such, their power is attributed to dependency, i.e., the extent to which others are dependent on the actor in question, which in turn is derived from this actor's access to scarce, valued resources (Mechanic, 1962; Emerson, 1962). Sources of such power include information, expertise, credibility, prestige, access to higher echelons, money, rewards, and sanctions, etc. (e.g., Pettigrew, 1973; Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978). Informed by this early body of work on resource dependencies, two streams of research on power in organizations have developed somewhat separately. The first has adopted a social psychological approach. It treats power as an independent variable – usually in the form of some measurement of individuals’ asymmetric control of valued resources – and the ability to administer rewards and punishments (Goldstein & Hays, 2011). In such studies, quantitative research – often based on experiments or surveys – typically attempts to identify whether measures of high power (possession of resources) correlate with certain dependent outcomes, such as team performance, influence over decisions, career success, social perception, optimism, and risk taking (e.g., Anderson & Galinsky, 2006; Pfeffer, 2013; Tost, Gino, & Larrick, 2013). This work has developed an understanding of power by delving into the psychology of individual power-holders, equating power with particular attitudes and characteristics. Thus individuals categorized as ‘high power’ in terms of possessing scarce resources also appear predisposed to think and act in ways ‘that lead to the retention and acquisition of [more] power’ (Magee, Galinsky, & Wagner, 2008: 351). A separate stream of research has drawn on the idea of resource dependencies in a rather different way. Based on the premise that it is not enough simply to possess control over scarce valued resources to influence outcomes, and recognizing that what constitutes such a power resource varies depending on the context, this work has focused on how actors successfully mobilize power resources in specific organizational settings. It has found that those individuals with the greatest access to these power resources and the greatest skill in putting them to use are the most likely to succeed. Studies have examined how power shapes organizations over time, for example, Lindblom's (1959) work on muddling through, Quinn's (1978) work on logical incrementalism, Pettigrew's (1985) 20-year study of strategy at Imperial Chemical Industries, and Buchanan and Badham's (2008) study of power, politics, and organizational change. These studies tend to be qualitative and interpretative, and focus on specific organizational change initiatives. They are, as a result, more processual in their research design as they examine how the exercise of power influences the transition of an organization from one state to another. A very different conceptualization of power from either of the above two approaches is to be found in the discursive view of power (e.g., Knights & Morgan, 1991; Townley, 1993). Drawing on the work of Foucault (1972, 1979, 1980), this discursive approach challenges the very idea that individuals can pull the strings of power to achieve intended outcomes (Hardy & Thomas, 2014): Power must be analyzed as something which circulates, or rather something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localized here or there, never in anybody's hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organization … [Individuals] are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power. Page 6 of 17

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(Foucault 1980: 98) Rather than a convenient, manipulable resource controlled by autonomous individuals, power takes the form of a network or web of meaning in which both the advantaged and disadvantaged are enmeshed (Deetz, 1992). According to this view, power circulates through discourse – collections of interrelated texts and practices that ‘systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (Foucault, 1972: 49). Discourse creates bodies of knowledge that normalize certain ways of believing, speaking, and acting (Townley, 1993). In creating knowledge, discourse produces meanings, which become ‘fixed or reified in certain forms’ as ‘taken-for-granted categories of existence’ (Clegg, 1989: 183), allowing particular kinds of subjects and objects to become ‘known'. In this way, discourse ‘defines and produces the objects of our knowledge’ (Hall, 2001: 72). Discourse also creates subject positions – socially constructed and legitimated categories of identity that warrant voice (Hardy & Phillips, 1999) – providing those actors able to occupy the subject position with rights to speak and act (Maguire, Hardy & Lawrence, 2004). Studies on discursive power are typically qualitative and critical insofar as they seek to explore the complex nature of power and how it is hidden in the apparent fixity of meanings. Table 29.2 summarizes these three approaches to power and shows how they might complement process studies of organizations. First, the work on the social psychology of individual power-holders has little to add to the study of process. The assumptions associated with this view of power are at odds with those underlying processual approaches (and in fact align with the non-processual or variance approach presented in the first column of Table 29.1). The processes whereby actors acquire power or how they use it to achieve organizational outcomes are ignored. In adopting a causal analysis of dependency measures to explain change in individual behaviours, as well as organizational outcomes, such research is primarily deterministic. As such, this particular view of power is of limited value in understanding the complex processes that preoccupy process theorists.

Table 29.2Different approaches to power

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Second, the work on the mobilization of power in situ aligns well with a synoptic view of process, with its privileging of agency and focus on change as episodic. These power theorists do not question individual agency – particular individuals are deemed responsible for the deliberate initiation of power by mobilizing resources over actors who oppose them in attempts to bring about their desired endpoints. Organizational characteristics (and changes in them) are typically among these endpoints. There is a focus on temporality of change but in the form of episodic change, i.e., change occurs between states of more settled equilibria. As exemplified by the work of scholars like Pettigrew, this approach to power is already embedded in many process studies of organizations. Finally, the assumptions associated with a discursive view of power align most closely with a performative process approach, in which individual agency is far less evident than in synoptic process studies. Discursive views of power admit to agency, but only within the confines of the discursive context – the power relations – in which individuals are situated, and recognize that objects only become visible in the context of the bodies of knowledge in which they are situated. There has, however, been relatively little work bringing discursive views of power and performative views of process together. Nonetheless, we believe this intersection offers the most potential in terms of bringing power to bear on process, as we discuss further in the second part of the chapter.

Part 2: Putting (Discursive) Power into (Performative) Process In this section, we examine in more detail how, by engaging more directly with a discursive view of power, process scholars interested in a performative approach are able to address two key challenges posed by their theoretical orientation: agency and stabilization.

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Agency: The Problem of the ‘Knowing’ Subject Performative process researchers appear to struggle with the question of agency, as a result of which two different views are discernible: ‘owned’ and ‘un-owned’ processes (Rescher, 1996). Although performative process theorists do not champion the idea of the heroic change agent found in many synoptic process studies, some researchers nonetheless advocate a role for agency by subscribing to a view of owned processes. For example, Tsoukas & Chia (2002: 577) argue for organizational phenomena to be ‘not treated as entities, as accomplished events, but as enactments – unfolding processes involving actors making choices interactively, in inescapably local conditions, by drawing on broader rules and resources'. Human agents fine-tune processes by making a myriad of micro adjustments in specific contexts, which, in turn, steers the unfolding of organizational reality. Organizations are ‘made to work’ by change agents or managers exercising their ‘declarative powers’ or by introducing a new ‘discursive template’ (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002: 577). New discursive templates can create new subject positions and, in turn, construct greater scope for agency on the part of particular actors (Tsoukas, 2005). This idea of owned processes among performative process theorists conveys the sentiment that individuals set parameters within which processes evolve, albeit in tandem with complex, opportunistic adaptations and improvisations as a result of which actual processes often deviate from original intentions. Nonetheless, intentions and actions of individual actors form the basis of emerging and evolving processes. ‘Change programs trigger on-going change; they provide the discursive resources for making certain things possible, although what exactly will happen remains uncertain’ (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002: 578). In contrast, the concept of un-owned processes has been offered as a way to push the process ontology even further (Langley et al., 2013). It emphatically rejects the process reducibility thesis, which reduces processes to the actions of things (Rescher, 1996). In the case of un-owned processes, there is no originating agent to steer the change. Un-owned processes are subject-less, free floating, and autonomous. Change happens ‘of its own volition', without the need for an identifiable change agent (Bergson, 1946/1992: 147–148, quoted in MacKay & Chia, 2013: 211). The focus switches from privileging the role of intentional agent directing processes (albeit imperfectly) as in the case of owned processes, to recognizing that processes consist of their own momentum, which alone shapes outcomes independently of, and separately from, the activities of individual actors. [S]ituations contain their own internal dynamics so that outcomes arise, not so much because of active intervention on the part of identifiable actors, but because of the ongoing reconfiguration of spontaneous self-generating processes, independent of human intentions. (Chia, 2014: 10, emphasis added) MacKay and Chia (2013: 223) subscribe to an un-owned view of process in their study of the strategy of an auto parts company over the period leading up to its bankruptcy, which they attribute, not to unrealized intentions, but to ‘the accumulation of historical events, the interlocking effects of prior decisions, and their eventual unintended consequences'. Their analysis constructs a complex and chaotic account of processes where practices generate unintended and accidental consequences, regardless of independent actors. The existence of both owned and un-owned understandings of processes within the rubric of performative process accounts of change creates a considerable degree of ambiguity regarding the nature of agency and the status of the ‘knowing’ subject. Too much emphasis on the idea of owned processes risks leading performative process researchers back into the realm of synoptic process theory, privileging actors and entities, and undermining the emphasis on the ‘becoming’ of phenomena, including individuals. At the same time, in promoting a view of un-owned processes, researchers appear ambivalent as to how to theorize agency. They emphasize inertia and habitus instead of deliberate action but, nonetheless, reserve a place for individual action (albeit unintended) as an important impetus in how processes play out. For example, Chia (2014) argues that individuals wishing to manage organizational change should step back and ‘let change happen'. However, this assertion, somewhat ironically, reinforces the role of agency insofar as it suggests that by doPage 9 of 17

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ing nothing individuals nonetheless ‘act’ – if they were to do something, they would shape the change in a less desirable way. Without a clearer understanding of agency, it becomes difficult for performative process theorists to locate the ‘knowing’ subject and to understand how processes emerge, fade, start, and change direction. In the box below, we show how bringing in a discursive view of power helps understand how the knowing subject is produced discursively. Box 29.1 shows how power works in the recursive relationship between discourse, subject position, practices, and agency to produce knowing subjects. Despite both strategic components featuring as equally important in the company's strategic vision, technological leadership had a far more precarious status than cost-effectiveness. However, this was not because individuals mobilized power in the form of scarce resources with the intention of undermining technological leadership. Similarly, the durability of cost-effectiveness cannot be attributed to a small group of senior managers, or even the CEO, single-handedly putting this strategy into play. Instead, the dominance of the market discourse produced clear subject positions that legitimated a wide range of actors to act in the name of cost-effectiveness, including senior managers inside the company and, equally importantly, actors outside the company such as bankers, shareholders, and the media. These external actors emphasized the importance of market indicators such as share price, blaming senior managers for failing to protect it through effective cost cutting, and reducing the company's credit ranking when the share price fell. Consequently, when managers introduced practices associated with cost-effectiveness, their status as ‘responsible’ managers was reinforced. These practices and the widely shared meanings associated with them also served to construct a new subject position – the ‘cost-conscious employee’ – as employees throughout the company were introduced to the language of cash flow, and trained to monitor and correct it. In this way, the power relations associated with the market discourse produced multiple knowing subjects who identified with the strategy of cost-effectiveness, were authorized to act on it, and could engage competently in practices that realized it, thus serving to reproduce this part of the strategy. In contrast, subject positions that related to technological leadership were far less authoritative and, as the professional discourse lost out to the market discourse, individuals throughout the company started to question its meaning and whether it was a solution to the company's situation. Consequently, employees became less likely to enact practices related to technological leadership, undermining its strategic status.

Stabilization: The Problem of the ‘Known’ Object The performative process approach does not deny the existence of individuals and other entities, but sees them as temporary stabilizations emerging from the processes in which they are situated i.e., transient and ephemeral abstractions constituted from ongoing movement and flux. An entity is not an inert and permanent substance, but the result of a relational process of becoming. Entities that emerge as unities out of processes are abstractions. They arise from processes and they form in turn the basis for further processes. Abstractions are always ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being'; they are always in formation, and never exist as entities in themselves. For this reason, they cannot be seen as separate from their processes of becoming. (Bakken & Hernes, 2006: 1610) So-called enduring ‘things’ therefore come about through the emergence of ‘a stability wave in a surging sea of process’ (Seibt, 2013: 16). The second challenge that process theorists face, then, is how does such stabilization occur? If discrete events dissolve ‘into a manifold of processes which themselves dissolve into further processes’ (Rescher, 1996: 29), how is it that some processes persist and have effects, whereas others do not? If processes are so fluid, how do they stabilize enough for entities to ‘appear'? Can any form of outcome or entity emerge in a random manner from the processes that they inhabit? The problem here is that many assertions are made as to the transitory and precarious status of individuals, Page 10 of 17

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organizations, and other objects, but very little theorization occurs as to how that status is achieved and fixed, albeit momentarily. If entities are reifications, then how do they become reified? If individuals are stabilized nodes, then how did they become nodes? Performative process theorists acknowledge that stabilizations have effects, but provide rather less explanation of how stabilizations occur in the first place. For example, Chia (2002) refers to persistent patterns among practices as ‘forms of social ordering’ that become frameworks for regulating subsequent interactions and modes of thought. However, the focus is on what forms of ordering do in terms of providing structure, rather than on how the ordering occurred. Similarly, Nayak and Chia (2011: 284) argue that the theoretical reifications that constitute individuals and entities refer to ‘slowerchanging configurations of social relationships resulting from the sustained regularizing of human exchanges'. But the question remains: what accounts for some social relationships being slower to change and how do regularities become sustained? As Chia (1999: 219) notes, without explaining some kind of ‘pre-structured field of possibilities', it is impossible ‘to establish the identity of an object of analysis'. In sum, performative process theorists find it difficult to account for stabilizing and stabilizations. They cannot explain how some objects – organizations, individuals, strategies, and entities – come to be collectively ‘known', while others do not. The emphasis on fluidity suggests that processes would produce nothing other than the random, idiosyncratic effects of individual sensemaking. For objective and identifiable entities to emerge from processes, they must be distinguishable in some way to multiple members of a community who, in turn, must agree that they exhibit common features and meanings. In the box below, we show how bringing in a discursive view of power helps to understand how the knowing subject is produced discursively. Box 29.2 shows how the power relations circulating through different discourses led to the production of known objects as the meanings of the two chemicals as being risky or safe were stabilized at particular points in time through normalizing and problematizing practices. These chemical objects were thus in a continual process of ‘becoming': having been safe, and then becoming risky in the case of bisphenol A (BPA) and, in the case of vinyl acetate monomer (VAM), then becoming safe again. The organizing processes constituted by normalizing and problematizing practices were un-owned insofar as specific actors did not select either one deliberately for particular purposes. At the same time, the coalescing of practices into one or other form was not random – practices interrelated in ways that ‘made sense’ in light of prevailing discourses. Normalizing practices were embedded in the broader discourse of sound science, which relates to how risk is conceived of in late modernity and has an emphasis on scientific rationality. Problematizing practices related to the discourse of precaution, which questions the existing body of knowledge and allows for action to be taken in the face of scientific uncertainty regarding adverse effects. The objects that became known were not risky or safe in any essentialist way, but were made meaningful through practices, which in turn were embedded in, and legitimized by, the discursive ‘landscape’ in which they were situated.

Conclusion We suggest that considerable potential is to be derived from bringing a discursive view of power to bear on a performative process orientation. In particular, it helps address two key lacunae in the performative process literature. The first repudiates methodological ‘individualism’ and challenges the role of human agency in initiating new or different processes. While some performative process theorists advocate the idea of un-owned processes in which there is no role for any kind of change agent, other researchers have assigned a far greater role to individuals in initiating change processes, albeit accepting that these processes unfold in unexpected ways. There is, as a result, considerable ambivalence in the performative process literature concerning the role of the human agent – the ‘knowing’ subject. The incorporation of a discursive view of power helps to collapse the distinction between un-owned and owned processes, showing how practices create the knowing subject as individuals take up and act from particular subject positions in the discourse. Thus, we avoid the mistakes of both attributing change to the acts of heroic leaders and proposing a naïve view of selfPage 11 of 17

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generating, uncontrolled, chaotic processes. The second lacuna relates to the issue of stabilization and the rejection of a substance ontology. Performative process theorists argue that entities, such as individuals, organizations, strategies, etc., emerge from processes. However, if the world is comprised of emerging, fluid processes, what causes them to stabilize sufficiently to produce these entities? This issue has, for the most part, been neglected by process researchers, with the result that there is no clear theoretical explanation for the emergence of particular entities – ‘known’ objects – except as random and arbitrary outcomes. We show how, by engaging with a discursive view of power, performative process theorists can retain the idea that entities ‘exist’ only as reified, stabilized moments in ongoing processes, while achieving greater explanatory potential as to why particular entities, and not others, come to be ‘petrified’ through the power relations that circulate through the discourses in which they are situated. We conclude by suggesting how performative process researchers might introduce a consideration of a discursive approach to power into their empirical studies of organizational processes.

The Unfolding Nature of the Discursive Landscape A first step in understanding how processes produce knowing subjects and known objects is to consider the circulation of power through discourse, by mapping the discursive landscape in which the processes under examination are situated. This requires sensitivity to its unfolding nature. Accordingly, researchers might ascertain whether a dominant discourse prevails. Are countervailing discourses competing with it? Are prevailing discourses being displaced by other, newly emerging discourses? Are existing discourses evolving and, if so, how? In this way, researchers become more aware of the way in which processes play out in particular ways, insofar as they are held in place by existing discourses. It also helps to attune them to how any discursive anchoring of existing processes is temporary and fluid – as discourses change, so too does this discursive anchoring. This allows the performative process researcher to factor in power effects, and yet still retain the conceptualization of processes as changeful and ever changing.

The Network of Subject Positions Emerging from the Discursive Landscape Having identified the discursive landscape, researchers are then in a position to examine the most obvious subject positions associated with it. Discourses grant certain actors the rights to speak and act, while silencing others. Through ascertaining the presence of a dominant discourse, researchers may also examine who is authorized to speak and act, and to consider what it is they are authorized to say and do. By referring back to the discursive landscape, researchers can also consider how, if the discourse changes, subject positions – and the relations among them – might also change. In understanding the network of subject positions, it becomes possible to examine the way in which particular processes unfold as practices instigated by one subject position affect others. Rather than ignore subject positions completely, as the un-owned approach tends to do, or privilege a singular, omnipotent change agent subject position, as the owned approach tends to do, the examination of discourse allows researchers to see how processes emerge from the multiple practices of multiple actors in an unfolding discursive landscape.

The Identification of Other Voices As Foucault (1979) makes clear, power does not arise without resistance and, in fact, one way to trace power relations is to identify points of resistance. A focus on the clearly visible, powerful subject positions authorized to participate in, and influence processes, risks missing the role of other, less obvious actors who may resist Page 12 of 17

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this participation and influence. By being attuned to the pervasiveness of resistance, performative process researchers can explore how the constant push-pull of power-resistance relations shapes processes. In considering how power and resistance shape the network of relations among subject positions, researchers can identify the role of collective, organized resistance associated with relatively, well-defined positions (such as unions and professional groups), as well as local, unorganized, transversal resistance associated with far less obvious and less visible subject positions. In this way, it becomes possible to consider how new subject positions emerge as discourses change, and how previously silent, invisible actors become discernible.

The Power of Processes: The Recursive Production of Practice, Subject, and Object Insofar as performative process research emphasizes that both actors and entities emerge from processes rather than pre-exist them, there is a need to appreciate the recursive relationship among process, subject, and object. This conceptualization is entirely compatible with a discursive view of power, although it does create considerable challenges for researchers struggling with the complexity of empirical data. Processes comprise practices; practices are conducted by human agents located in evolving subject positions associated with an unfolding discursive landscape; these practices produce known objects and, in carrying out these practices, knowing subjects are also produced. Such complex processes are undoubtedly hard to study empirically. Nonetheless, by investigating what practices make up the processes under investigation, how practices are authorized, legitimated, and normalized in the particular discursive landscape, and how they serve to give meaning to the identities of individuals and entities, performative process researchers will be well placed to disentangle these complex relationships. In sum, the mission of performative process theorists has been to challenge dominant, taken-for-granted, entitative views of the world by pushing our thinking in relation to fluidity rather than fixity; to encourage us to open up rather than close down. However, in doing so, these researchers have also made it difficult to understand how our ‘seeing’ of entities and agents comes from processes that are momentarily stabilized through power relations that hold them in place long enough for subjects and objects to emerge. A discursive view of power offers process researchers the opportunity to learn more about how processes produce objects and subjects without losing the sense of fluidity, since stabilization is never total and always subject to change.

A Study of Strategic Change in a Global Telecommunications Company1 In 2000, GlobalTel2 – one of the world's biggest suppliers of mobile phones – announced that they would be pursuing a twofold strategy of cost-effectiveness and technological leadership. The company had a leadership position in research and development (R&D), although the mobile phone division had posted an operating loss. The processes involved in realizing this strategy were complex, with the introduction of a wide range of new practices. Jobs were relocated, outsourced, and cut in successive waves of downsizing that affected particular divisions, products, plants, and locations. Contractors were dismissed, and their work was reallocated to permanent employees. An instructional computer game was developed for employ-

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ees to learn more about cash flow, identify problems that caused delays in invoicing, and keep an eye on customers who were careless about paying. To maintain technological leadership, new units were created, including a new subsidiary and a separate joint venture, and old ones merged. Despite cutbacks, the company continued to invest heavily in R&D, generate new patents, and publicize its commitment to being the ‘first and best’ in terms of technology. Working practices were changed to accommodate both strategic components, e.g., teams were modified to include a dedicated project manager to manage costs, as well as a customer project manager who became part of the customer's organization during the project to assess technology needs. At the end of the three-year period, when the company was restored to profitability, differences in the two components of the strategy were clearly discernible. The meaning of cost-effectiveness had become broadly shared, i.e., a wide range of individuals talked about being cost-effective in a similar and unproblematic way. They consistently linked it to a broader market discourse in a way that reinforced and rationalized the need to be cost-effective. This discourse emphasized the legitimacy of making cutbacks and reducing operating costs so as to maintain shareholder value in the context of the prevailing market conditions. ‘Being cost-effective’ was the obvious strategy solution to the problems of a difficult market. In contrast, despite the introduction of practices to support technological leadership, there was far more ambiguity about what being ‘first and best’ meant. Initially, it meant being a technological leader and was linked to a professional discourse that emphasized the engineering expertise of the company and its history of producing leading-edge products characterized by technical excellence and innovation. Over time, however, this part of the strategy became disconnected from the professional discourse and, instead, became attached to the market discourse. Employees started to question whether being first and best technologically was a sensible strategy, arguing it would be better to be less advanced technologically and concentrate more on making sure the customer was first and best. Later, it came to mean being ‘first to market'. Accordingly, there was considerable confusion about what being ‘first and best’ meant, and the technological meaning came to represent a strategy problem rather than a solution.

1.Adapted from Hardy, C. and Thomas, R. (2014) ‘Strategy, Discourse and Practice: The Intensification of Power', Journal of Management Studies, 51(2): 320–348. 2.A pseudonym.

A Study of Chemical Risk Assessment in Canada1 This study examines how power relations influenced the processes through which chemical objects became known as ‘risky’ or ‘safe'. It investigates the risk assessment and management processes introduced by the Canadian Government in 2006 to assess the toxicity of chemicals believed to pose risks to human health and the environment. It compares two chemicals. Vinyl acetate monomer (VAM)

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is an industrial chemical found in paints, adhesives, and personal care products that is believed to cause cancer. VAM was initially found to be toxic, although this finding was later reversed as the final assessment pronounced it safe at current levels of exposure. Bisphenol A (BPA) is used in baby bottles, water bottles, and can linings, and is believed to be an endocrine disruptor. It was found to be toxic, as a result of which Canada became the first country in the world to implement a ban on baby bottles containing this chemical. The study found that the process of risk assessment clustered around two types of practice. Normalizing practices emphasized the discourse of ‘sound science', i.e., the mindful application of accepted risk knowledge and the use of codified norms and precedents as a basis for action. Specific practices included referencing an accepted body of scientific or regulatory knowledge, anchoring actions in organizational precedents or taken-for-granted routines, and categorizing chemicals in ways that subsequently led to a predetermined sequence of clearly delineated actions. Problematizing was associated with the discourse of ‘precaution', which acknowledges potential inadequacies in risk knowledge and the need for open-ended deliberations as a basis for ascertaining risk management actions. Specific practices included recognizing particular situations as unique or novel, innovating, questioning the adequacy of existing scientific knowledge, and acknowledging the plurality of multiple actors with stakes in risk assessment and management. The study found that, in the case of VAM, there was evidence only of normalizing practices whereas, in the case of BPA, in addition to normalizing, there was also evidence of extensive problematizing. When normalizing practices dominated, the meaning of VAM as a chemical object was constructed through shared understandings as to accepted ‘facts’ and causal models, categories, as well as accepted methods for generating and validating risk knowledge. In this way, the meaning of VAM as both toxic and safe was held in place at different points in time by established power-knowledge relations, i.e., a nexus of pre-existing texts (scientific articles, policy documents, etc.) and risk assessments from other jurisdictions that amounted to a taken-for-granted body of risk knowledge. Normalizing practices served to reproduce the authority and applicability of this body of risk knowledge and the credibility of scientific experts, such that even though having been risky, when VAM later ‘became’ safe, the change was uncontroversial. When problematizing practices dominated, they called the authority and applicability of the body of risk knowledge concerning BPA into question, thereby constructing a problem that demanded innovative action. More texts were produced, distributed, and consumed in the case of BPA compared to VAM; and they involved many more challenges to scientific expertise, basic facts, and appropriate methods for generating and validating knowledge. What constituted the relevant body of risk knowledge, how to produce it, and what to do with it were all highly contested, thereby helping to justify Canada's decision to take pre-emptive action by banning baby bottles containing BPA.

1.Adapted from Maguire, S. and Hardy, C. (2013). Organizing Processes and the Construction of Risk: A Discursive Approach. Academy of Management Journal, 56(1): 231–255.

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Organizational Learning and Knowledge Processes: A Critical Review

Contributors: Krista Pettit, Mary Crossan & Dusya Vera Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Organizational Learning and Knowledge Processes: A Critical Review" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n30 Print pages: 481-496 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Organizational Learning and Knowledge Processes: A Critical Review Krista PettitMary CrossanDusya Vera More than 25 years ago, organizational learning (OL) was proposed as a fundamental strategic process and the only sustainable competitive advantage of the future (DeGues, 1988). In the current chapter, we adapt the definition provided by Vera, Crossan, and Apaydin (2010) to acknowledge the critical role of emotion in OL – ‘organizational learning is the process of change in individual and shared thought, emotion and action, which is affected by and embedded in the institutions of the organization’ (2010:154). This definition is purposefully broad, reflecting a multi-level perspective. A variety of approaches to OL coexist, and the purpose here is not to synthesize the different approaches (for reviews of OL, please see Argote, 1999, 2013; Huber, 1991; Fiol & Lyles, 1985; Nicolini & Meznar, 1995; Vera et al., 2010) but rather to take stock of the empirical and conceptual OL process research to compare and contrast approaches, identify gaps, and suggest promising directions for future research. By using the term ‘process,’ we adopt the Weickian tradition of focusing on activities and behaviors or ‘ongoing interdependent actions’ (Weick, 1979, p. 3) by individuals, groups, and organizations involved in OL. This process perspective differs from views of learning as an entity, which is represented in work on ‘learning organizations’ and suggests learning is an ability that organizations possess (for a detailed discussion, see Tsang, 1997). Our process approach also differs from views of learning as an outcome. Thus, our review does not focus on measuring outcomes, such as changes in cognition and behavior, but on the activities and subprocesses unfolding in organizations as they engage in learning. We review influential works in organizational studies that have contributed to our understanding of OL processes and categorize them using the questions of ‘Who, What, Why, Where, When, and How’ as our organizing framework. We begin by examining ‘who is learning?’ or the focal level of analysis of OL process research: individuals, groups, organizations, and populations. The subsequent section on ‘what’ highlights different types of learning and existing learning process frameworks. From here, we examine ‘why’ the OL process unfolds in organizations. The question of ‘where’ refers to the location where learning takes place (e.g., OL in joint ventures, OL in functional units, inter- versus intra-organizational learning, internal versus external learning). Finally, the section on ‘when’ explores the conditions and contextual factors under which learning occurs, as well as the timing of learning. We also address the ‘how’ in each of these sections by examining the question: How does the analysis of the focal WH questions impact our understanding of learning and knowledge processes? Table 30.1 includes the main studies covered in our analysis. By answering the ‘Who, What, Why, Where and When’ questions for each piece, we highlight both the commonalities and differences across OL process perspectives. As a result, we cover more theoretical than empirical research, though some of the studies make significant contributions in both of these areas. In addition, we focus on foundational work, but also include key contributions of contemporary research where appropriate. The next sections highlight insights from each of our WH questions.

Table 30.1Article summary

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Table 30.1

Article summary

Publication

Who

Why

What (where/when)

Cyert & March (1963)

Org. as political coalition

Meet goals or aspiration levels

OL is the process of adaptation during which search and attention rules change to meet aspiration levels/goals.

Argyris & Schon (1978)

Ind.

Correct errors

Process of error detection and correction that varies with depth of effort. Single-loop learning is simple adaptation; double-loop learning requires evaluation of underlying values.

Daft & Weick (1984)

Survival Org. as interpretive system

OL is the process of scanning, interpreting, and acting on relevant information in the environment.

Levitt & March (1988)

Org.

Adaptation to meet goals

OL is the process of interpreting and codifying experiences into organizational routines.

Cohen & Org. Levinthal (1990)

Innovation R&D Survival

A firm's ability to innovate and succeed at R&D is based on a foundation of prior knowledge. The ability to recognize and assimilate new knowledge is contingent on the retention of prior OL.

Brown & Duguid Communities of (1991; 2001) practice

Participation Innovation

OL is the result of participating and working in communities of practice where becoming, knowing, and working lead to innovating.

Huber (1991)

Org.

Adaptation Innovation

OL is the process of acquiring knowledge, distributing information, interpreting information, and storing information for retrieval. OL includes actual and potential behavior changes.

March (1991)

Org.

Goal attainment Create competitive advantage

Organizations have limited resources. OL is an adaptation process involving a tension between refining current (exploiting) or inventing new (exploring) routines.

Miner & Mezias (1995)

Org. lnter-org.

Legitimacy Survival Prosperity

Inter-organizational OL is the process of sharing and information processing for prosperity and survival and includes trial-anderror, inferential, vicarious, and generative learning.

Darr, Argote, & Epple (1995)

lnter-org. Org.

Innovation Best practice development

OL is a change in task behavior that involves the key process of transferring information or innovations across organizations

Nonaka & Takeuchi (1995)

Ind., Gp, Org., lnter-Org.

Innovation

OL is the process of creating knowledge via creating, sharing, and using both tacit and explicit knowledge for the purpose of innovating.

Develop competitive advantage Appropriate rents

OL is the flow or transfer of best practices across the organization. This is often impeded due to causal ambiguity of the practice or strained relations. OL includes the transferring and institutionalizing of knowledge.

Szulanski (1996) Org.

Haunschild & Miner (1997)

lnter-org.

Improve performance Vicarious OL is imitating or adopting practices from other Survival organizations.

Crossan, Lane &White (1999)

Ind., Gp., Org.

Strategic Renewal

OL 1s the intuiting, interpreting, integrating, and institutionalizing of information across organizational levels for the purpose of strategic renewal.

Edmondson (1999)

Gp.

Adaptation (with intent to improve)

Learning involves 'sharing' or 'transferring' of information across group members that is facilitated by a shared sense of psychological safety.

Berends & Lammers (201 O)

lnd.,Gp., Org.

Adaptation Implementation of new system

OL is a non-sequential process where the flow of information across organizational levels is impacted by the enactment of embedded structures at each level and at specific points in time.

Argote & MironSpektor (2011)

Org.

Knowledge creation and accumulation

OL is a cyclical process translating task experience to knowledge through the processes of creating, transferring, and retaining knowledge.

Sustained firm performance

OL is the sequence or pattern of deploying different types of learning processes at specific points in time with varying impact on performance.

Bingham &Davis Org. (2012)

Malena com dire1tos auto• ats

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Who is Learning? The OL process literature focuses on the organization as an interconnected social system (March, 1991). Reviews of OL acknowledge that multiple levels (individuals and groups) are embedded within organizations (e.g., Argote, 2013; Easterby-Smith et al., 2000) and, in turn, organizations are part of larger populations of organizations (Levitt & March, 1988). Though individuals play a central role, the process of OL is inherently more complex than summing up individual learning (Argyris & Schon, 1978; Cyert & March, 1963; Daft & Weick, 1984). OL involves subprocesses at the individual and team levels – such as knowledge transfer or knowledge sharing – that can eventually lead to the institutionalization of new knowledge within the organizational system by way of routines, memory, procedures, and policies (Cyert & March, 1963; Fiol & Lyles, 1985; Huber, 1991; Levitt & March, 1988). The necessity of subprocesses, such as sharing, transferring, and embedding knowledge, connecting OL across the entire organizational system distinguishes OL from individual learning (Daft & Weick, 1984; Huber, 1991). In OL process research, the focus on ‘who’ is learning is predominantly at the organizational level, which is evident in a recent review of the OL field by Argote (2013), who dedicates most of the discussion to the elements involved in the organizational processes of transferring and retaining knowledge. While attention has been given to the socializing and embedding subprocesses of OL, there is limited advancement in multi-level OL process research and the connectivity between levels (Crossan, Maurer, & White, 2011). With the exceptions of multi-level frameworks developed by Crossan, Lane, and White (1999) and Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995), most OL process research focuses on the organizational level of analysis and, thus, fails to account for the complexities arising from a multi-level phenomenon. Understanding organizational-level subprocesses is essential; nevertheless, the foundational assumption that individuals are acting as agents of the OL process suggests that individual-level factors are also important in the OL process. Organizational-level theories where OL processes are central, such as the Behavioral Theory of the Firm, are built on individual-level cognitive theories of search and choice (Cyert & March, 1963; Gavetti, Greve, Levinthal, & Ocasio, 2012). Unfortunately, by focusing on the organization level of analysis, OL process research loses the inherent heterogeneity of individuals. Though there have been some attempts to model how heterogeneous traits of individuals impact OL outcomes (e.g., Kane et al., 2005; March, 1991), there is little work revealing how individual factors impact the overall multi-level OL process.

What Types of Learning Exist? What Learning Process Frameworks Exist? This section examines the types of learning as well as the overall process frameworks identified in the literature. Types of learning include learning from direct experience or learning-by-doing (Huber, 1991; Levitt & March, 1988), single- and double-loop learning (Argyris & Schon, 1978), trial-and-error learning (Thomke, 1998; Van de Ven & Polley, 1992), and improvisational learning (Miner, Bassoff, & Moorman, 2001). Organizations also learn through indirect experience or vicarious learning (Huber, 1991), and anticipatory learning (Bingham & Kahl, 2014). Related to both direct and indirect learning processes, a growing area of research focuses on the role of types of experiences such as learning from success or failure (Cannon & Edmondson, 2005; Madsen & Desai, 2010). Finally, in order to understand types of learning, we examine multiple frameworks, which emphasize different aspects of OL processes including multi-level learning (Crossan et al., 1999), learning from task experience (Argote & Miron-Spektor, 2011), learning for innovating or knowledge creation (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995), and practice-based learning (Brown & Duguid, 1991; Nicolini & Meznar, 1995). As shown in Figure 30.1, we organize OL process frameworks using two dimensions associated with learning types: ‘knowledge/learning emphasis’ and ‘planned/spontaneous nature.’ The first dimension examPage 4 of 17

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ines whether the learning framework emphasizes knowledge or learning. A knowledge emphasis is grounded in the resource-based view of organizations (e.g., Foss, 1996; Grant, 1996; Liebeskind, 1996), where knowledge assets are viewed as an important organizational resource. In contrast, a learning emphasis is anchored in theories linking learning to changes in behavior and cognition (e.g., Daft & Weick, 1984; Huber, 1991; Fiol & Lyles, 1985). Second, we examine whether the research focuses on explaining planned and deliberate OL processes or unplanned and spontaneous OL processes. Our purpose is not to draw clear, categorical boundaries, but to position some of the key studies in Figure 30.1 (see p. xx) to help extrapolate common themes and reveal gaps created as a result of the different emphases.

Figure 30.1Dimensions of OL process types

Organizing Dimensions OL process studies with a learning emphasis stem from research positing that OL involves changes in cognition and changes in behavior across levels (Vera et al., 2010). As a result of the cognitive and behavioral foundations, this research highlights cognitive subprocesses responsible for scanning and enacting environmental cues, as well as behavioral subprocesses necessary for translating the information into action. Depending on the type of learning, different subprocesses are privileged. For example, learning-by-doing studies may emphasize subprocesses such as reflecting or self-appraising in order to alter actions (Huber, 1991). Learning-by-doing subprocesses can also range from honing operational efficiency through practice (Epple, Argote, & Devadas, 1991) to structural changes, such as grafting or acquiring personnel with specific characteristics necessary to meet learning or organizational goals (Crossan & Berdrow, 2003; Huber, 1991; Levitt & March, 1988). Page 5 of 17

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Experimental learning, a specific form of learning-by-doing, is deliberate and planned with formalized subprocesses of reflecting and documenting outcomes. It often transpires outside of regular operational activities or in departments such as research and development groups specifically created for this purpose (Thomke, 1998, 2003). Similarly, trial-and-error learning is a more informal type of experimental learning arising during regular business operations (Miner et al., 2001). Planned trial-and-error learning includes subprocesses for interpreting organizational actions, evaluating outcomes, and making adjustments based on these outcomes (Levitt & March, 1988). Trial-and-error learning can also be unplanned. In an exploration of evolutionary processes in organizations, Miner (1990) posits that OL processes unfold naturally in organizations and argues that specific jobs are not always created in direct response to organizational goals, yet these structural actions trigger trial-and-error learning as the outcomes are not expected or planned. Similarly, in improvisational learning, the OL process unfolds with very little anticipation of impact or outcomes yet these experiences supply inputs to the overall OL process (Miner et al., 2001). Emphasizing consequences gives rise to a tension where successful outcomes encourage exploitative learning processes, and failing to meet outcome objectives justifies exploratory learning (March, 1991). Vicarious learning from indirect experience emphasizes the role of external knowledge in the learning process and, thus, occupies a central position on the learning/knowledge axis in Figure 30.1. Vicarious learning involves robust scanning and evaluating subprocesses to determine the relevance of experiential assets for the focal organization (Kim & Miner, 2007). Types of experience such as success or failure trigger different subprocesses and are a key emphasis for these scholars (see Madsen & Desai, 2010, for an example). Finally, recent research introduces anticipatory learning, or the process of OL driven by the desire to avoid expected negative outcomes as a planned OL process (Bingham & Kahl, 2014). Anticipatory learning introduces subprocesses such as extended searching or engaging in due diligence activities to avoid negative outcomes as part of the overall OL process (Bingham & Kahl, 2014).

Key OL Process Frameworks Much of the contemporary research discussed above builds on the work of Argyris and Schon (1978), who define the OL process as error detection and correction by individuals working as agents within an organization. These authors distinguish two main types of learning that differ based on cognitive effort: single-loop and double-loop learning. Single-loop learning is the process of detecting and correcting errors without examining any variables governing actions. Double-loop learning requires more effort as organizational members examine the underlying variables that govern behavior. Both single-loop and double-loop learning are planned, insofar as both revolve around a trigger or error to start the process. In contrast, Daft and Weick (1984) focus on behavior change and outline an OL process model as one of continual scanning, interpreting, and responding to cues in the organizational environment. According to these authors, managers acting on behalf of the organization scan the environment and take action based on these interpretations. The process is not triggered by an error or problem, but is continual and, thus, we position it to the far right in Figure 30.1. With a clear emphasis on knowledge assets and planned OL, Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) highlight the importance of two types of knowledge assets – tacit and explicit – in creating knowledge necessary for innovation. This framework focuses on the subprocesses linking the translation of tacit knowledge embedded within individuals to explicit organizational-level knowledge necessary for firms to fuel innovation. The resulting ‘knowledge spiral’ identifies four key subprocesses that cycle across levels and convert tacit to explicit knowledge: socializing, externalizing, internalizing, and combining. One key contribution of this framework is that it highlights that knowledge assets reside within individuals in organizations in the form of tacit knowledge. The framework focuses on the fundamental subprocesses of sharing and interpreting as necessary to extract knowledge that may otherwise remain hidden. Page 6 of 17

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An additional approach emphasizing knowledge conceptualizes the OL processes as three distinct subprocesses responsible for the creation, transfer, and retention of knowledge assets (Argote, 1999). Knowledge assets are seen as key resources, and the emphasis is on how knowledge assets are uncovered and how they flow through the organization. For example, Argote and Miron-Spektor (2011) describe the OL process as converting task performance experience to knowledge, and propose a cyclical process where knowledge is created, transferred, and retained by organizational members and their networks as they use specific tools to accomplish tasks. Subsequently, task performance experience is converted into knowledge, which then impacts the overall process. The overall OL process is embedded within both an active and latent organizational context and further embedded within the environment. The focus is on translating experience to knowledge while acknowledging the entire process is influenced by contextual factors. Other OL process frameworks emphasize learning. The multi-level ‘4I’ learning framework developed by Crossan et al. (1999) builds on the interpretive approach by distinguishing between four key processes transpiring across organizational levels: intuiting, interpreting, integrating, and institutionalizing. In the 4I framework, the tension between learning by planning and learning-by-doing is reflected in the feed-forward (from individuals to groups and the organization) and feedback flows (from the organization back to individuals and groups). OL processes at the individual and group levels are often unplanned involving trial-and-error or improvisational learning (Miner et al., 2001). In contrast, the process of institutionalizing learning is less spontaneous and more deliberate. This does not suggest that institutionalization is a completely planned process as learning-by-doing is needed in the feedback flow as individuals and groups may find it useful to engage in trial-and-error to make sense of the knowledge transferred. Research on the implementation of new information systems, for example, shows that individuals learn by doing when developing an understanding of new institutionalized systems and procedures (Orlikowski, 1996; Orlikowski & Hoffman, 1997). Finally, the practice-based approach to learning provides an example of an unplanned OL process framework. Nicolini and Meznar (1995) conceptualize OL as a continuous social process including two key elements: ‘(1) the modification of organizational cognitive structures (which constitutes a form of cognition in action), and (2) the processes of representation, formalization, and normalization of such knowledge’ (1995: 743). Though the practice-based view of learning discusses knowledge, it does not focus on knowledge as a resource or asset but instead on how ‘knowing’ manifests in organizational practices (Brown & Duguid, 1991; Gherardi & Nicolini, 2000; Orlikowski, 2002). Practices emerge when organizational members actively participate and work in communities embedded within the organization, and working together is the mechanism for sharing or transferring skills within communities. As a result, OL researchers using this approach focus on studying practices as these capture the social, behavioral and cognitive aspects of knowledge that manifests by participating, working, learning, and knowing (Gherardi & Nicolini, 2000; Orlikowski, 2002).

Why is Learning Taking Place? There are multiple motivations for the OL process including error detection (Argyris & Schon, 1978), knowledge accumulation (Epple et al., 1991), strategic renewal (Crossan et al., 1999), change (Nicolini & Meznar, 1995), performance feedback (Cyert & March, 1963; Greve, 2003), superior firm performance (Kogut & Zander, 1996), capability building (Zollo & Winter, 2002), innovation (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995), and competitive advantage (Teece, 2007). While all these outcome variables are desirable and have been linked to OL, the performance implications of learning have been debated since the origins of the field (see review by Vera et al., 2010). On one side of this debate are scholars establishing a positive link between these constructs. For example, Cangelosi and Dill (1965) mention that improved performance is OL, and Fiol and Lyles (1985) propose that ‘the assumption that learning will improve future performance exists’ (1985: 803). On the other side of the Page 7 of 17

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debate are authors (i.e., Argyris & Schon, 1978; March & Olsen, 1975) who do not see a direct relationship between OL processes and performance. For example, Levitt and March (1988) state that ‘learning does not always lead to intelligent behavior’ (1988: 335), and Huber (1991) adds that ‘learning does not always increase the learner's effectiveness or even potential effectiveness … Entities can incorrectly learn, and they can correctly learn that which is incorrect’ (1991: 89). This contingent view of OL has led to research looking at conditions under which learning processes occur and conditions under which learning processes are effective (e.g., Bapuji & Crossan, 2004; Gnyawali & Stewart, 2003). The focus on a specific dependent variable of interest leads to an examination of different OL subprocesses. For example, scholars emphasizing knowledge outcomes, such as knowledge accumulation, focus on the subprocesses of creating, transferring, retaining, and forgetting knowledge (e.g., Argote, 2013). Alternatively, researchers emphasizing learning outcomes, such as problem solving or goal attainment, focus on the subprocesses of enacting, searching, interpreting, and retaining. As a result of the various areas of focus in terms of performance outcomes of interest, the literature on OL processes is fragmented. In general, the desire to explain outcomes emphasizes more deliberate activities such as sharing or transferring and, thus, this research occupies the left side of Figure 30.1.

Where is Learning Taking Place? Research shows that OL processes occur within (Cyert & March, 1963; Kogut & Zander, 1992; Zander & Kogut, 1995) and between organizations (Crossan & Inkpen, 1995; Inkpen & Tsang, 2005; Miner, Kim, Holzinger, & Haunschild, 1999). As Szulanski points out, knowledge transfer should not be seen as an act, but rather as a ‘process in which an organization recreates and maintains a complex, causally ambiguous set of routines in a new setting’ (2000: 10). The location of OL impacts the subprocesses of OL. For example, in joint ventures, Inkpen and Crossan (1995) find that the sharing and institutionalizing subprocesses may be disrupted owing to different managerial mindsets. The authors suggest this obstacle may be offset structurally by creating ‘communities’ within the joint venture through deliberate transferring of key managers. Similarly, Darr, Argote, and Epple (1995) find that the OL subprocesses of sharing and institutionalizing flow more efficiently across commonly owned franchises versus other stores in the same population, and suggest that higher levels of interaction and communication between commonly owned franchise members facilitate these key processes. In the knowledge tradition, distinctions have also been made surrounding whether or not knowledge assets manifest internally or externally. For example, Bierly and Chakrabarti (1996) explain that firms need to determine the balance of internal and external learning that best meets their needs and fits their resources. Internal learning occurs within the boundaries of the firm. External learning occurs when boundary spanners bring in knowledge from outside via imitation and acquisition, and the knowledge is transferred throughout the firm. In fact, Cohen and Levinthal (1990) defined absorptive capacity as the ability of a firm to recognize the value of new, external information; assimilate it; and apply it to commercial ends. Having a certain level of absorptive capacity is a prerequisite for being the recipient of knowledge transfer, and at the same time, experience in inter-organizational knowledge transfer improves a firm's capacity to further assimilate and integrate external knowledge (Kumar & Nti, 1998; Vasudeva & Anand, 2011). Assimilating external knowledge involves unique subprocesses, such as determining the similarity of the knowledge source (Kim & Miner, 2007), building a foundation of relevant knowledge (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990; Lane, Koka, & Pathak, 2004), and evaluating experiences as successes or failures (Madsen & Desai, 2010). Finally, the practice perspective offers an alternative view of where learning takes place. Practice-based Page 8 of 17

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scholars view learning as a social and relational process where knowledge is continually being transformed and enacted in practice (Gherardi & Nicolini, 2000; Nicolini & Meznar, 1995). Learning is indistinguishable from working as both evolve simultaneously within the social context of organizational communities (Brown & Duguid, 1991; Gherardi, 1999). Participation creates communities of practice where involvement in the community leads to learning and working (Brown & Duguid, 1991; Lave & Wenger, 1991). In other words, as opposed to focusing on the dependent variable, or why learning takes place, practice-based researchers focus on activities and practices in communities, or where learning unfolds. This unique perspective is emergent and unplanned, and occupies the far right of Figure 30.1.

When is Learning Taking Place? As the previous section suggests, OL processes occur within and across multiple types of organizations; however, OL processes may not unfold smoothly. Consequently, extensive research is available examining the conditions and contextual factors that either help or hinder OL (see Argote, 2013, for a recent review). Also available, but more scarce, is research studying sequencing and the role of time in OL (e.g., Davis and Bingham 2012; Miner & Mezias, 1996). Research on contextual factors can be divided on the basis of its learning or knowledge emphasis. Research emphasizing learning focuses on contextual factors enabling or disabling behavioral and cognitive subprocesses. For example, research on learning from success and failure suggests that a firm's prior success may negatively impact the depth and breadth of search processes (March, 1991; Miller, 1993); similarly, a firm's prior failure may trigger subprocesses such as threat-rigidity responses (Staw, Sandelands, & Dutton, 1981), ultimately hindering the overall OL process. In addition, the presence of a high level of psychological safety or the shared belief that all members are supportive of mistakes, value the contributions of others, and accept different ideas is an important contextual condition for the smooth function of OL processes (Edmondson, 1999). Researchers emphasizing knowledge highlight how knowledge characteristics, such as causal ambiguity, impact whether or not the transferring or sharing subprocesses are effective (Szulanski, 1996). Similarly, research on absorptive capacity suggests that organizations require a foundational level of relevant knowledge to facilitate the OL processes of recognizing, assimilating, and leveraging any external knowledge (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990; Lane et al., 2004; Volberda, Foss, & Lyles, 2010). These are only a few examples of important contextual factors, and more extensive discussions can be found in recent reviews (see Argote, 2013; Schilling & Kluge, 2009 for reviews). Finally, an alternative area of research explores how elements of a social system, such as power and politics (Lawrence, Mauws, Dyck, & Kleysen, 2005), status (Bunderson & Reagans, 2011), community membership (Brown & Duguid, 1991), discourse (Gherardi & Nicolini, 2000), and structure (Brown & Duguid, 1991; Bunderson & Boumgarden, 2010) may facilitate or impede the OL process. The role of time and sequencing is also important in addressing when OL processes occur. For example, the process of vicarious OL may be triggered when organizations recognize potential best practices (Darr, Argote, & Epple, 1995) or seek to avoid the failures of similar organizations (Madsen & Desai, 2010). Timing is also essential as OL processes may unfold too early or late to ensure survival (Miner & Mezias, 1996). Another facet of timing is proposed by Davis and Bingham (2012), who find that over time organizations alternate between types of OL processes such as vicarious, trial-and-error, and improvisational learning. Furthermore, the authors find that organizations only leverage vicarious learning if they engage in these subprocesses early on in their life cycle. Though more research is needed to draw conclusions, this study highlights the importance of time and sequencing in OL processes. Page 9 of 17

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One challenge in integrating research on the conditions under which OL occurs, and research on the timing of OL, is that existing work has often been conducted at a single level of analysis. One exception is the study by Berends and Lammers (2010), which examines how the interconnectivity between levels, events, structures, and time either causes discontinuities or allows learning to progress. The authors find that social structure, such as the relative positioning of individuals, impacts processes at other levels – for instance, the interpretation and integration of knowledge. The authors also posit that the enactment of temporal structures impacts the timing of OL processes and the resultant outcomes. This study highlights the importance of elements such as power, structure, clock time, and events in the overall OL process. The authors explicitly acknowledge that OL unfolds within a system, and thus factors such as relative positioning within that system will impact both the process and outcomes. Similarly, a study of safety practices uncovers the important role of discourse in the OL process as firms learn through discourse with external stakeholders such as governmental agencies (Gherardi & Nicolini, 2000).

Gaps Identified We posit in our organizing framework that the distinctions between planned versus unplanned nature, and learning versus knowledge emphasis, highlighted in Figure 30.1, have the greatest impact on the centrality of certain subprocesses. For example, reflecting and documenting are very clear parts of planned OL processes, whereas these subprocesses are less clearly defined for spontaneous learning such as improvisational learning. Similarly, a learning emphasis focuses on cognitive and behavioral subprocesses, whereas a knowledge emphasis highlights the importance of subprocesses as they relate to the creation, transfer, and retention of resources. Regardless of where the researchers place their emphasis, several similarities run across the work on OL processes. Whether discussed directly or indirectly, the frameworks and types of learning explored above describe OL as a continuous, nonlinear, and social subprocess unfolding within a dynamic environment. Perhaps as a result of focusing on various types of learning and drawing distinctions between them, very few empirical or theoretical studies explicitly theorize and capture the role of the foundational and common elements that connect the different approaches. One reason for this is that the emphasis on ‘when’ may be privileging the importance of context and highlighting differences, such as enabling conditions for learning from failure versus success (e.g., Madsen & Desai, 2010). Focusing on OL processes to explain performance outcomes shifts the attention on researching enablers and disablers of the process. However, this emphasis is at the expense of understanding the similarities between the various types of learning described above. For example, though time is foundational in OL process research, the role of time is not always captured in empirical models or theoretical arguments (for exceptions, see Berends & Lammers, 2010; Bingham & Davis, 2012; March, 1991). Given the existing fragmentation, we propose a promising endeavor: the development of a process approach to OL that does not rely on a specific intent, motivation, or outcome. One possibility is for OL process researchers to examine the right side of Figure 30.1, building on unplanned learning and sensemaking theories (see Weick, 1995). The aforementioned study by Miner (1990) is an example of the approach we suggest as the author adopts a naturalistic approach by using an evolutionary model in her exploration of unplanned learning processes. As a result, this model can be applied across research environments. By focusing on explaining unplanned OL, it is possible to develop an OL model containing an ‘umbrella’ set of processes applicable regardless of the dependent variables of interest to examine the OL process across multiple contexts. In addition, social factors are generally underrepresented in OL process studies, and this represents a subPage 10 of 17

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stantial gap in our understanding of OL. In fact, almost all frameworks acknowledge the nonlinearity and continuity of OL processes as they unfold in a social system, yet few frameworks focus on the implications of this statement. Shifting the research focus from the dependent-variable-driven left side of Figure 30.1 to a more naturalistic approach of better understanding the right side of Figure 30.1 may partially rectify this gap. One such example is the work on discontinuities by Berends and Lammers (2010), which identifies the impact of social factors and time on the flow of OL processes. Nevertheless, the authors limit their analysis to events and structures inside the organization, and suggest that more work needs to be done to unpack how factors outside the organization impact the OL processes occurring within the organization. Another substantial gap in knowledge is our understanding of how the multi-level nature and heterogeneity within levels influences the overall OL process. For example, Lawrence et al. (2005) explore the role of power and posit that two modes of power – episodic and systemic – influence both the OL process and outcomes as it unfolds across organizational levels. Examples of this type of research are scarce. One unfortunate result of the assumption that individuals enacting or intuiting are homogeneous is a paucity of research exploring how the heterogeneity of individuals impacts the process. In addition to the social role of power, research on identity (Pratt, Rockmann, & Kaufmann, 2006; Stryker & Serpe, 1982), diversity (Milliken & Martins, 1996), and affect (Vince, 2006) highlights how these individual-level factors influence higher-level interpretations and behaviors within social systems. Though the focus on organizational-level attributes is essential to understanding the OL process, it is commonly accepted that there is diversity among and within individuals. As we can see from Figure 30.1, ‘learning-by-doing’ spans the spectrum from unplanned to planned, and as the practice-based approach emphasized, the ‘doing’ is enacted by individuals in the organization.

Implications, Opportunities, and Conclusions As reviews and special issues dedicated to OL indicate, OL research continues to grow (Argote, 2013; Bapuji & Crossan, 2004; Easterby-Smith, Lyles, & Tsang, 2008). Our goal was not to offer a comprehensive review, but to examine how the extant literature has contributed to our current understanding of OL as a process. OL process research is incredibly rich and diverse, so much so that the breadth and associated fragmentation could undermine the potential it holds to address many thorny and challenging organizational issues. OL process should be a pivotal theoretical lens to handle dynamic approaches to organizational studies whether they are associated with change, adaptation, renewal, transformation, or survival. Crossan et al. (2011) note a proliferation to the branches of the OL tree without attention to the theoretical foundation in any integrated fashion. Similarly, OL process theories remain largely disconnected. Instead of seeking to make connections, new approaches emerge that often fail to recognize the potential connections to prior research. A similar picture existed years ago between OL, knowledge management, and dynamic capabilities fields (Vera et al., 2010). Despite integration efforts, a major opportunity for OL process theory still exists for researchers to see how these diverse approaches emerge from common elements. Providing pathways to connect these diverse areas will foster more robust OL theory. Reflecting back, we see an important theme emerging with respect to a deepening of our understanding of the person situated in the social context. Though the organization level of analysis is important, we feel the pendulum may have swung too far in one direction. By emphasizing the organization, individuals have become secondary, and homogeneity is assumed. In spite of the general acceptance that OL involves other levels including individuals and groups, few studies account for the links between individuals, groups, organiPage 11 of 17

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zations, and society (Crossan et al., 2011). As a result, the bulk of empirical OL process research examines how different types of experience or contextual factors impact the process at a single level of analysis such as the group or organization. In turn, few empirical OL process studies account for individual-level factors and their connections to other levels of the organization in spite of the central role individuals’ play in the overall process. Thus, questions about how affect or emotion of organizational members impact key OL subprocesses, such as enacting and interpreting (Forgas & George, 2001), are underdeveloped. Initial work on the role of emotions or affect in OL processes is available in research by Vince (2001), who examines how power and emotions interact to influence OL processes. In addition, Huy (1999) theorizes how the emotional intelligence of individuals facilitates or hinders organization-level change. During periods of change, organizational members must first be receptive to new ideas before they take action. The level of emotional intelligence influencing this receptivity and mobilization for action impacts the meso-level emotional dynamics defined as behaviors stemming from specific emotional states in the organization. Huy (1999) suggests that these emotional dynamics act as a trigger for OL processes. Subsequent work demonstrates how group emotional states can impact the receptivity to change initiatives in organizations (Huy, 2011). Recent research highlights the importance of emotion in key organizational processes (Huy, 2012), yet the relationship between emotion and OL process is unclear. Emotion not only impacts individuals but alters social aspects such as organizational dynamics (Vince, 2001). More work is necessary to either establish a new framework accounting for the impact of affect, or incorporating it into one of the frameworks above. Another promising direction to deepen OL process theory is through identity, which acknowledges that individuals are not homogenous even within themselves. Identity is important as it is a ‘root construct’ (Albert, Ashforth, & Dutton, 2000) fundamental to individual enactment, interpretation, and action (Stryker, 1968; Stryker & Serpe, 1982). Individuals possess multiple identities including those that define them as individuals, groups, organizations, and external communities (Ashforth & Mael, 1989; Hillman, Nicholson, & Shopshire, 2008; Pratt & Foreman, 2000; Pratt et al., 2006). The study of learning in communities of practice is grounded in identity as participating in a community helps form one's identity (Brown & Duguid, 2001). Examining identity also brings the external environment into the organization. For example, professionals such as doctors, librarians, professors, and journalists may participate in communities outside their current organization that exert an impact on how they enact practices within their respective organizational communities and vice versa (e.g., Nelson & Irwin, 2014). Outside of the practice-based research where identity is a key component of working and learning, there is some initial work on the impact of socio-identity such as gender on OL (Kane, Argote, & Levine, 2005). The study by Kane et al. (2005) only examines the impact of identity on the knowledge transfer subprocess; however, given the central role of individuals, identity likely impacts the entire learning process. Given the pivotal role of individuals in the OL process, we propose that future research focus on understanding how multiple types of identity at the individual and group level impact the entire OL process in organizations. In addition to incorporating in OL process research the heterogeneity of individuals, we also invite scholars to shift their focus to understanding similarities versus differences. Our above analysis suggests future research should emphasize common characteristics of the various types of OL processes as opposed to identifying more types. Focusing on differences will further fragment our understanding and unnecessarily limit the potential application of OL process theory. For example, the above organization analysis concludes that OL is a continuous and nonlinear process. As we suggest above, one way forward is to shift our focus from the desire to explain specific dependent variables to furthering our understanding of common foundational assumptions. For example, OL researchers could examine how time impacts the universal subprocesses involved in Page 12 of 17

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enacting, sharing, and retaining, and practice-based scholars could focus on how time impacts the forming, spreading, and participating of practices. Another common factor between approaches highlights the social nature of OL processes. Future OL process research can explore how social factors such as power, positioning, diversity, and participation impact the overall process or key subprocesses. These are only a couple of examples of how future studies can extend our understanding on the common elements and, in doing so, strengthen the overall field of OL process research. In conclusion, OL process theory is broad and deep and would benefit from some efforts that seek to bridge and connect to other theories. OL process theory may be ‘punching below its weight’ in terms of how it can support studies that seek to understand organizational dynamics. In almost every field, there seems to be a desire to elaborate on ‘micro-foundations’ (Felin, Foss, Heimeriks, & Madsen, 2012), which are often rooted, but not acknowledged, as being grounded in OL process. The micro-foundation view has reminded the field that individuals – with their characteristics, abilities, choices, motivations, and cognition – are the key building block for understanding organizational capabilities and routines. Embracing this view provides an opportunity for OL processes and subprocesses to be brought to the surface. Yet, beyond the efforts to bridge approaches and surface similarities, our review also identified important opportunities of deepening OL theory that could serve to transform the field and its relevance to practitioners. We hope this chapter helps to re-energize the debate about the key role of OL processes in organizations.

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search. Organization Science, 7(1), 88–99. Nelson, A., & Irwin, J. (2014). ‘Defining what we do – all over again': Occupational identity, technological change, and the librarian/internet-search relationship. Academy of Management Journal, 57(3), 892–928. Nicolini, D., & Meznar, M. (1995). The social construction of organizational learning: Conceptual and practical issues in the field. Human Relations, 48(7), 717–746. Nonaka, I., & Takeuchi, H. (1995). The Knowledge-Creating Company. New York: Oxord University Press. Orlikowski, W. (1996). Improvising organizational transformation over time: A situated change perspective. Information Systems Research, 7(1), 63–92. Orlikowski, W., & Hoffman, J. D. (1997). An improvisational model for change managment: The case of groupware technologies. Inventing the Organizations of the 21st century (pp. 265–282). Boston, MA: MIT. Orlikowski, W. J. (2002). Knowing in practice: Enacting a collective capability in distributed organizing. Organization Science, 13(3), 249–273. Pratt, M. G., & Foreman, P. O. (2000). Classifying managerial responses to multiple organizational identities. Academy of Management Review, 25(1), 18–42. Pratt, M. G., Rockmann, K. W., & Kaufmann, J. B. (2006). Constructing professional identity: The role of work and identity learning cycles in the customization of identity among medical residents. Academy of Management Journal, 49(2), 235–262. Schilling, J., & Kluge, A. (2009). Barriers to organizational learning: An integration of theory and research. International Journal of Management Reviews, 11(3), 337–360. Staw, B. M., Sandelands, L. E., & Dutton, J. E. (1981). Threat rigidity effects in organizational behavior: A multilevel analysis. Administrative Science Quarterly, 26(4), 501–524. Stryker, S. (1968). Identity salience and role performance: The relevance of symbolic interaction theory for family research. Journal of Marriage and Family, 30(4), 558–564. Stryker, S., & Serpe, R. (1982). Committment, identity salience and role behavior: Theory and research example. In W. Ickes & E. Knowles (Eds.), Personality, Roles and Social Behavior (pp. 199–218). New York: Springer-Verlag. Szulanski, G. (1996). Exploring internal stickiness: Impediments to the transfer of best practice within the firm. Strategic Management Journal, 17(Special Issue: Knowledge and the Firm), 27–43. Szulanski, G. (2000). The process of knowledge transfer: A diachronic analysis of stickiness. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 82(1), 9–27. Teece, D. (2007). Explicating dynamic capabilities: The nature and microfoundations of (sustainable) enterprise performance. Strategic Management Journal, 28(13), 1319–1350. Thomke, S. H. (1998). Managing experimentation in the design of new products. Management Science, 44(6), 743–762. Thomke, S. H. (2003). Experimentation Matters: Unlocking the Potential of New Technologies for Innovation. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press. Tsang, E. (1997). Organizational learning and the learning organization: A dichotomy between descriptive and prescriptive research. Human Relations, 50(1), 73–89. Van de Ven, A., & Polley, D. (1992). Learning while innovating. Organization Science, 3, 92–116. Vasudeva, G., & Anand, J. (2011). Unpacking absorptive capacity: A study of knowledge utilization from alliance portfolios. Academy of Management Journal, 54(3), 611–623. Vera, D., Crossan, M., & Apaydin, M. (2010). Organizational learning, knowledge management, dynamic capabilities, and absorptive capacity: Toward an integrative framework of the learning field. Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management ( 2nd ed. ). Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell Publishing. Vince, R. (2001). Power and emotion in organizational learning. Human Relations, 54(10), 1325–1351. Vince, R. (2006). Being taken over: Managers’ emotions and rationalizations during a company takeover. Journal of Management Studies, 43(2), 343–365. Volberda, H. W., Foss, N. J., & Lyles, M. A. (2010). Absorbing the concept of absorptive capacity: How to realize its potential in the organization field. Organization Science, 21(4), 931–951. Weick, K. (1979). The Social Psychology of Organizing. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Weick, K. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Page 16 of 17

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Leadership Process

Contributors: Gail T. Fairhurst Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Leadership Process" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n31 Print pages: 497-511 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Leadership Process Gail T. Fairhurst Almost since its inception, the field of leadership studies has had an abiding concern for leadership processes (Antonakis, Cianciolo, and Sternberg, 2004; Bass, 1981; Rost, 1991; Uhl-Bien, 2006). In fact, it would be hard to find a leadership scholar over the past 75 years who would not claim that he or she is studying them. The problem has been the inability to capture the temporality of process. Peter Gronn nicely summed up the difficulty of doing so in his 20th century description of leadership studies as ‘belief in the power of one’ (2000: 319). The dominant lens has been individual and cognitive (versus social and cultural) and variable analytic (Fairhurst, 2007a; Fairhurst and Uhl-Bien, 2012; Wood, 2005). Until relatively recently, heroic models of leadership (e.g., neo-charisma models) marginalized followership (Uhl-Bien et al., 2014) and elided leadership collectives (Denis, Langley and Sergi, 2012; Gronn, 2000), while extant relational models of leadership (e.g., leader–member exchange) focused on one individual's reading of the relationship as if there were a single relational reality (Rogers, Millar, and Bavelas, 1985). As a by-product of this individualism, temporality got swallowed up in retrospective summaries of behavior, and leadership was often reified. Leadership process (hereafter, LP) research strikes out in three very different directions. The first direction, talk-in-interaction, focuses on leadership-as-it-happens. It rejects treating individual leaders (or followers) as having strong inner motors, motors that force ‘process’ into retrospective summaries and evaluations of behavior in ill-fitting scales. The focus is instead is on the sequential flow of social interaction and ‘how behavior means’ and not what people mean (e.g., vis-à-vis their perceptions) (Scheflen, 1974). A second LP direction also has an interest in sequence and temporal form, but uses a wide-angle lens to study the trajectories of leadership in case histories – case studies with a more or less explicit historical component. Because no two trajectories may be alike, ethnographies and multiple methods, often qualitative and fine-grained, are necessary to document the paths of leadership change. Importantly, analysts rely heavily on leadership actors to define their circumstances and practices, rather than imposing ‘analysts know best’ or other variable analytic assumptions that sacrifice too much in studying the progress of leadership over time. Finally, a third LP direction is a subset of the second, but with the important focus on dialectical tensions, marking the instabilities and flux of complex leadership environments. For many organizational observers, dialectical tensions and, relatedly, paradox and contradiction are the ‘new normal’ of organizational life (Trethewey and Ashcraft, 2004). Analysts increasingly want to know how leadership actors are finding ways to hold incompatibilities together, embrace irrationality, and thrive within a tension-filled world. All three LP research directions are biased toward the temporal, relational, and contextual. They are temporal because they focus on leadership vis-à-vis the sequential flow of social interaction, whether through a microscopic or wide-angle lens. LP research is also relational because leadership is never a solitary activity, but co-created by leadership actors over time. For this reason, historiometric research is largely excluded from this review because the focus is heavily on the (successful) leader not leadership per se (Parry et al., 2014). Finally, LP research is heavily contextual in that analysts can focus on the leadership relationship as deeply rooted in power and culture. It can demonstrate how leadership actors impact the context as much as they are impacted by it. It can also recognize the ability of leadership actors to identify those aspects of the context that are most relevant to defining ‘their situation here and now,’ and it can bring task and practices back into the study of leadership (Carroll, Levy, and Richmond, 2008; Crevani, Lindgren, and Packendorf, 2010). For each LP lens, I will briefly review early and more current representative work, although no attempt will be made to be comprehensive owing to space limitations. This will be followed by suggestions for how to further develop the LP lens in leadership studies. First, however, leadership and process must be defined.

Defining Leadership? Defining Process? Page 2 of 15

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It would be ever so logical to begin this chapter with a clear and unambiguous definition of leadership. Unfortunately, multifarious definitions of leadership make this impossible (Kelly, 2014). Is leadership equivalent to behavior associated with the managerial role or hierarchical position? Plenty of leadership studies cast leadership in this way (e.g., neo-charisma research; leader–member exchange research). Is leadership about advancing the task at hand or mobilizing a collective to act? Achievement or outcome-oriented views of leadership require such a demonstration (Barker, 2002; Drath et al., 2008). Does leadership involve a particular set of power and influence-oriented language games or discourses? In this view, leadership is deeply tied to context and power effects (Fairhurst, 2007a; Kelly, 2008). Is leadership less about the specific influence patterns of leader-follower roles and more about their interplay and intersections among other tensional forces? Dialectical perspectives cast leadership in this way (Collinson, 2005; 2014; Zoller and Fairhurst, 2007). Finally, is leadership about a specific attribution by actors or analysts? Here, leadership ultimately is in the eyes of the beholder (Calder, 1977; Grint, 2000). To add further complexity, one definition of leadership does not necessarily preclude the others. What is an LP analyst to do? One option is to hold multiple ways of seeing leadership in creative tension with one another. By embracing all five views of leadership – role-based, mobilizing achievement, power and influence language games, dialectics, and attribution – we can better appreciate the multi-dimensionality of this varied and complex concept. As much as possible, then, how leadership is being conceived will be noted when undertaking this review. A definition of process is somewhat easier to come by, especially if Langley et al.'s (2013) bipartite definition is used. One way they cast process is through entitative ‘changes in things,’ i.e., an entity with an extant identity (e.g., leadership) changes in state (2013: 6). Such a view will be particularly relevant to leadership case histories and dialectics and their focus on the evolution/devolution of leadership tensions or other features over time. However, Langley et al. also define process vis-à-vis becoming (Chia, 1996), fluidity, and activities-overproduct. This view of process is particularly salient to the discussion below on leadership talk-in-interaction and its focus on the sequencing of the micro-practices of leaders and members. While some leadership scholars see only a becoming orientation, not an entitative change in things, as sufficiently processual (Crevani et al., 2010; Wood, 2005), both orientations pose questions about leadership's sequential and temporal forms that the other finds difficult to address and thus are the subject of this review.

Leadership Talk-in-Interaction This category of LP research has a history dating back to the late 1970s and 1980s where leadership equates with an organizational role. Theoretically, Weick (1979) proposed a model of organizing built upon contingent response patterns like the double interact where the ‘act’ is the behavior of one person (e.g., a leader), the ‘interact’ is the response to that behavior (e.g., the member's), and the ‘double interact’ is the response (again, the leader's) to the response. Weick (1979: 89) actually wrote about this model in leader–member terms and represented it as the building block of organizational growth and decline. But a few years later, Hosking (1988; Hosking and Morley, 1988) wanted to know why the leadership literature was so disconnected from the rest of the organizational sciences. She asked, aren't the skills of leadership also the skills of organizing? Shouldn't leaders be defined by their ‘influential acts of organizing’ (Hosking, 1988: 147)? Others would later follow to argue that the disconnect lay in the mainstream literature's penchant for ignoring task accomplishment in lieu of relational concerns (Gronn, 2002), while Robinson (2001) observed that the mainstream literature ‘floated ethereally’ above task accomplishment. Practice-based views of leadership have followed a similar line of argument (Carroll et al., 2008; Crevani et al., 2010). Empirically, Gronn (1983), Komaki (1998, for a review), and Fairhurst (2004, for a review) were among the first to capture the sequential and temporal details in leadership relationships; however, all in different ways. Gronn's (1983) ‘talk as the work’ introduced conversation analysis (CA) as a method of studying the microunderstandings and sensemaking of talk as it unfolded in school administration; more CA work in institutional Page 3 of 15

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settings would soon follow (Boden, 1994; Heritage, 1997). Komaki (1986; 1998; Komaki, Zlotnick and Jensen, 1986) used operant conditioning theory to quantitatively code leaders’ performance antecedent, monitoring, and consequence behaviors in response to members’ performance and measured this against the work output of teams. She time sampled behavioral sequences in a wide range of work units ranging from sailboat races to insurance firms. She demonstrated that team performance (e.g., sailboat race times) was a function of the timing and frequency of leaders’ performance monitoring behaviors. Finally, following work by Watson (1982) demonstrating relational control patterns among students role-playing leaders and members, Fairhurst (2004) and colleagues quantitatively coded actual leaders’ and members’ relational control behaviors in routine work conversations in a large multinational. Their minimum unit of analysis was two contiguous control moves (i.e., the interact). Fairhurst and her colleagues demonstrated how sequential control patterns impacted relational judgments (Fairhurst, Rogers, and Sarr, 1987); mirrored a mechanistically organized plant versus an organic one (Courtright, Fairhurst, and Rogers, 1989); reflected plants with a history of mechanistic organizing versus organic organizing (Fairhurst, Green, and Courtright, 1995); and, more recently, documented control patterns in a high-reliability organization (Cooren and Fairhurst, 2004; Fairhurst and Cooren, 2004). This category thus privileges the organizing potential of leader–member acts as they occur within the turn-taking machinery of conversation and its other features (Fairhurst, 2007a). It emphasizes the sequential pacing that talk gives to tasks, how interactional moves can signal the organization's presence from one moment to the next, and the co-defined nature of all relationships (Boden, 1994; Rogers and Escudero, 2004). The organization is thus in a constant state of becoming (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002), made possible only through the actions of its agents, of which leaders are crucial though certainly not alone (Fairhurst, 2007a). Following Hosking (1988: 147), ‘leadership can be seen as a certain kind of organizing activity.’ Communication can also be meaning-centered, not solely an act of transmission, while various forms of discourse (qualitative) and interaction (quantitative) analyses interrogate the sequential, temporal, categorical, discursive, and/or material character of leader–member interaction (Fairhurst, 2007a; Fairhurst and Uhl-Bien, 2012). As discussed below, current research foci include studying leadership as mobilizing a collective to act, doing relationship work, and strategy-as-practice.

Mobilizing a Collective to Act Aside from designated roles, yet another definition of leadership is mobilizing a collective to act (Barker, 2002; Rost, 1991). Understanding when and how this occurs is likely to be very context specific and unpredictably timed; analysts are likely to observe and code communication over a series of interactions, thus implicitly adopting Hosking's (1988) view of leadership as influential acts of organizing. These are influential moves, turning points, or passage points in interaction in with which some type of collective action is made possible. In contrast to the regularized interactional patterns of the early 1980s work, influential acts of organizing may or may not occur with any frequency. We can describe two studies in this genre as ethnography meets discourse analysis. For example, in Wodak, Kwon, and Clarke's (2011) field study in an Australian aerospace firm, a transcribed data set of over 150 hours of meetings and individual interviews sourced their analyses of the talk patterns of egalitarian and authoritarian leaders and their impact on a durable consensus. Their concern for context was multi-leveled, focusing on the organization's structural context, the history of specific communities of practice, and also close discursive analyses. Deploying critical discursive methods, they identified five ‘influential acts’ (i.e., discursive categories of micro-behaviors) used by the company's CEO and COO to build consensus. They include 1) bonding (e.g., the collective ‘we'); 2) encouraging others to talk (e.g., soliciting expert opinions); 3) moving a Page 4 of 15

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discussion toward closure (e.g., directed challenges); 4) modulating through framing the issue at hand (e.g., argumentative appeals to common knowledge); and 5) re/committing (e.g., reminding others of obligations) (Wodak et al., 2011: 603–607). While a balanced use of these five strategies produced a consensus in key critical incidents, it quickly dissolved when the strategies were authoritatively deployed in other incidents. As part of Carroll and Simpson's (2012) ethnography, they discursively analyzed 93 online forum postings of 20 managers communicating about a leadership development seminar in which they were enrolled. The authors focused on participants’ framing moves that were instrumental in moving the discussion forward. Importantly, they constructed such moves as ‘gesture and response’ (i.e., interacts that are ordered, not necessarily contiguous moves) that simultaneously addressed each other and the ongoing conversation. Three such moves were identified: kindling, which furthered online discussion through testing meanings, frames, and assumptions; stretching, which expanded the frames and meanings of key concepts and ideas; and spanning, which linked key ideas and concepts together. A study by Abolafia (2010) shows us how some influential acts of organizing require legitimation, in this case, through co-constructing narratives in a policy group at the US Federal Reserve to strategically order information environments to legitimate their actions (e.g., the setting of interest rates). Narrative co-construction was revealed in verbatim transcripts of the Federal Open Market Committee, led by Alan Greenspan, where line-by-line open coding gave way to the study of the dialectical relationship between operating models and narrative. Narratives filled in the blanks, both logical and temporal, wrought by the deficiencies of standard operating models; however, narratives competed in this regard. Narrative fit was tested through an iterative process of retelling and glossing its features for temporal clarity and situational fit. Selective retention of one narrative over another was often conflictual owing to tensions between politics and culture; consequently, a consensus policy was often reflective of several narratives strains. All three aforementioned studies identified key interactional moves whose organizing potential greatly impacted the outcomes of the interaction and issues at hand. In the first two studies, analysts made explicit leadership attributions; however, research also exists where the participants themselves signaled within the interaction the influential acts of organizing prompting them to mobilize (Fairhurst, 2007b). Indeed, working from within an ethnomethodological perspective (Boden, 1994; Garfinkel, 1967) requires actors, not analysts, be the ones to signal, ‘This is leadership.'

Doing Relationship Work Although the mainstream leadership literature has historically occupied itself with studying leadership's relational underpinnings, the use of surveys and scaled judgments are overwhelmingly retrospective and thus, by necessity, gloss the fine details (sequential or otherwise) of relationship work in which both leaders and members engage (Fairhurst, 2007a; Fairhurst and Uhl-Bien, 2012). For example, survey items may inquire about the levels of status and respect that leadership actors accord one another, while fine-grained discursive analyses can examine differential forms of address, politeness, reciprocity, distance – and how they were responded to – that form the foundation of relational judgments about status or respect. Based heavily on scaled data, leader–member exchange (LMX) theory holds that leaders discriminate in their treatment of members by using their discretionary resources to reward those willing to go above and beyond job expectations while withholding those resources from those who do not (Graen and Uhl-Bien, 1995). However, qualitative LMX work by Fairhurst and colleagues (Fairhurst, 1993; Fairhurst and Chandler, 1989; Fairhurst and Hamlett, 2003) examined the co-produced language games played between leaders and members as they enact relationships of high, medium, or low LMX quality in routine work conversations. Language games are thus words or actions formulated simply as ‘gesture and response’ or, more complexly, into episodes and routines whose logics assert a definition of the relationship that require other role set members to challenge or play along (Fairhurst and Uhl-Bien, 2012). Fairhurst's (1993) study of six women leaders and Page 5 of 15

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16 of their members found that the language patterns or games of high LMXs were marked by nonroutine problem solving, insider humor, and coaching, while medium LMXs were marked by role negotiation and polite disagreement. The low LMXs were especially interesting because they were marked by power and influence-oriented language games like ‘silent male,’ ‘one-upping,’ and ‘leading the leader on’ through fantastical storytelling intended to challenge the leader's status. Members’ game-playing skills revealed themselves in storytelling that was only realizable in leader-assisted control moves. Together, these members and an unsure leader co-constructed interactional patterns of deceit, distrust, and resistance to authority (Fairhurst and Hamlett, 2003).

Doing Strategic Leadership Leaders ‘doing strategy’ are the subjects of a strategy-as-practice review elsewhere in this volume (Chapter 24). However, it is important to briefly acknowledge those studies that focus on the talk-in-interaction of (mostly) top leaders doing strategy work (Vaara and Whittington, 2012). Samra-Fredericks’ (2003) ethnomethodology-informed CA of strategy sessions is one of the most cited early examples. Her work demonstrated the ‘real-time’ use of several relational-rhetorical skills, including those that ‘speak forms of knowledge; mitigate and observe the protocols of human interaction (the moral order); question and query; display appropriate emotion; deploy metaphors and, finally, put history “to work”’ (Samra-Fredericks, 2003: 168). More recently, strategy-as-practice researchers have been using video-ethnography to study leadership actors in strategy meetings. For example, Liu and Maitlis (2014) examined embodied emotional performances in strategy meetings in the gaming industry. Coded sequences of real-time emotion displays were linked to strategy outcomes while mitigated by relational dynamics and issue urgency. Likewise, Sorsa, Pälli, and Mikkola (2014) used video-ethnography to study strategy talk in performance appraisals. These authors focus on the ways in which strategy gets appropriated in the appraisal, highlighting the embodied, intertextual, and material nature of strategy. Gestures were found to concretize strategy while strategic texts gained agency as they were ‘ventriloquized’ (Cooren, 2010). The research in this area focuses on strategy practices, but largely treats leadership as equivalent to organizational role. However, as will be discussed at the end of the chapter, the strategy-as-practice genre can be a model for leadership researchers seeking to move their research into more of a process direction, while strategy-as-practice analysts may want to expand their treatment of leadership. To summarize, the talk-in-interaction genre deploys a microscopic lens in order to understand how leadership (and, in fact, all organizational action) coheres as a sequence (Boden, 1994). This lens provides an abundance of detail from which to examine the emergence of leadership as demonstrated above and in other work (e.g., Clifton, 2006; Larsson and Lundholm, 2010; 2013).

Leadership Case Histories For leadership case histories, the goal is to build theory from the ground up with a wide-angle lens through ethnography, grounded theory analyses, and mixed methods. The study of sequence and temporal form is not wrought from the machinery of conversation as in talk-in-interaction; rather, it considers the trajectory of one or more cases of leadership (or lack thereof) involving numerous collective work practices whose consequentiality, for good or bad, is of the utmost importance. For this reason, case histories have to be formulated; typically, it is through multi-party interviews, extensive field notes, and/or archival records compiled into composite narratives (Sonenshein, 2010) or vignettes (Denis, Langley, and Rouleau, 2010) that then become secondary data to be analyzed. Such data can be a gloss of interaction dynamics of major proportions; however, talk-in-interaction studies find it difficult to scale up to the kinds of questions that case histories more easily address. Case histories can be problem centered and examine the features of a problem over its life Page 6 of 15

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history (Maguire and Hardy, 2013). They can examine the impact of turning points and related outcomes, and they can engage in case comparisons over time. The research on strategic change leadership is exemplary.

Strategic Change Contemporary strategic change research often highlights the relationship between leadership actors’ language, narratives, and discourse with the production of intersubjective meaning (Cornelissen, 2012; Maitlis and Lawrence, 2007). Narrative and sensemaking are often coterminous (Bruner, 1986), while discursive strategic change processes are inescapably situated (Currie and Brown, 2003; Rouleau and Balogun, 2011) and variable over time (Sonenshein, 2010). In this literature, leaders and managers are often the primary symbolizing agents (Fairhurst, 2001), while Gioia and colleagues’ (Gioia and Chittipeddi, 1991; Gioia and Thomas, 1996) distinction between sensemaking and sensegiving has been a popular choice to explain strategic change. Per this distinction, sensemaking involves managers’ interpretation and understanding of the world. Gioia and Chitapeddi (1991: 442) defined sensegiving as ‘the process of attempting to influence the sensemaking and meaning construction of others toward a predefined redefinition of organizational reality.’ Like Gioia and colleagues, Foldy, Goldman, and Ospina (2008) cast sensegiving as the ‘work’ of leaders in their study of the case histories of 20 social change organizations in which they documented how the framing strategies impacted the cognitive shifts that these organizations were able to achieve over a range of relevant issues. A cognitive shift was defined as a change in how an organizational audience viewed the work of the organization. This work and similar others (Maitlis, 2005; Maitlis and Lawrence, 2007; Rouleau, 2005; Rouleau and Balogun, 2011) is often not explicitly temporal, but approaches leadership sensemaking/sensegiving processes through the articulation of micro-practices, attributed outcomes, and an implied sensemaking-leads-to-sensegiving sequential logic. There is, however, research on the collective nature of sensemaking and strategic change leadership that is more explicitly temporal. For example, Sonenshein (2010) tracked manager and employee narrative use during different time periods of the strategic change process. Drawing from composite narratives, surveys, and core change documents, managers strategically told both progressive and preservational change narratives, while employees routinely embellished these narratives over time to affect both positive and negative outcomes. Managerial narratives, in effect, became discourses from which employees could creatively draw to explain and navigate their new circumstances. The collective sensemaking of leadership actors during strategic change also surfaced in work by Abolafia (2010), reviewed above, on the conflictual, successive legitimation narratives of the U.S. Federal Reserve and Currie and Brown's (2003) study of dueling senior and middle manager narratives in response to senior management interventions. Finally, work by Denis, Langley, and colleagues (Denis, Langley, and Pineault, 2000; Denis, Lamothe, and Langley, 2001) is less focused on sensemaking per se and more focused on the sequential and phasic nature of leadership change dynamics throughout a case history. For example, Denis et al. (2000) studied the integration of a new CEO of a Canadian hospital, noting the successive accommodations that different groups of hospital personnel (e.g., clinical versus administrative staffs) and the CEO made toward one another. CEO integration proved to be a function of collaborative and affirmative forms of learning, persuasion, and the timing of power consolidation, practices contingent upon interdependent activity domains as they evolved over time. Denis et al. (2001) report on five case studies in the Canadian health industry (including the Canadian hospital mentioned above), all of which constituted pluralistic settings of dispersed power and variable objectives. Constellations of senior leaders were not always unified as a result of ‘uncouplings’ from their environment, organizational base, or each other. Many of the problems that these organizations faced were dealt with sequentially, not simultaneously, while change moved forward unevenly. They also required sources of stability Page 7 of 15

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(e.g., slack resources, social embeddedness, creative opportunism) that could be in short supply; fragile relations were a mark of these leadership collectivities. See also Denis et al. (2010) for a study of three individual leaders from the case studies above. In summary, the wide-angle lens of leadership case studies involving strategic change has increased its presence in the literature with the growing popularity of ethnographic methods, grounded theory, and mixed methods. Typically, this work focuses on strategic change practices and processes associated with traditional leader–member roles.

Leadership Dialectics All that was said about case histories applies to this LP category as well; however, there is an added focus on dialectical tensions as a way to understand leadership and change. Dialectics and a related family of terms including paradox, tension, and contradiction have a heavy presence in the organizational sciences today (Putnam, Fairhurst, and Banghart, 2016), so much so that writers are casting the presence of dialectical tensions and paradoxes as the ‘new normal’ (Ashcraft and Tretheway, 2004). Increasingly, these analysts are moving from treating tensions as problems, breaches, or flaws in an organization's fabric to focus on how they enable and constrain organizational processes (Beech et al., 2004). Leadership researchers, in particular, want to know how these actors are finding ways to hold incompatibilities together, embrace irrationality, and adapt well to a tensional environment (Collinson, 2005; 2014; Zoller and Fairhurst, 2007). Two key areas of leadership dialectics stand out, the first of which is heavily under-researched but nicely demonstrates how dialectical tensions actually work (Fairhurst, 2001). This area speaks to the vast majority of leadership research that assumes that successful relationships progress on a path that is unidirectional and cumulative, moving toward increased levels of closeness or fusion, relational stability, and transformation beyond self-interest. Graen and Uhl-Bien's (1995) leadership-making model is prototypical in this regard. Contra LMX, according to dialectical approaches to relationship development (Baxter, 2011), even healthy relationships have tensions that create simultaneous pulls to fuse with and differentiate from another. Thus, fusion and separation, closeness and distance, and interdependence and autonomy are all a part of relational bonding, leader–member relationships notwithstanding (Fairhurst, 2001). Too much of either pole creates a need to shift toward the other; leadership actors variously manage these tensions over time either by consistently selecting one pole over another, alternating first one pole then another, or reframing one pole in terms of another, among other management strategies (Seo, Putnam, and Bartunek, 2004). Much more common than relational dialectics, however, is the second area of dialectical tensions work that (potentially) examines the entire field of tensions that leadership actors face in this age of increasingly turbulent environments. This approach examines dialectical tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes at the intersection of order and disorder that then becomes the ground for alternative organizational processes and orders (Fairhurst and Putnam, 2014). Note that the heavy reliance on interviews allows the leadership actors themselves to select those aspects of the context that they, not analysts, deem are the most tension producing for them. Note also that in most of these studies, leadership (or its failure) emerges in and through the interplay between tensional poles and amidst other intersecting tensions (Collinson, 2014).

Tension, Contradiction, and Paradox There is quite a large literature on the tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes of organizational life in which leadership actors find themselves to be central players (Collinson, 2005; 2014; Lewis and Smith, 2014). One representative strand of this research focuses on Giddens’ (1979; 1984) structuration theory in which he casts social systems as an ‘antagonism of opposites’ and hierarchizes them, as Marx did, as primary and secondary Page 8 of 15

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contradictions. For example, Fairhurst, Cooren, and Cahill (2002) examined the primary and secondary contradictions within a downsizing organization where modern capitalism sourced the primary contradiction: increasing profits versus meeting the needs of people. Secondary contradictions are offshoots of the primary, such as the old versus new social contract; the latter creates a more mobile workforce and less company loyalty that, in turn, often weakens production and lessens profits. Fairhurst et al. (2002) used a case history approach to study the aforementioned dialectical tensions (and others) and their management practices across three successive downsizings at an environmental remediation site. A brutal first downsizing (‘pack your box') was followed by a second, which was a mandated ‘voluntary’ reduction in force (VRIF). A third that followed was much more humane (a ‘velvet boot') and sought to bridge or transcend the interests of both employees and management. However, subsequent to its highly successful launch, the ‘pack your box’ values of the vice presidents greatly contributed to the elimination of the middle manager responsible for the well-received ‘velvet boot.’ This study thus demonstrated how the practices involved in the management of these downsizings reflected low levels of discursive penetration by senior leaders (in contrast to middle management), which then triggered successive waves of unintended consequences for the organization, including a congressional investigation for ‘pack your box’ and too many ‘volunteers’ for the VRIF. In an 18-month ethnography, Gibbs (2009) examined dialectical tensions in managing global teams involving several countries. She found that managers, more so than team members, were able to transcend the subtensions and ambiguities surrounding autonomy-connectedness, inclusion-exclusion, and empowerment-disempowerment over time so that competing goals and interests could more easily coexist. However, Davis and Eisenhardt's (2011) work challenges the conventional wisdom that discourses of transcendence, i.e., ambidexterity (Lewis, 2000), synthesis (Poole and Van De Ven, 1989), or ‘creative synthesis’ involving consensus-based, both/and or win/win solutions (Abdallah, Denis, and Langley, 2011), are the optimal means by which leaders should resolve paradox. Their study of partnering innovation firms, each with unilateral control needs, demonstrated that rotated leadership through temporal separation and alternating decision control – not consensus leadership (or dominating leadership) – produced more innovation. Abdallah et al. (2011) also took note of leaders’ capacity to use ‘discourses of transcendence’ to mitigate contradiction and paradox primarily through their organizational visions. They tracked the success of these discourses in three case studies over time, finding that the very mechanisms that made these discourses appealing at the start (e.g., quasi-resolution of conflict, strategic ambiguity, and groupthink) ultimately sowed the seeds of their demise as conditions evolved. Using a case history and diachronic method, Norton (2009) studied the dialectic of control-resistance in a multi-stakeholder conflict over the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument in the U.S. state of Utah over a 10-year period. Norton's diachronic lens goes beyond dialectics to examine durable, systemic changes over time emerging from ongoing contestation among stakeholders (including leaders of government and property rights organizations) (2009: 525). More specifically, it is overtly temporal, goes beyond micro-politics to study systemic change, and does not privilege the symbolic over the material – all criticisms of a classically dialectical lens. Norton compares a diachronic dialectical lens compared to a dialectical lens by noting: Taken in isolation, the group dynamics within each of the (five) dialectical phases would be read in a limited fashion: President Clinton was protecting the environment and PFUSA (a property rights organization) was the underdog. Read diachronically these moments thread together to provide a robust understanding of politics among organizations across time. President Clinton's dedication and similar advances of an environmental ethic in the western states justified, and perhaps led to, the rise of property rights politics (and the organizations they formed) … Similarly PFUSA was truly the ‘underdog’ in 1999, more or less in control by 2003, and a target of counter-resistance by 2005. (pp. 544–545) Norton's study is certainly reminiscent of the detailed phasic casework of Denis et al. (2000; 2001; 2010), but with the added benefit of articulating a materially sensitive, diachronic dialectic lens. Thus, Norton's (2009) Page 9 of 15

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observation that a dialectical lens by itself may be ahistorical is worth noting; like Abdallah et al. (2011), his diachronic lens surfaced paradoxical effects associated with ongoing dialectical tensions, effects that would otherwise not have come to the fore. To recap, the study of leadership dialectics also adopts a case history approach but with the added emphasis on the tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes of the complex environments that leadership actors face. As alluded to earlier, managing tensional environments over time, along with the unintended consequences of the actions taken, casts leadership ‘standing for a kind of dialectic’ at the intersection of tensional forces (Collinson, 2005; Kelly, 2014: 907).

Possible Futures for Leadership Process Research There are several directions in which LP research could proceed; however, three of the most important are the concern here. They include a greater focus on socio-materialities, delineating time, and switching between lenses. First, focus more on the sociomaterial world in leadership practices. LP researchers have been trying for some time now to understand process by animating relational structures, witness the talk-in-interaction studies dating back to the 1980s. More leadership scholars are also beginning to cast leadership not just in terms of organizational role, but also in terms of influential acts of organizing as they bring tasks and practices back into the study of leadership. However, LP researchers are only beginning to understand influential acts of human-material organizing, i.e., how leadership practices are embodied in talk, action, and other symbolic media through an association with a material world. The material world manifests itself in objects, sites, and bodies (Cook and Brown, 1999), which become entangled with the discursive and symbolic – just as discursive objects (e.g., authority) quickly become text objects (e.g., a memory trace, written or recorded documents, memos, work orders, and so on) (Cooren, 2006). Although materialities lack the ability to symbolize or be reflexive, they exert agency in the ways they make a difference (Taylor and Van Every, 2000); leadership actors are made different by the objects they employ, while objects are made different by their human use (Latour, 1994; Suchman, 2007). However, as the technology literature makes clear, this does not imply symmetry: ‘persons and artifacts do not constitute each other in the same way' (Suchman, 2007: 269, emphasis original). The challenge is to understand precisely how the discursive and material enter into ‘mutual entanglements’ (Orlikowski, 2007) in leadership practices, technological or otherwise (Collinson, 2014). The glimpses we have seen in the leadership literature on textual agency (Oborn, Barrett and Dawson, 2013; Sorsa et al., 2014), objects (Cooren, Fairhurst and Huët, 2012; Fairhurst, 2007a; Fairhurst and Cooren, 2009), bodies (Sinclair, 2005; Sorsa et al., 2014), and sites, using both talk-in-interaction and case study work, already suggest the ability to understand leadership concepts (e.g., leadership presence; Fairhurst and Cooren, 2009) once thought too abstract to apprehend. Second, delineate issues of time more clearly in data analysis. Even though LP scholars adopt process language, all three categories of research reviewed here could do a better job delineating issues of time. For example, in the talk-in-interaction genre, Nicholson and Carroll's (2013) identity undoing strategies would be well served by a phasic analysis of the power effects of leadership development programs’ power effects; however, they are not alone. It is interesting to see case histories and dialectical studies that are the products of substantial time in the field delve deep into micro-practices, yet only yield a cross-sectional slice of the organization rather than a time-sensitive one (e.g., Maitlis and Lawrence, 2007; Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003). Granted, ethnographic interview data are still retrospective, but the sequential organization of the narratives they amass is often under-analyzed. Certainly, time is in the background rather than the foreground in many dialectical studies, as Norton (2009) allows by suggesting that a dialectical lens is not necessarily diachronic.

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Third, switch between micro-analytic and wide-angle lenses more frequently. Strategy-as-practice (SAP) researchers appear to be leading the way in this regard. They routinely use both a microscopic lens to view strategy talk-in-interaction, including video-ethnography, to understand issues of embodiment and intertextuality (Sorsa et al., 2014), and a wide-angle lens to examine case histories for a deeper sense of the context and consequences of strategy interactions (Denis et al., 2001), some within the same study such as we find in Aggerholm, Asmuβ, and Thomsen (2012), Denis et al. (2011), and Spee and Jarzabkowski (2011). Leadership studies, in general, could learn a lot from the multi-lens stance of SAP researchers.1

Conclusion It is hard not to be excited by the dividends that LP's temporal (and sequential), relational (and co-created), and contextual (and cultural) lens is yielding in terms of the variety of ways in which leadership is being investigated through time. This is not to dismiss the post-positivist, individualist, and cognitively based work of past, present, or future leadership psychologists. It is to reaffirm that there is more than one lens (Fairhurst and Uhl-Bien, 2012; Parry et al., 2014) and to appreciate that there are certain kinds of questions for which each lens is ideally suited (Fairhurst, 2007a). Finally, it is to stipulate that LP researchers must continue to push the boundaries of processual research to fully understand leadership's complex dynamics over time.

Note 1However, given that SAP researchers routinely study senior and middle managers, they could easily incorporate greater inquiry into leadership in their research. For example, how, when, and by whom are leadership attributions made in strategy talk? What influential acts of organizing speed or inhibit its formulation? How does leadership emerge (or fail to) in the dialectical interplay among tensions swirling in strategy development and implementation? Work by Denis et al. (2010) is a step in the right direction, but much more could be done.

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Organizational Communication as Process

Contributors: Franois Cooren, Gerald Bartels & Thomas Martine Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Organizational Communication as Process" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n32 Print pages: 513-528 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Organizational Communication as Process Franois CoorenGerald BartelsThomas Martine

Communication as a field of study, and organizational communication as one of its subfields seems, at first sight, naturally predisposed for understanding and analyzing processually the organizational world. In comparison to their sister disciplines – sociology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, management, etc. – communication studies are, indeed, supposed to focus on specific activities – communicating, interacting, connecting, cooperating, diffusing, transmitting, etc. – that require approaches that do justice to their ongoing nature. Despite this obvious predisposition, most current research devoted to communication in general, and organizational communication in particular, tends to prioritize product over activity; the outcome of these activities rather than what is taking place or happening to produce such results (Taylor, 2009). For more than 25 years, however, a growing body of research has begun to emerge in organizational communication, positioning communication as what allows organizational forms to emerge and be reproduced (Taylor, 1988). This movement, associated with what is today called the Communication as Constitutive of Organization approach – hereafter, the CCO approach – proposes to start from the in-depth study of communicational episodes to identify their organizing properties (Cooren, 2000). The idea thus consists of questioning the way we traditionally conceive of the link between communication and organization: Instead of just envisaging communication as something that happens in organization, the CCO movement paradoxically proposes to study how organization happens in communication (Smith, 1993). This reversal of perspective echoes John Dewey (1916/1944), who already wrote, some 100 years ago: Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication. There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication. Men live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common. (p. 4, emphasis in the original, quoted in Taylor, 1988, p. 201, as well as in Taylor & Van Every, 2000, p. 69) If the proximity of pragmatism and process studies no longer has to be demonstrated (Rescher, 2000), John Dewey's pragmatist stance can be understood as an invitation to analyze the communicative processes by which relatively stable societies get reproduced, evolve, and change. This is precisely what the CCO movement proposes to do in order to study organizations. As Langley and Tsoukas (2010) point out, this process orientation ‘does not deny the existence of events, states, or entities, but insists on unpacking them to reveal the complex activities and transactions that take place and contribute to their constitution’ (pp. 2–3). The idea thus consists of studying organization in action, which is another way to speak about organization in process. Implicit in this formulation is a certain form of stability, constancy, or even identity – to the extent that we can still identify something (an organization, a society, a group) that is deemed as being in process – but the focus is now on what produces this relative stability, constancy, or identity for another next first time, to use the felicitous expression coined by Harold Garfinkel (2002). In what follows, we thus propose to first present a brief history of the CCO movement, followed by an exposition of the main assumptions, ideas, and concepts that define it. Although this approach is far from being homogeneous (as we will see, at least three schools of thought can be identified), we will give particular prominence to principles and notions that highlight the process-oriented character of this body of research. Subsequently, we will introduce a series of exemplary works that characterize the advances of this approach.

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The CCO Approach: A Brief History Although the expression ‘communicative constitution of organization’ was first coined by Robert D. McPhee and Pamela Zaug in an article published in 2000 in the Electronic Journal of Communication, the idea that organizations could be studied in communication can arguably be attributed to James R. Taylor who, in the late 1980s, published a book in French titled Une organisation n'est qu'un tissu de communication: Essais théoriques (An organization is but a web of communication: Theoretical essays). The publication of this book, which proposed to respond to John Dewey's plea for the study of communication, can indeed be considered the first step that led him and Elizabeth Van Every to explore this idea, an exploration that continues today (Taylor, 1993; Taylor & Van Every, 1993, 2000, 2011, 2014). Before Taylor and Van Every, other scholars had already proposed to set a new research agenda focused on the organizing properties of communication – we are thinking of Karl E. Weick (1979), of course, but also of researchers associated with the interpretive paradigm in organizational communication (Putnam & Pacanowsky, 1983). Because of their interpretive bias, however, these scholars tended to almost exclusively focus on members’ sensemaking activities, which means that their interest in actual conversations and communication processes was relatively marginal. Most interpretive research was indeed interview based (for interesting exceptions, see Fairhurst & Chandler [1989], as well as Trujillo, 1983). Although Taylor (1993) was certainly influenced by the interpretive movement, his own research agenda consisted of going beyond member's interpretive activities by focusing on the logic of their interactions. This logic, which, as we will see, he associated with a text/conversation dialectic, was introduced through an article coauthored by Taylor, Cooren, Giroux, and Robichaud, published in 1996 in Communication Theory. It is this article, which is usually considered to have initiated this research movement, that played a major role in the emergence of a first school of thought associated with the CCO approach, namely, the Montreal School of Organizational Communication (Ashcraft, Kuhn, & Cooren, 2009; Brummans, 2006; Cooren, Taylor, & Van Every, 2006; Mumby, 2007). While the Montreal School is strongly influenced by pragmatism, the two other schools of thought associated with the CCO movement – McPhee and Zaug's (2000) Four Flows Model and Niklas Luhmann's (1995) Theory of Social System – are respectively rooted in Giddens's (1984) structuration theory and Maturana and Varela's (1987) idea of autopoiesis. Beyond their diversity, however, these three pillars of CCO (Schoeneborn et al., 2014) share a deep interest in the study of ongoing processes of communication, which means that they are, as we will show, interested in ‘time, movement, sequence, and flux’ (Langley & Tsoukas, 2010, p. 2). We will now present some of the ontological, theoretical, and conceptual aspects that define this movement by focusing especially on two of its main representatives: the Montreal School and the Four-Flow Model. Although some connections will be made with Luhmann's (1995) Theory of Social System, we encourage readers to refer to Schoeneborn et al.'s (2014) article to have a better understanding of what separates and unifies these three schools of thought.

Main Assumptions, Ideas, and Concepts In what follows, we will present key assumptions, ideas, and concepts that characterize the CCO movement. Although this research agenda is, as we saw, far from being homogeneous, we will highlight what unifies it, especially regarding its process-oriented character.

Communication Flow Page 3 of 16

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As mentioned previously, the acronym CCO was first coined in an article co-authored by McPhee and Zaug in 2000; an article in which these two authors introduced what they call the Four Flows Model. By communication flow, an idea which they claim to have borrowed from Weick (1979), they refer to ‘four types of constituting communication processes’ (p. 2); they identify these as (1) membership negotiation, (2) organizational selfstructuring, (3) activity coordination, and (4) institutional positioning. According to the authors, each of these four flows, which are characterized by ‘interactive communication episodes’ (p. 7), generates a specific social structure, constituting the organization per se. As they point out: The four flows link the organization to its members (membership negotiation), to itself reflexively (self-structuring), to the environment (institutional positioning); the fourth is used to adapt interdependent activity to specific work situations and problems (activity coordination). (McPhee & Zaug, 2000, p. 7) In other words, for an organization to exist and function, these four types of communication episode need to take place. By membership negotiation, McPhee and Zaug (2000) refer to the communication episodes by which people are constituted as members of the organization. These episodes participate in the constitution of the organization itself, given, as they point out, that ‘one must be a member of something’ (p. 8). Although McPhee and Zaug are thinking of episodes such as processes of recruitment and socialization, they also include activities involving questions of reputation, courtship, identification, and positioning. All these processes thus participate in the constitution of organization to the extent that they allow people to negotiate, reproduce, and alter what it means to be the member of this collective. These processes do not, of course, exhaust what constitutes organizations, which leads McPhee and Zaug (2000) to identify a second flow: organizational self-structuring. This flow refers to the communication episodes by which some individuals ‘bring the organization into being’ (p. 9) by designing and controlling what gets done in its name. As implied in the idea of process, flux, or flow, this type of activity implies active work by which the organization appears to structure itself. As any reflexive activity, however, this type of process involves people acting in the name of the organization; an organization that their activities contribute to structure and define. McPhee and Zaug (2000) especially highlight the role that texts and documents play in this flow – they mention ‘charters, organization charts, policy and procedures manuals’ (p. 9) – in that they contribute to the establishment of what is called a formal structure. However, they also identify activities such as accounting, budgeting, as well as issuing directives and orders, which contributes to the division of labor and ‘the pre-fixing of work arrangements and norms’ (p. 10). Although this type of flow creates the conditions of a system, the bottom-up approach advocated by these two authors allows them to avoid the illusion that there would be somewhere and somehow a harmonizing force that would make this whole coherent and unidirectional (Tarde, 2012 [1895]). Because it involves communication episodes, it is subjected to mishaps, gaffes, or mistakes. Systemization is therefore something that has to be worked out in interaction (Cooren, 2010; Luhmann, 1995). The third flow, activity coordination, corresponds to communication episodes by which adjustments are made to solve practical problems members face when collectively getting things done. Although the self-structuring flows allow organizations to standardize and anticipate what will be done in their name, activity coordination consists of managing or dealing with the unexpected (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2001) or any type of system breakdown or incidents. Beyond procedures, protocols, orders, and programs, which, as we saw, structure the organization (second flow), this third flow thus amounts to correcting, adjusting, or altering what was planned in order to complete specific goals and objectives. Page 4 of 16

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Finally, the fourth flow, institutional positioning, allows the organization to communicate with its environment (suppliers, clients, competitors, collaborators, governmental agencies, etc.). We are thus dealing with any communication episode that involves the production of a text in the name of the organization, whether this text will be ultimately voiced by a spokesperson (a CEO, for instance) or presented by what Vásquez and Cooren (2011) call a spokesobject (a website, a press release, etc.). Institutional positioning thus consists of making the organization position itself vis-à-vis its environment; knowing that this can only be done on the terra firma of interaction (Cooren, 2006) through human and nonhuman actors speaking on its behalf (Latour, 2013).

Texts and Conversations Although McPhee and Zaug's (2000) model shows to what extent processes of communication can contribute to the constitution of complex organizations, it does not really go into the detail of the communication episodes they typify. At no point do we see these authors, nor other scholars who mobilized the Four Flows Model, studying the detail of actual interactions, which does not seem to do justice to the processual dimension of the flow they identified (e.g., Browning, Greene, Sitkin, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2009; McPhee & Iverson, 2009). Instead of starting from the type of communication it theoretically takes to constitute an organization, Taylor and his colleagues of the Montreal School (Cooren, 2000; Taylor, Cooren, Giroux & Robichaud, 1996; Taylor & Van Every, 2000) proposed to study ‘the properties of communication that would explain how organization is generated in interaction’ (Taylor, 2009, p. 154, italics in the original). What is at stake for the Montreal School representatives is a theory of communication that explains why and how organization can be found in communication. This is what Taylor et al. (1996) initially proposed through the identification of what they presented as two essential modalities of human communication: texts and conversations. While conversations correspond to what people actually do in communicating with each other (this is where processes, fluxes, or flows take place), texts can be identified as the content of the conversations themselves, whether these conversations occur orally or in writing. On the conversational side, the organization thus emerges as a realized object, ‘in its continued enactment in the interaction patterns of its members’ exchanges’ (Taylor and Van Every, 2000, p. 4). This modality of communication, which can be relatively chaotic and unpredictable, corresponds to what Taylor and Van Every called the site of the organization. It is a world of events, transactions, turn-takings, uptakes, repairs, alignment, and co-orientation, which means that people always communicate about something, which is the object of their mutual orientation. In order to do that, people are speaking or writing to each other, and it is these acts of communication that constitute an organization-in-the-making. On the textual side, the organization emerges as a described object; that is ‘an object about which people talk and have attitudes’ (Taylor and Van Every, 2000, p. 4). While the conversational modality tends to mark the eventful character of communication, the textual modality thus expresses its iterable dimension; the fact that people talk about something that is identifiable beyond the localness and eventfulness of their interactions. Because of their iterable character, texts therefore have the capacity to travel from one conversation to another, allowing a form of relative continuity to take place. This is what Taylor and Van Every call the surface of the organization; what identifies its values, norms, procedures, routines, etc. In other words, the textual aspect of communication is what allows us to identify the organization itself, in its continuity, but also its variations. In speaking about these two modalities of communication, Taylor and Van Every (2000) insisted that they constitute two ways of conceiving of communication – two worldviews, as they sometimes called them – which means that one cannot exist without the other. An organization can therefore be analytically conceived according to two worlds: (a) a lived world of practically focused collective attention to a universe of objects, presenting probPage 5 of 16

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lems and necessitating responses to them [this is the conversational world]; and (b) an interpreted world of collectively held and negotiated understandings that link the community to its past and future and to other conversational universes of action by its shared inheritance of a common language [this is the textual world]. (p. 34) Organizations as forms of life thus emerge between what Henri Atlan (1979) called the crystal (a perfectly ordered and stable structure) and the smoke (random and chaotic interactions); two extremes between which life can navigate, but that do not constitute life themselves. Text, the modality of communication that, according to Taylor and Van Every (2000), embodies the source of order, thus functions like, what according to chaos theory, would be called a strange attractor (Gleick, 1987; Kriz, 1997, 1999, 2001). Because texts correspond to what people are talking about, it is indeed around these that the relatively chaotic world of conversation will organize itself, generating a form of structuration. This structuration is always at the mercy of alterations, adjustments, or even transformations, which redefine the texts, creating new attractors. Through their text-conversation model, Taylor and Van Every thus highlight the self-organizing property of communication (see also Taylor, 1995; Taylor & Giroux, 2005), which, as we will see later, establishes a strong parallel with another CCO school of thought, the one represented by Luhmann's (1992, 1995) and Maturana and Varela's (1987) theories of autopoiesis.

Textual Agency Given that texts tend to embody a source of order, it becomes progressively obvious that their agency has to be acknowledged, that is, their capacity to do things or make a difference in organizational processes. Cooren (2004) theoretically developed this idea further and illustrated that texts are regularly invoked in conversations to attempt to alter specific courses of action. For instance, something like a contract, an agreement, or a form can be mobilized to enjoin another party to proceed according to its terms (Brummans, 2007). Similarly, we are all familiar with situations where an administrator invokes the policy of her organization in order to reject a request that was made (Cooren, 2010). Speech acts, which we tend to attribute only to human beings (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969, 1979), can thus be attributed to the texts that humans constantly produce. For instance, we have no problem saying (1) that a memo informs us that someone resigned, (2) that a contract commits the organization to provide specific services, (3) that a policy enjoins employees to work from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm, (4) that a document confirms someone's appointment, or even (5) that a newsletter compliments one of the employees. Each of these speech acts respectively correspond to five categories identified by Searle (1979), namely, (1) assertives, (2) commissives, (3) directives, (4) declarations, and (5) expressives (Cooren, 2004, 2008, 2009), which demonstrates the mundane character of this phenomenon. In keeping with the bottom-up perspective advocated by proponents of the CCO perspective, and paralleling the notion of strange attractors, this reflection on textual agency therefore shows that a source of order, information, or systemization can come from the texts people mobilize in their interactions. As Cooren (2004) noticed, some texts also have the particularity of being relatively established or instituted, which illustrates why they can represent a source of stability or even identity for the organization. For instance, we can think of a mission statement that is regularly invoked by a CEO or a procedure that defines how things get done in a specific organization (Wright, 2016). Because of what Derrida (1988) calls their restance, i.e., their staying capacity (rester means to stay or remain in French), texts can thus be considered fully-fledged contributors to what gets accomplished in the organization's name. People are supposed to know what these documents say and if they do not, they can be told or reminded of what these writings stipulate. This means that texts such as mission statements, policies, procedures, protocols, programs, contracts, etc., make a difference in the way an organization functions (or Page 6 of 16

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malfunctions, for that matter). It is, in many respects, because of their existence and agency that a source of stability and iterability, which is typical of organizations and institutions, can be identified. Studying organizational processes can thus consist of analyzing what people, but also texts, literally do in organizational settings. There is not, as we see, an abstract structure that would govern from the top down what takes place in these processes. On the contrary, we see that in this source of governance, systemization or order comes from other actors: human beings, of course, but also the texts that they produced and are producing (Latour, 2005, 2013). This is what McPhee and Zaug (2000) identified as the organizational self-structuring flow; a process of self-structuring that needs to be constantly reenacted, for another next first time (Garfinkel, 2002). What we call the formal structure of an organization, therefore, is concretely made of documents, organizational charts, statuses, permits, IDs, procedures that actively, literally, and endogenously define not only the organization itself but also how things get done in its name.

Authority This reflection on textual agency allows us to tackle a related CCO notion, which is the one of authority. As Taylor and Van Every (2000) remind us, ‘without texts, no authority: After all, the words authority and author have the same root!’ (p. 242, see also Taylor & Van Every, 2014). This Latin root – auctor – also means the creator, father, genitor, the one who initiates, protects, and sanctions (Cooren, 2015a). Authority, according to the CCO perspective, must thus be understood dynamically: It has to be implicitly or explicitly enacted in a given interaction in order to be recognized and acknowledged. As Taylor and Cooren (1997) point out, ‘In a communicational interpretation of organization […], there is no constant point of stability; the authority to speak for the collectivity must be endlessly renewed, in the performance of the acts of speech’ (p. 435). What does this mean concretely? Simply that people's authority depends on their capacity to author texts that themselves give a voice to other authors (Benoit-Barné and Cooren, 2009). To understand how this works, we can take the typical example we already used about an administrator invoking the organization's policy to reject a request from a client. At first sight, we could think that it is just this person who is talking. However, if we start analyzing the situation carefully, we realize that many other authors can be identified as the sources/ genitors/fathers/creators of what is communicated to us, namely, (1) an administrator, embodied by this person at this point; (2) the organization itself, which she is supposed to represent; and even (3) the policy that she is invoking to reject the request. When this person is telling us, ‘I'm sorry, but our policy prevents me from disclosing this information,’ it is therefore not only she who is talking to us, but also the administrator she embodies, a person who is herself authorized to act in the name of the organization she speaks for. This part of her authority manifests itself through the presence of the pronoun ‘our,’ which signifies that she is acting as a spokesperson for the organization. It is therefore also the organization that is supposed to speak when she speaks. Furthermore, by invoking the policy, she is staging what authorizes her to reject the request. It is therefore also this policy that tells her and us that we cannot have access to this piece of information. As we see through this mundane example, analyzing the detail of interaction allows us to unfold or reveal all the authors that/who are participating in a given situation. It is not by chance that the Latin word auctor stems from the word augere, which means ‘to augment’ (Cooren, 2010). Being in or expressing an authority – a claim that can, of course, be always called into question – thus consists of augmenting the authors of what is put forward, which is a way to justify, legitimize, or account for what we say. Studying organizational processes, according to the CCO perspective, can thus consist of analyzing the multiple authors that/who invite themselves in activities and conversations. According to this bottom-up approach, there is not, on one side, human beings and their interactions and, on the other side, the organization and its official texts (procedures, programs, policies, statuses, ranks, charts, etc.). As we see, the organizations Page 7 of 16

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themselves, but also their procedures, programs, policies, documents, etc., can express themselves, implicitly or explicitly, in what human beings say and do, which is what McPhee and Zaug (2000) allude to when they speak about their fourth flow, institutional positioning.

Ventriloquism and Polyphony It is therefore a form of polyphony, already noticed by Mikhail Bakhtin (1984), that the CCO perspective aims to acknowledge in discourse and interaction in general. This polyphony, which we can identify in what people say and write, can indeed demonstrate why communication is constitutive of the mode of being and functioning of organizations: Organizations are able to literally and figuratively express themselves through what their members say in their name or for them, a phenomenon that Cooren (2010, 2012; Cooren & Sandler, 2014) identifies as a form of ventriloquism. Speaking in the name of an organization consists of ventriloquizing it; that is, making it say something. From a processual viewpoint, the figure of the ventriloquist is extremely interesting, since it shows that there is no absolute separation between the context of an interaction and the interaction itself. In other words, this figure rests on a relational ontology, implicit in any process perspective; an ontology that consists of ‘the recognition that everything that is has no existence apart from its relation to other things’ (Langley & Tsoukas, 2010, p. 3). This is essential to understand the difference between the conversation/text model and the ventriloquist approach. For the former, the organization is constituted mainly through human interactions (notably through metaconversations). For the latter, it is constituted through relations that involve – but can never be reduced to – human interactions. In other words, for the former, linguistic phenomena are always central, while for the latter, their weight or significance is (one of the many things that are) determined in interactions. Ventriloquizing indeed amounts to making someone or something say something, which means that aspects of the so-called ‘context’ of a discussion can, in fact, be envisaged as constantly and made to say things in what people say and do. For instance, the person who is invoking a policy is ventriloquizing it to the extent that she makes it say something at a specific point of an interaction. What is this policy made to say? For instance, that we are not authorized to get the information we were expecting from the organization. From a relational viewpoint, we see that the policy, as an official document of the organization, exists not only under the form of a text consultable online or in a written record available to all the employees, but also through its invocation/evocation/convocation by this administrator at this moment of her conversation with us. A policy exists relationally to the extent that its mode of existence and action depends on its multiple forms of embodiment/incarnation/materialization in oral and written texts. These texts can exist in people's minds (because the latter know them and can recall what they say), documents (a policy brochure, for instance), or in how they are ventriloquized in an interaction. The phenomenon of ventriloquism thus tends to call into question the bifurcation of nature1 that Alfred North Whitehead (1920) already denounced almost 100 years ago (Cooren, 2010; Latour, 2008). Nature does not bifurcate to the extent that the world that surrounds us is not mute (Latour, 2013; Stengers, 2011). It literally and figuratively speaks to us, which is what Charles Sanders Peirce (1991), the inventor of pragmatism and modern semiotics, showed us more than one hundred years ago (Lorino, 2014). Invoking a fact, a situation, a context, a policy, a principle, a procedure, a value thus consists of offering a way to exist and express themselves relationally through a discussion. Ventriloquism as a metaphor of (organizational) communication thus offers a way to resolve the unending debate between objectivism/realism and subjectivism/constructivism (Cooren & Sandler, 2014; Hacking, 2000). Following Étienne Souriau (2009), a French philosopher who was recently brought out of obscurity by Bruno Latour (2011) and Isabelle Stengers Page 8 of 16

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(Stengers & Latour, 2009), the ventriloqual thesis makes us realize that things as diverse as organizations, groups, procedures, policies, contracts, facts, situations, etc., come to exist and act more or less (in time and space) through the way we ventriloquize them in our discussions; a position that is perfectly compatible with a processual view. There is therefore no opposition, no clash, no rupture between the world that surrounds us and our own discussions. This world, through all its incarnations, materializations, and embodiments expresses itself more or less through what people say to each other, their alignment and disagreement. Going back to the four flows identified by McPhee and Zaug, we therefore have a way to operationalize the flows these two authors identified: (1) Membership negotiation, the first flow, is supposed to link the organization to its members, but this can only be done through the way membership can express itself – i.e., be ventriloquized – through what people say and do. This expression can certainly take the form of hiring contracts, but also other forms such as the cultivation of values, norms, and habits that are supposed to define what the organization is about. If we turn to (2) self-structuring, the flow that allows the organization to structure itself, we see that this is possible only through the way people design and produce texts in its name (budgets, organizational charts, statuses, charters, procedures, protocols); texts that can later be invoked and ventriloquized to define formal and established courses of action. Note that this self-structuring process is not limited to texts, as architectural elements (buildings, rooms, spaces, hallways, etc.). Technologies also constitute devices by which people will be led to follow specific courses of action and not others. Regarding (3) institutional positioning, the flow supposed to link the organization to its environment, we now understand that such a positioning can be done through all the spokespersons and spokesobjects that will be deemed as representing the organization, that is, literally making it present (again) to representatives of its environment. A press release will, for instance, ventriloquize the organization to the extent that it will tell the journalists and, through them, the general public, what the organization wants to promote (an event, a position, etc.). There is no need, therefore, to leave the terra firma of interaction (Cooren, 2006) as institutional positioning always, as any other flow, has to be enacted in communication. Finally, the fourth flow, (4) activity coordination, corresponds with what members constantly do to adapt to specific situations and problems in order to meet their objectives. According to the ventriloqual thesis, this consists of saying that it is not only procedures, programs, rules, and protocols that indicate what members should do (flow 2), but also the situations, circumstances, and problems they face on a daily basis. People are therefore not only ventriloquized by the rules and procedures they invoke, but also by the situations they encounter. These situations and problems also dictate what has to be done, even if people can, of course, disagree about what is dictated. As we see through this presentation of its key notions (flows, texts/conversations, textual agency, authority, and ventriloquism), the CCO approach defends a strong processual view to the extent that organizations and organizing are always studied in action. But what is noteworthy is that the CCO view also allows us to identify what literally passes through these actions. A process, in order to be identifiable, has to be the process of something (working, making a collective decision, strategizing, collaborating, solving a conflict, preparing a press release, etc.), which means, by definition, that certain things need to remain minimally stable and constant, be it only what people are up to in this process. Organizational processes will therefore be marked, identified, and defined by what is characteristically invoked or ventriloquized by the people who are involved in these activities. For instance, responding to clients’ requests for information might typically imply the mobilization of a policy in order to tell them what they can and cannot have access to (Cooren, 2010). Similarly, strategizing might predictably imply the ventriloquizing of objectives, graphs, facts, experiences, analyses, tools, techniques, PowerPoint presentations, and numbers (Denis, Langley, & Rouleau, 2006; Whittington, 2003) that will be explicitly or implicitly presented as dictating specific courses of action. Page 9 of 16

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With its polyphonic perspective, the CCO approach thus leads us to identify the numerous voices that can populate a given process, especially when these voices are typically given to facts, situations, documents, procedures, values, experiences, collectives, etc., that literally pass through what people say and characterize the organizational world. We therefore have a way to account for both stability/order and eventfulness/action without resorting to the existence of beings that would not be ventriloquized implicitly or explicitly in interaction. This is precisely what a constitutive approach to communication advocates.

Exemplary Works Another strength of the CCO approach is that its advances are, for the most part, empirically grounded. Given its focus on acting and organizing, representatives of this movement have always been interested in illustrating their theses through case studies taken from the organizational world. Furthermore, because of their process-oriented approach, CCO scholars (especially representatives of the Montreal School) have been mobilizing recording methods that allow them to do justice to the complexity of the courses of action they are trying to analyze and understand. In most cases, and when possible, this has implied the usage of video recording (Cooren, 2006; Cooren, Fairhurst, & Huët, 2012; Cooren, Fox, Robichaud, & Talih, 2005; Cooren, Matte, Benoit-Barné, & Brummans, 2014; Robichaud, Giroux, & Taylor, 2004), and more precisely, the technique of video shadowing (Meunier & Vásquez, 2008; Vásquez, Brummans, & Groleau, 2012). In what follows, we will present some studies that we think are exemplary in terms of their insights and findings.

Metaconversation Daniel Robichaud and James R. Taylor (Robichaud, Giroux, & Taylor, 2004; Taylor & Robichaud, 2007) developed the notion of metaconversation to illustrate the interactional process by which the constitution of organization occurs in interaction. Metaconversation refers to: a conversation (that of management) that generates accounts about other conversations (those of the multiple communities of practice that make up the organization), all now being given a voice (however authentic the translation is) by their representatives in the managerial metaconversation. (Taylor & Robichaud, 2007, p. 5) A metaconversation, as they explain, deals with questions of authority, since it involves different spokespersons claiming to speak on behalf of the organization as well as its interests and preoccupations. As they display through their analyses, metaconversations lead these spokespersons to talk implicitly or explicitly about what constitutes the organization, that is, assumptions defining the rights and obligations that are typically distributed in any collective endeavor. As they also show, it involves a narrative mode of argument to the extent that managers will put forward various ways of making sense of situations, which lead them to tell different stories regarding what they are co-orienting to. These stories typically involve heroes responding to breaches (of rights and obligations) by trying to overcome obstacles in order to reach specific objectives (Greimas, 1987). They each constitute competing claims about what a situation looks like and what should be done about it. As Robichaud, Giroux, and Taylor (2004) also demonstrate, metaconversations are characterized by what they call a search for closure, that is, an attempt to collectively reestablish a tentative state of order so that the organization can move forward with a sense of unity. What needs to be done at some point by these managers is to collectively author what the organization wants and has to do, which is, of course, a question of authority. If an organization should be seen as ‘a diversity of communities or practice engaged (or failing to Page 10 of 16

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be engaged) in the metaconversation, through their representatives’ (p. 631), it has, in order to exist, to find and have one voice so that its existence and identity can be acknowledged. As they point out, ‘organization is thus simultaneously singular and plural – a universe and pluriverse’ (p. 631).

Spacing and Timing Consuelo Vásquez's (2009, 2010, 2013; Vásquez & Cooren, 2013) studies on spacing and timing constitute another key CCO work illustrating the processual nature of organizing and organization. By video-shadowing various representatives of Explora, a Chilean governmental organization of science and technology diffusion, she shows how these spokespersons allow their collective to be ‘here and there at the same time, now and then at the same place’ (Vásquez, 2013, p. 127), making it present to various interlocutors that they are trying to enroll for an upcoming event. While space has traditionally been defined in contrast with time, Vásquez (2013) echoes Massey's (2004) work by conceptualizing space as space-time, which allows her to reintroduce dynamism, movement, and temporality into this notion. The different trajectories she video-shadows are thus conceived as ‘stories-so-far’ (Massey, 2005), that is, stories that are always unfinished and that meet each other through the various encounters she observes and video records. For instance, by video-shadowing Explora representatives trying to enroll scientists by knocking at their office door, she showed how each of these encounters could be analyzed as one of the multiple ways by which this organization spread out in the Chilean University, one interaction at a time. Explora thus becomes an ‘organization-in-the-making’ (Vásquez, 2013, p. 130) where each representative she follows spaces his, her, or even its organization. These spacing practices allow the organization that is represented (made present again in space and time) to expand and displace itself throughout Chile. Organizational boundaries thus become as dynamic and mobile as the spokespersons and spokesobjects that represent them. They become, as Vásquez (2013) points out, ‘shifting and fluctuating events. Boundary setting is carried through interaction as it responds to specific criteria of inclusion and exclusion’ (p. 130). Setting boundaries can then be seen as a strategic activity as these boundaries are ‘produced by certain agents, in certain moments, with certain goals’ (p. 131). Furthermore, she illustrates how each trajectory can be envisaged as a mode of ordering (Law, 1994), which implies that a lot of work always needs to be done to align these stories-so-far and maintain a coherence between the various trajectories.

Appropriation and Attribution Nicolas Bencherki's (2011, 2013; Bencherki & Cooren, 2011) studies on activities of appropriation and attribution constitute another exemplary work illustrating the processual view of the CCO movement. In fieldwork where he video-shadowed various organizational activities (meetings, especially), he showed how organizations are able to act (make statements, position themselves, etc.) by being attributed actions through conversations. Through the detailed study of interaction, Bencherki put forward a ‘genuinely communicative explanation of the way action passes from humans (and possibly other entities) to an organization’ (Bencherki & Cooren, 2011, p. 1580). In keeping with Bruno Latour (1996) and process philosophers such as Henri Bergson (2003 [1907]), Gilbert Simondon (2005 [1958]), Alfred North Whitehead (1967 [1933], 1979 [1929]), or even the sociologist Gabriel Tarde (1893, 1898), action is thus conceived as something that is shared between various beings that are staged implicitly or explicitly in people's conversations. As shown in Bencherki's analyses, the source of a given action is thus something that has to be defined in the becoming of interactions. Being someone or something is therefore not what only defines the static origin of action; i.e., roles, identities, positions are not the only things defining what can be done. Instead, being is also a matter of having someone or something else Page 11 of 16

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with whom to share action, to the extent that existing and acting consist of prehending (a Whiteheadian term) other entities’ action in a process of concrescence (another Whiteheadian notion), i.e., of gaining concrete existence. An organization can indeed prehend the actions of its constituents through the way participants conversationally recognize actions, including speech, as being not only that of its human author, but also that of the organization. For instance, focusing on attributive/appropriative practices means that a representative's ability to act and speak in the name of her organization rests in the collective recognition that the deed or the utterance of the representative is also that of the organization, whether through talk, applause, ulterior accounts of the event, etc. Those practices are so many ways for this organization to appropriate or be attributed what its representatives are doing or saying, with all the questions of responsibility that this kind of situation implies. These activities of attribution/prehension thus allow the organization to reproduce itself and evolve through the interactions that are observed. As pointed out by Bencherki and Cooren (2011): Rather than trying to draw a clear line between individual and organizational action, or rather than awkwardly stumbling on the divide between both, we [show] that action is always hybrid, and that it is exactly this oscillation or vacillation that also makes organizations act. It is action's ability to go to and fro, to be attributed and to ‘belong’ to several authors at once that allows a passing from individual to organizational action. (p. 1599, italics in the original)

Conclusion As we hope we were able to demonstrate, the CCO movement allows us to focus on processes of becoming, while identifying what allows the latter to remain identifiable and recognizable. In other words, it allows us to account for the stability and evolution of organizational forms while showing how they have to be enacted on the terra firma of interaction (Cooren, 2006). As implied in the acronym itself, the CCO approach invites us to take communication in all its forms seriously, since these forms constitute the very site and surface where organizations reproduce themselves and change (Taylor & Van Every, 2000). While the CCO movement could at first sight be dismissed as a form of ‘ontological conflationism’ (Archer, 1995, 2000) ‘in which individual agency determine social/organizational structure’ (Reed, 2010, p. 153), we saw that, on the contrary, this movement tends to question the very notion of individual agency, even if questions of responsibility remain, of course, addressable (Cooren, 2010). People should never be considered the absolute point of origin in any process precisely because they act as much as they are acted upon. Echoing Reed's terminology, we could say that what determines social/organizational structure (we would prefer to speak in terms of structuration) is actually a configuration of agencies whose articulations and interactions are precisely what the CCO approach proposes to study. In his critique, Michael Reed (2010) sarcastically writes, ‘If organization is constituted by communication, then why bother with materiality, spatiality, temporality, and sociality?’ (p. 155). Well, as shown in our panorama of the CCO process literature, studying materiality, spatiality, temporality, and sociality is precisely what CCO is doing. What needs to be understood, however, is that communication should not be reduced to human communication only. We need to acknowledge how the world (in all its incarnations and manifestations) also communicates through what people say, write and, more generally, do. This is what the process philosophers helped us understand, and this is what the CCO movement will hopefully continue to show.

Note 1By bifurcation of nature, Whitehead meant what he denounced as the artificial division, proposed for inPage 12 of 16

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stance by John Locke (1959 [1690]), between primary qualities (the physical part of the world) and secondary qualities (the experiences and comprehensions human beings have of this world).

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Materiality as an Organizing Process: Toward a Process Metaphysics for Material Artifacts

Contributors: Paul M. Leonardi & Santa Barbara Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Materiality as an Organizing Process: Toward a Process Metaphysics for Material Artifacts" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n33 Print pages: 529-542 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Materiality as an Organizing Process: Toward a Process Metaphysics for Material Artifacts Paul M. LeonardiSanta Barbara In the everyday world, people are used to making distinctions between activities and things. If you walked into a meeting with a friend and asked that friend to observe what was happening, he or she would likely say something like, ‘people are talking,’ ‘they are making decisions,’ or ‘they are coordinating.’ Your friend would not be likely to say, ‘the wood is becoming a desk’ or ‘the spreadsheet is becoming an amortization table.’ If he or she did say that, it would be weird. But it would be just as weird if you asked your friend to point to the things in the room and he or she said ‘the conversation,’ ‘the loan approval routine,’ or ‘the banking institution.’ Right? For some reason, though, organizational theorists have become, over time, comfortable conceptualizing activities such as talking and decision making as processual artifacts like discourses, routines, and institutions. But they have not yet become comfortable seeing material artifacts from the same processual vantage point. Instead, activities are processes, and things are substances (or, so today's prevailing logic would have it). During the last few years, organizational scholars have begun to call for more theorizing about the things – (e.g., artifacts, objects, technologies) people use in organizations to do their work, suggesting that the materiality of those things is consequential for our understanding of the organizing process (Carlile et al., 2013; Leonardi, 2012b; Leonardi, Nardi, & Kallinikos, 2012; Orlikowski & Scott, 2008). This notion of materiality seems to separate the materiality of artifacts like bodies, chairs, staplers, filing cabinets, and drill presses from the more conceptual nature of discourses, routines, and institutions. While some authors argue that the boundaries between the material and the conceptual are not fixed but rather constantly negotiated in practice (Latour, 2005; Orlikowski & Scott, 2008; Suchman, 2007), they usually submit, without protest, to the idea that the material and the conceptual are phenomena of different orders. The material (obviously) can be touched while the conceptual cannot. Material things are made up of substrates like flesh, bone, wood, glass, steel, and plastic – each one with its own matter. These properties offer certain opportunities and constraints that simply cannot be overcome – you cannot see through wood or light glass on fire. Although the content of an institution or the contours of a routine may seem as difficult to change as the arrangement of polymers in a plastic, the conceptual offers a particular freedom of improvisation and re-creation that the physical does not – simply because it lacks matter. It is with this distinction between material artifacts (like desks, computers, software programs, invoices, etc.) and conceptual artifacts (like routines, discourses, and institutions) that processed-based theories of organizing struggle. They struggle because they tend to treat conceptual artifacts as processual in nature, while treating material artifacts as substantial in nature. By processual, I mean that the artifact in question is always in a process of ‘becoming’ (Endrissat & Noppeney, 2013). For example, Feldman and Pentland's (2003) conceptualization of routines as consisting of both ostensive and performative aspects reminds us that although routines have a set of guiding principles that are expected to hold true across all cases of their enactment, they are carried out in the realm of practice in ways that do not always fully reflect, represent, or capture their ostensive guidelines. Consequently, routines are not substances; they are processes because they are continually moving and changing. But, in stark contrast, most discussions of material artifacts treat them as substances that exist ‘out there’ waiting to be used. For example, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system consists of certain directories, input fields, and file structures; thus, it provides a limited set of capabilities and constraints on all who use it. Research shows that people may work around an ERP system's constraints by using it in ways other than designers or implementers intended (see, for example, Boudreau & Robey, 2005). But this very observation admits that there is a substance that has entered an organization that is constraining and that in attempting to carry out their routines people must adjust them to work around the stable technology. When conceptual artifacts (like routines) are seen to be processual, and material artifacts (like ERP systems) are seen to be substantial, the latter will always be taken to be subordinate to the former. What I mean by this Page 2 of 14

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is simple: the routine (or whatever other conceptual artifact is in question) will be the focus of attention while the ERP system (or whatever other material artifact is in question) will only be seen as one element constituting the process through which routines are enacted and perpetuated. Organizational scholars who adopt a process ontology often argue that routines, discourses, institutions, and other conceptual artifacts are the processes that make organizing happen (Langley, 2007; Monge, 1990). Because material artifacts are taken to be substantial, rather than processual, they often fail to figure centrally in the organizing process themselves. Failing to understand material artifacts’ role in the process of organizing is especially problematic in an era in which most societies are rapidly shifting to a computational infrastructure where nearly every job is built around the use of some sort of advanced software-based technology. If organizational scholars do not adequately theorize the role that materiality plays in the organizing process, they are likely to be unable to explain changes in the form and function of work and work systems and, consequently, they will lose their relevance. In this chapter, I attempt to make a modest step toward rectifying this problem. To do so, I argue that organizational theorists must adopt a process metaphysics that treats material artifacts as processual, rather than substantial, just as they do with conceptual artifacts. When materiality is conceptualized as a process, we can begin to theorize more accurately about how material artifacts coevolve with conceptual artifacts in ways that produce, perpetuate, and change the broader organizing process. To begin a move in this direction, I organize this chapter into three parts. First, I draw on the work of process philosopher Nicholas Rescher to argue for a processed-based view of materiality. Then I turn to existing studies of technology development and use in organizations to show how through both activities, material artifacts retain a processual character in their constant state of becoming. Finally, I discuss how we might change our theorizing about the process of organizing if we were to consider materiality to be an important organizational process in its own right.

Materiality: A Process Metaphysics Perspective Perhaps part of our difficulty in thinking about materiality as a process is due to a shortcoming of linguistics: there is no gerundial form for the nouns that name most material artifacts. Although we make the easy linguistic shift from talking about ‘organizations’ to talking about ‘organizing’ (just as we can talk about ‘institutionalizing’ instead of ‘institutions,’ ‘working’ instead of ‘work,’ or ‘communicating’ instead of ‘communications'), we cannot so easily move from talking about ‘technology’ to the silly-sounding ‘technologizing’ or ‘software’ to the clearly abhorrent, ‘softwaring.' What would it take to extend process-based theorizing from the realm of the conceptual to the realm of the material (without making up new words)? And, what good would it do organizational scholarship? Philosopher Nicholas Rescher's career of work on process metaphysics provides compelling answers to both questions. In outlining what he calls a ‘process metaphysics,’ Rescher (1996: 2) articulates a very simple philosophical premise: ‘Process has primacy over things. Substance is subordinate to process: Things are simply constellations of processes.’ In other words, the world does not consist of activities and things. Instead, the world consists only of processes. And those things that we think of as substances are really a set of processes. Rescher defines a process as ‘a coordinated group of changes in the complexion of reality, an organized family of occurrences that are systematically linked to one another either causally or functionally’ (p. 38). At first glance, this way of thinking sounds relatively straightforward: There are no substances, only processes; the things we think of as substances are really just a collection of processes. But upon further inspection, the logic becomes quite complicated. Is the wood that makes up a desk really a process? Are the binary codes, the compilers, and the CPUs that together make up spreadsheets, which in turn make amortization tables, really all processes? As Rescher would have it, the world is processes all the way down. For a process metaphysics applied to materiality to make sense, it is crucial to place it in context. Most of the discussion that takes place within organizational theory about the role of materiality in the organizing process argues that material artifacts take on meaning in interaction. People interpret new technologies in the context of use and thus imbue them with meaning and significance. As Barley (1988) commented several decades Page 3 of 14

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ago, it is through the process of interpretation and meaning assignment that workers turn a technology from a material object into a social object. Orlikowski (2000) has taken this thinking one step further by arguing that material artifacts do not exist apart from the way they are enrolled in social action. In other words, technological (or material) artifacts become technologies-in-practice when people use them in their work, and scholarly studies of materiality must incorporate use as a definition of technology. Instead, it was only once technological artifacts becomes enmeshed in a web of organizational, occupational, and institutional forces that people interpret them and variously employ them in the practice of their work. With such recognition, terms like ‘technology-in-use’ (Orlikowski et al., 1995) and ‘socio-technological ensembles’ (Bijker, 1995) have begun to replace the word ‘technology’ in many discussions about the genesis of organizational change. As I have argued elsewhere (Leonardi, 2012a), this constructivist position, when taken at its extreme, suggests that technologies themselves matter very little in the way people work, but people's interpretations of the technology matter a lot. The ‘if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound?’ kind of argument that such writing provokes is very compelling. But as Rescher (pp. 47–48) notes, an ontological stance that treats things as if they are socially constructed when they are enrolled in some process (rather than if they are processes in their own right) becomes problematic because it eventually ends up by denying an artifact's materiality: The fact is that all we can ever detect about ‘things’ relates to how they act upon and interact with one another – a substance has no discernible, and thus no justifiably attributable properties save those that represent responses elicited from interaction with others. And so a substance metaphysics of the traditional sort paints itself into the embarrassing corner of having to treat substances as bare (propertyless) particulars because there is no non-speculative way to say what concrete properties a substance ever has in and of itself. But a process metaphysics is spared this embarrassment because processes are, by their very nature, interrelated and interactive. A process – unlike a substance– can simply be what it does. In other words, when scholars begin to argue that materiality is little more than what it might become through its enrollment in some sort of social process, they undermine the importance of the material artifact itself in the organizing process. This problem arises because if one adopts a constructivist stance on the world while maintaining the view that material artifacts are substances rather than processes, it becomes imperative to continue trying to explain the substance of materiality as subordinate to some sort of social process. Thus, although scholars may wish to adopt the view that both the material and social aspects of organizing are processual, without a specific process ontology for material artifacts, all materiality will eventually be explained in reference to the social processes with which it comes in contact. Rescher (1996) argues that a process metaphysics perspective avoids this problem of social reduction because it denies any definition of materiality as substance. As he argues: ‘Process metaphysics accordingly stresses the need to regard physical things – material objects – as being no more than stability waves in a sea of process’ (p. 53). A process metaphysics perspective on materiality has the following benefit: Instead of a two-tier reality that combines things together with their inevitable coordinated processes, it settles for a one-tier ontology of process alone – at any rate, at the level of basics. For it sees things not just as the products of processes (as one cannot avoid doing) but also as the manifestations of processes – as complex bundles of coordinated processes. It replaces the troublesome ontological dualism of thing and activity with a monism of activities of different and differently organized sorts. (Rescher: 49) Put more succinctly, to say that materiality is a process is to say that the materials (whether physical or digital) out of which a material artifact are created are the product of social and organizational practices, which in turn, are shaped by the very materiality they produce. And, those processes of materiality become integrated with the processes of other conceptual artifacts like discourse, institutions, and routines to constitute a broadPage 4 of 14

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er process of organizing. To make the case for materiality as a process requires an understanding of how material artifacts are developed and used. In the next section, I review process-oriented studies of technology development and use – two areas in which scholars have flirted with a process-oriented approach to material artifacts – to make this case.

Materiality and Process in Studies of Technology Development and Use Over the past half-century, and intensifying during the past twenty-five years, scholars have explored the role that material artifacts play in the organizing process, primarily through an examination of the development and use of new technologies. There are two streams of studies that have explored this materiality-organizing relationship. One stream of studies has examined the social processes that occur around the development of new technologies. These studies argue for a perspective that views technologies themselves as the constellation of social and material features. The second stream of studies takes a complementary view, but focuses on the social processes surrounding technology implementation and use, arguing, ultimately, that the usage context becomes a part of the very technology that is shaping it. Although none of the studies in these streams adopts an avowedly process-oriented approach to materiality, they do, collectively, provide a slate of evidence that points, empirically, to the processes that come to constitute materiality.1

The Process of Technology Development A persistent focus in studies of technology development has been on whether new technologies evolve because certain innovations push technical trajectories in a certain direction, or, rather, that technologies take the forms they do because they are the result of constant negotiation and discussion among interested parties. Within the organizational sciences, most perspectives since the 1960s have offered an approach that reads much more like a deterministic account of technological development. For example, Tushman and colleagues (Anderson & Tushman, 1990; Rosenkopf & Tushman, 1994; Tushman & Anderson, 1986) argued that new technologies emerge out of the negotiation and political concession of entrepreneurs, designers, engineers, and others. However, once a technology became an industry standard (a dominant design), its form and function were difficult to dislodge. As a technological design came to have a momentum of its own, it determined, to a large extent the form of future technologies until the moment when another radical technology either dramatically enhanced or destroyed the competencies established by the trajectory of its predecessor. The logic derived from such a perspective was that technologies and the social world around them coevolved and that ‘this process of co-evolution is characterized by periods of social construction and periods of technological determinism’ (Rosenkopf & Tushman, 1994: 404). This argument resonated also in the work of evolutionary economists such as Nelson and Winter (1982) and Dosi (1982), who suggest that although new technologies were decidedly social creations, their continued evolution in a constant direction could be explained by ‘natural trajectories’ or ‘technological paradigms’ that ‘refer to the path of improvement taken by a technology, given technologists’ perceptions of opportunities, and the market and other evaluation mechanisms that determined what kinds of improvements would be profitable’ (Dosi & Nelson, 1994: 161). In the late 1980s and early 1990s, dissatisfaction grew with this stance that technologies develop through social processes but then get locked into certain trajectories by the logic of scientific progress. Scholars who had previously worked to show that the creation and stability of scientific facts were themselves the product of ongoing social processes turned their gaze to demonstrating that technology development was also a process and that the materiality of an artifact resulted from social processes (Leonardi, 2013a). In one approach to this line of inquiry, Pinch and Bijker (1984) proposed a theory that explains how social processes shape the development of new technologies. This approach, known as the social construction of technology Page 5 of 14

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(SCOT), proposed three related processes through which the development of new technologies was socially constructed. The first is that relevant social groups played a key role in the development of a technological artifact. Such groups share a particular meaning of the artifact. This meaning can be used to explain why artifacts develop along particular paths. For example, Pinch and Bijker described that there were at least two relevant social groups important to the development of the bicycle: ‘young men of nerve,’ and ‘older men and women.’ Each of these groups contributed to the development of the bicycle in different ways. Second, to understand how technology is socially constructed, one must keep in mind that all newly created artifacts are interpretively flexible. Interpretive flexibility is the notion that the meaning of an artifact does not reside in the technology itself, but is determined by the meanings attributed to it by its relevant social groups (Pinch, 2003). Thus, there is an interpretive flexibility over the meaning to be given to an artifact. In the case of the bicycle, the highwheeler simultaneously had the meaning of ‘macho machine’ for young men and ‘unsafe machine’ for older men and women. As a result, the one artifact itself was interpretively flexible among the various social groups and different meanings were embodied in new artifacts. The third process as related to the second: All newly created artifacts reach a state of stabilization and closure. As Pinch and Bijker (1984: 426) described, ‘closure in technology involves the stabilization of an artifact and the “disappearance” of problems.’ Over time, the artifact stabilized and interpretive flexibility was diminished as one meaning becomes dominant. Pinch and Bijker suggested that artifacts can reach a state of closure through two avenues. The first is rhetorical closure, whereby designers talk about the technology in a way that emphasizes its finality. The second is closure by redefinition of the problem. In this mechanism, designers begin to tackle a new problem of development, thus leaving the solution to the old problem satisfactorily behind, essentially closing further exploration into it. A complementary approach know as actor-network theory (ANT) emerged out of the work of Latour (1987), Callon (1986), and Law (1987) at roughly the same time as the SCOT approach. Working separately and at times together, these authors criticized Pinch and Bijker's SCOT approach for making arbitrary distinctions between the social and the technological in their explication of the stabilization of technologies. ANT's main proposition is that the split between technology and society is artificial. To reconcile these two entities, ANT focused on multiple networks that are composed of (human and nonhuman) actors who share the same ontological status. In other words, there is no social/technical distinction. Neutrons, scallops, people, and organizations are all treated as similar semantic components capable of influencing an actor-network. While still seeking to explain how the process of technological development unfolds, ANT's supporters argue that a social constructivist theory of technology must take into account the status of the actors involved throughout the technology development process and the study of the ‘social’ not as the characteristics of any one individual, but rather as a distinct network in which heterogeneous relationships constitute different actors (Kaghan & Bowker, 2001). ANT proposes two major processes with which to understand the technology development process. The first concept is that of translation. Callon and Latour (1981) suggested that translation is the process of negotiation whereby actors (human or nonhuman) assume the authority to speak and act on behalf of others. Callon (1986) later specified that translation involves at least four distinct subprocesses. In the first, problematization, actors position themselves as resources for problem solving by foisting their definition of a given technological problem onto other actors. In the second, interessement, actors attempt to build alliances with other actors and with those actors who have not yet become members of the actor-network in order to validate a proposed problematization. The third, enrollment, involves multilateral negotiations used to help an interessement succeed – pointing new actors toward a desirable end state and showing them the means to achieve this goal. Finally, mobilization is a set of strategies that actors use to ensure that those allies they have enrolled do not betray their interests. Because actors often do have diverse interests, the development of a technology rests on the ability to translate – re-interpret, re-present, or appropriate – others’ interests to one's own (Law, 1992). As Callon (1991: 143) suggests, translation presupposes a medium into which such negotiations are inscribed: translations are ‘embodied in texts, machines, bodily skills [which] become their support, their more or less faithful executive.’ Although the process of translation, and in fact its very definition is often murky Page 6 of 14

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within ANT research, it is generally viewed to be a political process whereby actors use any means at their disposal to build a network of heterogeneous actors that will ultimately allow a technology to develop in a certain desired direction. The second concept, inscription, refers to the process by which individuals embed their social agendas into artifacts. As Latour (1991) suggests, all developers have certain ‘programs'– ideas about what they want the technology to do – and once this program is ‘translated’ into a set of negotiations that will make this possible, they are then inscribed into the technology. The inscription includes programs of action for the users, and it defines roles to be played by users and the technology (Holstrom & Robey, 2005). In doing so, it also makes assumptions about the competencies required by users to use the system. Thus, by inscribing programs of action into a technology, the technology becomes an actor in and of itself, imposing its program of action on its users. Taken together, SCOT and ANT demonstrate that the materiality of technological artifacts is not simply the result of social processes; rather, it is, itself a process. Latour and Woolgar (1986) took this point seriously when they produced the second addition of their famous book Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, and dropped the word ‘social’ from the first edition's title (published in 1979) to make the point that the construction of facts is not merely embedded in social processes, but that facts themselves, like material artifacts, are processes in their own right and do not simply depend upon what sociologists call the ‘social world’ for their continued existence (see pp. 281–282 for further explanation).

The Process of Technology Use The earliest research on technology use in organizations examined the effect of technology (typically large manufacturing processes) on organizational structure (conceptualized in a variety of ways, such span of control, centralization, or departmentalization). The core question for early organizational contingency theorists was whether certain technologies demanded particular organizational structures for organizations to be effective (Thompson & Bates, 1957; Woodward, 1958). Although many studies challenged the empirical findings presented about the optimal organizational structures for particular kinds of technologies (Aldrich, 1972; Blau et al., 1976), and several famous studies attempted to argue that the technologies themselves were merely justifications for structural changes managers wanted to make anyway (Child, 1972; Davis & Taylor, 1976), there were no real conceptual critiques of the underlying deterministic relationship until the mid-1980s, when Barley (1986) famously argued that technologies might not be structural determinants, but rather their implementation in organizations were occasions during which organizational actors could re-evaluate or re-imagine the structures in which they worked. To make this argument, Barley employed Giddens’ (1979; 1984) structuration theory in a sleight of hand of sorts. Barley employed structuration theory precisely because it offered a processual view of organizing (see Barley & Tolbert, 1997 for a further explanation) that elided the distinction between action and structure through its focus on social institutions as processes. Because structuration theory held that abstract social structures like social class (which organization theorists then figured could be simply transposed to a discussion of organizational structures, like centralization) were both the medium and outcome of human action, Barley reasoned that if one could demonstrate that technologies affected interaction among people, one could aggregate these interactions in such a way as to claim that there was a concomitant change in the process of organizing. In other words, Barley operationalized social interaction as a process of interpersonal communication and, adopting the premises of structuration theory, assumed that interpersonal communication processes formed, in the aggregate, organizational structure. Barley's use of structuration theory allowed him to treat technology as a pivot point between action (communication process) and structure (centralization of decision making). In Barley's study, as actors used the new technology and oriented themselves to it, they changed their communication processes, which, over time, altered decision rights allocated to different occupations. Barley demonstrated that the radiology departments within two hospitals who adopted the same Technicare 2060 CT Scanner both ultimately became more decentralized over time, but become so in different ways and at different levels of intensity. Page 7 of 14

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A second adaptation of structuration theory to technology use came from the development of Poole and DeSanctis’ (DeSanctis & Poole, 1994; Poole & DeSanctis, 1990, 1992) Adaptive Structuration Theory (AST). Like Barley, Poole and DeSanctis appropriated structuration theory's process orientation to explain the relationship between technology and social interaction. While, like Barley, they also focused on interpersonal communication processes as the way that social structure was enacted in everyday practice, they considered social structure, in the abstract, to be the norms of behavior governing small, decision-making groups. In their formulation of AST, technology use was also the modality of structuration (DeSanctis & Poole, 1994). Poole and DeSanctis focused specifically on how members of student groups used the various features of the group decision support technology under study to enact decision-making norms (Poole & DeSanctis, 1992). In these two appropriations of structuration theory, the technology-triggered structural change model and AST, technology use mediated between action and structure by providing people with new capabilities and opportunities to do things they could not do before. In Barley's terms, new technologies provided affordances that created a ‘slippage’ between action and structure, and in DeSanctis and Poole's words, new technologies could reconfigure structure through ‘ironic appropriation’ of the technology's features. A third application theory of structuration theory to technology use – Orlikowski's (1992) duality of technology model – changed the premise entirely. Whereas the technology-triggering model and AST both conceptualized ‘action’ as the communication among people that was altered by technology use, Orlikowski operationalized action itself as technology use. In her duality of technology model, people's technology use was the actions out of which organizational structures were constituted. In other words, technology did not have effects on organizational structure through communication; instead, technology use was the micro-level process that aggregated into macro-level organizational structure. This formulation placed technology in a central role in the organizing process. Orlikowski suggested that powerful actors shaped how people used the technology and how particular uses diffused across the organization. These actors did so to reinforce their abilities to signify, legitimize, and dominate particular organizational practices. Of course, people could rebel and use the technology differently, which would then lead to change in the (organizational) structures of signification, legitimization, and domination. Thus, in the duality-of-technology approach, technology use becomes a constitutive feature of organizational structure. Having already conceptualized technology use as a constitutive feature of structure in its own right, Orlikowski (2000) shifted the operationalization of structure to again bring technology more into the center of organizational analysis. In the development of the practice lens, the ‘technology-in-practice,’ which Orlikowski (2000: 407) defined as ‘a particular structure of technology use,’ was substituted for broader and more abstract types of social structures specified in the prior structurational approaches: centralization, group norms, or structures of legitimization, domination, and signification. Thus, the practice lens argued that certain processes of technology use aggregated into particular ‘technologies-in-practice’ as people formed interpretations, in the practice of their work, about how the technology's features would help them accomplish tasks and social interaction with others. Since the formulation of the practice lens, many scholars have begun to consider how the ways that people use technologies lead, through interpretive processes, to particular patterns of technology use that become institutionalized as the normal state of affairs within and across organizations (e.g., Baptista, 2009; Boudreau & Robey, 2005; Davidson, 2002; Majchrzak & Malhotra, 2004; Schultze & Orlikowski, 2004; Vaast & Walsham, 2005). But perhaps more importantly, the practice lens has been criticized for offering an overly socialized view of technology. This critique comes from the fact that the realm of action consists of people choosing to use a technology in a certain way. Here, the technologies themselves are only peripheral players that are subject to the whims of their users. For example, Orlikowski (2000: 412) argues that even though technologies have certain physical or digital properties that transcend specific contexts of use, ‘users have the option, at any moment and within existing conditions and materials, to “choose to do otherwise” with the technology at hand. In such possibilities to do otherwise lies the potential for innovation, learning, and change.’ Then, of course, at the macrosocial level, a technology-in-practice is really nothing more than a set of norms governing when, why, and how to use a technology in a specific setting. Although technology is the object of inquiry in Page 8 of 14

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studies adopting a practice lens, there is virtually no technology there to be found in most empirical accounts that employ it because action (technology use), structure (technology-in-practice), and modality (interpretation) are all fundamentally social. Their theoretical formulations depend on the existence of some materiality, to be sure, but we only see the reflection of that technology in the enactment of social processes in the practice lens.

The Process of Materiality This evolution of thought about the ontology of material artifacts in discussions of technology use has reached a point where scholars tend to recognize that materiality is a process through which matter and meaning are interrelated. As the studies outlined above demonstrate, materiality is a complex process involving an artifact's features and the social action that buffers the perception and use of those features. But as is true with the literature on technology development, the literature on technology use provides us only with evidence of the processual nature of materiality; it stops just short of calling materiality a process in its own right. I argue that scholars have not yet reached a true process metaphysics of materiality because they lack the conceptual tools to make the transition from thinking about materiality as embedded in an organizing process to treating materiality as a process of organizing.2 Recently, scholars who study both technology development and technology use have sought an ontological position that resolves the tension between materialistic and voluntaristic visions of technological change. As Steve Barley and I (Leonardi & Barley, 2010) have observed, scholars who have begun to adopt a ‘sociomaterial’ approach to organizing hope to embrace materialism within a voluntaristic ideology to argue that materiality shapes organizing without succumbing to a deterministic notion about the relationship between technology and organizational change. As several authors have begun to observe (Jones, 2013; Kautz & Jensen, 2013; Leonardi, 2013b), there are at least two variants of sociomaterial theorizing. These two variants are outlined in Table 33.1. The first, which uses as its basis a foundation of agential realism, a complex theoretical framework which holds that human actors consecrate some parts of the world as social and other parts as material when, in reality, there are no neat divisions to be found in nature or the built environment. Whereas the evolution of structurational arguments concerning technology had evolved to the point where the technologies themselves and the actions taken by the people that used them interacted recursively, over time, agential realism denied any separation between technologies and technology use, the ‘social’ and the ‘material,’ and more profoundly, the realms of structure and action. As Orlikowski (2007: 1438), drawing on Barad, argued: We have tended to speak of humans and technology as mutually shaping each other, recognizing that each is changed by its interaction with the other, but maintaining, nevertheless, their ontological separation. In contrast, the notion of constitutive entanglement presumes that there are no independently existing entities with inherent characteristics. (Barad, 2003: 816) When resting on the theoretical foundation of agential realism, a sociomaterial perspective argues that there is no social that is separate from material, there is only the sociomaterial. Any difference we would claim that exists between them results from an ‘agential cut’ (to use Barad's term) made by researchers who want to arbitrarily identify something as ‘social’ and something else as ‘material.’ The natural world, in Barad's writings, or the organizational practice, in Orlikowski's writings, knows no distinctions; only the people using apparatuses such as structuration theory to capture what is ‘out there’ notice distinctions as they enact them in their writings. In short, when resting upon the theoretical foundation of agential realism, a sociomaterial perspective breaks away, profoundly, from the tethers of structuration theory into a philosophical stance in which there is ‘no social that is not material and no material that is not social’ (Orlikowski, 2007: 1437). In its denial of a separation between social and material aspects of organizing process, this variant of the sociomaterial approach aligns with Rescher's (1996: 89) notion that materiality does not exist as a substance ex ante: Page 9 of 14

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Modern physics is in many ways deeply congenial to a process approach. In particular, quantum theory has it that at the level of the very small there are no ongoing ‘material’ things (substances, objects) at all in nature, no particulars with a continuing descriptive identity of their own; there are only patterns of process that exhibit stabilities. Table 33.1Toward a view of materiality as process: two variants of sociomateriality Variant 1 All processes occurring within organizations are sociomaterial (e.g., Orlikowski, 2007)

Variant 2 Organizing is a process through which social and material agencies mutually constitute each other (e.g., Leonardi, 2011) The social context and the materiality that exists in it are separate. The social and the material become ‘sociomaterial’ as people imbricate social and material agencies.

There is no social interaction that is disGeneral ontology tinct from materiality – there is only a fused ‘sociomaterial.'

General epistemology

Analysts make arbitrary distinctions about what is ‘social’ and what is ‘material’ (agential cuts) when looking at a unified whole (‘sociomaterial').

What is socioma- The inherent inseparability between the teriality? material and the social.

Analysts make determinations about how and why the separate ‘social’ and ‘material’ become the ‘sociomaterial’ and persist that way over time. The processes through which materiality becomes enmeshed with institutions, norms, discourses, and all other phenomena we typically define as ‘social.'

What is a process of materiality?

There is no materiality – only sociomaThe activities through which social and materiality – because there is no distinction terial agencies become imbricated in ways between social and material agencies. that enable organizing.

Methodological unit of analysis

The sociomaterial practice.

The process by which social and material agencies are imbricated.

Methodological focus

Identify what implications sociomaterial practices have for organizational processes (e.g., identification, negotiation, etc.).

Identify how the social and the material become the sociomaterial and what implications this has for organizing (e.g., communication networks, centralization, etc.).

Showcase how all organizational processes are sociomaterial and how recognition of this fact can improve our Potential theorettheorizing about them. Demonstrate that ical usefulness organizing occurs in practice and that practice is neither social nor material; it is both.

Showcase how organizations and technologies come to be as they are and why people think they had to be that way. Move materiality into a constitutive role in organizing and organizational processes while showing how organizing shapes the material world.

The second variant of sociomaterial theorizing argues that although the material and the social are related, they are not interpenetrated. Instead, materiality predates the actions to which it will be put and the perceptions it will help create (Leonardi, 2013b; Mutch, 2013). Put more simply, users are introduced to an artifact whose materiality has already been preconfigured for them. Although they may be able to change its materiality, even their perceptions of what changes could be made are constricted, to a large degree, by the initial materiality that they encounter when first using the technology. From the vantage point of this second variant, ‘whereas materiality might be a property of a technology, sociomateriality represents that enactment of a particular set of activities that meld materiality with institutions, norms, discourses, and all other phenomena we typically define as “social.”’ (Leonardi, 2012b: 34). Materiality is one important building block of sociomaPage 10 of 14

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teriality, but it is not isomorphic with the social. This second variant also brings time into sharp relief. Mutch (2013:31) discusses this point succinctly: ‘all agency takes place in conditions that predate action, forming logics that condition and shape what is possible. Time is therefore important in our analyses as certain conditions are more enduring and resistant to change.’ The very notion that something existing in the structural realm – like materiality – predates (for a particular actor) anything occurring in the realm of action – like communication patterns or routines – implies a temporal analysis of the relationship between structure and action. The issue that Mutch dodges in his analysis, however, is how the material and the social are brought together in such a way to create the sociomaterial. Elsewhere, I (Leonardi, 2011, 2012a) have advocated use of the metaphor of imbrication – the gradual overlapping and interlocking of distinct elements into a durable infrastructure – as one useful way to think about the process by which the social and the material become the sociomaterial. What is actually imbricated over time is social agency (which manifests itself in a group's goals and intentions) and material agency (the things a technology can do that are not entirely under the control of users). Social and material agencies, though both capabilities for action, differ, phenomenologically with respect to intention. By introducing time and by focusing on the process of the imbrication of agencies through it, this second variant perhaps provides better explanation than the first variant of materiality as a process (rather than simply action) and, consequently, more points of articulation with extant theories of organization. Put another way, it argues that materiality is itself a process that does not depend on other organizational processes that would enable developers or users of a material artifact to interpret it. Instead, the process of materiality exists independent of other social processes, but works alongside those processes to constitute the broader process of organizing.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have argued that although organizational scholars generally acknowledge that materiality plays an important role in the organizing process, we tend to view materiality as something that is a product of, or an exogenous pressure placed on, some important process, rather than a process in its own right. Yet, there is ample empirical evidence in constructivist studies of technology development and use to begin to see how the creation and implementation of material artifacts is processual in nature. But to view materiality not simply as something that arises out of process or affects process, but as a process itself, requires a process metaphysics that rejects the notion that material artifacts have substance and supports the view that material artifacts are processes. The current trend toward sociomaterial theorizing moves organizational scholars part of the way down the road in this direction by attempting to show that processes of development and use so saturate the becoming of materiality that it makes little sense to build distinctions between them. But there is still some distance to travel to see materiality as process. As Rescher's process metaphysics makes clear, materiality is always in a state of becoming. The organizing processes that help to produce it are constantly in flux, as are all processes, such that technological artifacts never stay stable for long. And the organizing processes into which a material artifact is introduced mediate its effects on them. Thus, when organizational members experience an artifact's materiality, they experience a half-completed process that will only come to completion as it intersects with the processes of conceptual artifacts such as discourses, routines, and institutions. For this reason, organizational scholars would do well to consider materiality as one of many processes of organizing. Alongside other processes, materiality comes to constitute those very organizations in which people work.

Notes 1The material in this section is an expansion of some of the basic ideas outlined in Leonardi (2009). Page 11 of 14

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2The material in this section builds upon preliminary arguments I made in Leonardi (2013b).

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Holstrom, J., & Robey, D. (2005). Inscribing organizational change with information technology. In B. Czarniawka & T. Hernes (Eds.), Actor-network theory and organizing (pp. 165–187). Malmo: Liber. Jones, M. (2013). Untangling sociomateriality. In P. R. Carlile, D. Nicolini, A. Langley, & H. Tsoukas (Eds.), How matter matters: Objects, artifacts, and materiality in organization studies (pp. 197–226). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kaghan, W. N., & Bowker, G. C. (2001). Out of machine age?: Complexity, sociotechnical systems and actor network theory. Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, 18, 253–269. Kautz, K., & Jensen, T. B. (2013). Sociomateriality at the royal court of is: A jester's monologue. Information and Organization, 23(1), 15–27. Langley, A. (2007). Process thinking in strategic organization. Strategic Organization, 5(2), 271–282. Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (1991). Technology is society made durable. In J. Law (Ed.), A sociology of monsters: Essays on power, technology and domination (pp. 103–131). London: Routledge. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1986). Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Law, J. (1987). Technology and heterogeneous engineering: The case of the Portuguese expansion. In W. E. Bijker, T. P. Hughes, & T. Pinch (Eds.), The social construction of technological systems: New directions in the sociology and history of technology (pp. 111–134). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Law, J. (1992). Notes on the theory of the actor-network: Ordering, strategy, and heterogeneity. Systems Practice, 5(4), 379–393. Leonardi, P. M. (2009). Crossing the implementaiton line: The mutual constitution of technology and organizing across development and use activities. Communication Theory, 19(3), 278–310. Leonardi, P. M., & Barley, S. R. (2010). What's under construction here? Social action, materiality, and power in constructivist studies of technology and organizing. The Academy of Management Annals, 4(1), 1–51. Leonardi, P. M. (2011). When flexible routines meet flexible technologies: Affordance, constraint, and the imbrication of human and material agencies. MIS Quarterly, 35(1), 147–167. Leonardi, P. M. (2012a). Car crashes without cars: Lessons about simulation technology and organizational change from automotive design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Leonardi, P. M. (2012b). Materiality, sociomateriality, and socio-technical systems: What do these terms mean? How are they different? Do we need them? In P. M. Leonardi, B. A. Nardi, & J. Kallinikos (Eds.), Materiality and organizing: Social interaction in a technological world (pp. 25–48). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leonardi, P. M. (2013a). The emergence of materiality within formal organizations. In P. R. Carlile, D. Nicolini, A. Langley, & H. Tsoukas (Eds.), How matter matters: Objects, artifacts, and materiality in organization studies (pp. 142–170). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leonardi, P. M. (2013b). Theoretical foundations for the study of sociomateriality. Information and Organization, 23(2), 59–76. Leonardi, P. M., Nardi, B. A., & Kallinikos, J. (Eds.), (2012). Materiality and organizing: Social interaction in a technological world. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Majchrzak, A., & Malhotra, A. (2004). Virtual workspace technology use and knowledge-sharing effectiveness in distributed teams: The influence of team's transactive memory. working paper. University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business, Los Angeles, CA. Monge, P. (1990). Theoretical and analytical issues in studying organizational processes. Organization Science, 1(4), 406–430. Mutch, A. (2013). Sociomateriality – a wrong turning? Information and Organization, 23(1), 28–40. Nelson, R. R., & Winter, S. G. (1982). An evolutionary theory of economic change. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Orlikowski, W. J. (1992). The duality of technology: Rethinking the concept of technology in organizations. Organization Science, 3(3), 398–427. Orlikowski, W. J. (2000). Using technology and constituting structures: A practice lens for studying technology in organizations. Organization Science, 11(4), 404–428. Orlikowski, W. J., & Scott, S. V. (2008). Sociomateriality: Challenging the separation of technology, work and Page 13 of 14

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organization. The Academy of Management Annals, 2(1), 433–474. Orlikowski, W. J., Yates, J., Okamura, K., & Fujimoto, M. (1995). Shaping electronic communication: The metastructuring of technology in the context of use. Organization Science, 6(4), 423–444. Orlikowski, W. J. (2007). Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work. Organization studies, 28(9), 1435–1448. Pinch, T. J. (2003). Giving birth to new users: How the minimoog was sold to rock and roll. In N. Oudshoorn & T. Pinch (Eds.), How users matter: The co-construction of users and technology (pp. 247–270). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pinch, T. J., & Bijker, W. E. (1984). The social construction of facts and artifacts: Or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other. Social Studies of Science, 14, 399–441. Poole, M. S., & DeSanctis, G. (1990). Understanding the use of group decision support systems: The theory of adaptive structuration. In J. Fulk & C. Steinfield (Eds.), Organizations and communication technology (pp. 173–193). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Poole, M. S., & DeSanctis, G. (1992). Microlevel structuration in computer-supported group decision making. Human Communication Research, 19(1), 5–49. Rescher, N. (1996). Process metaphysics: An introduction to process phiosophy. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Rosenkopf, L., & Tushman, M. L. (1994). The coevolution of technology and organization. In J. A. C. Baum & J. Singh (Eds.), Evolutionary dynamics of organizations (pp. 403–424). New York: Oxford University Press. Schultze, U., & Orlikowski, W. J. (2004). A practice perspective on technology-mediated network relations: The use of internet-based self-serve technologies. [Article]. Information Systems Research, 15(1), 87–106. Suchman, L. (2007). Human–machine reconfigurations: Plans and situated actions. Cambridge Cambridge University Press. Thompson, J. D., & Bates, F. L. (1957). Technology, organization, and administration. Administrative Science Quarterly, 2(3), 325–343. Tushman, M. L., & Anderson, P. (1986). Technological discontinuities and organizational environments. Administrative Science Quarterly, 31, 439–465. Vaast, E., & Walsham, G. (2005). Representations and actions: The transformation of work practices with it use. Information and Organization, 15, 65–89. Woodward, J. (1958). Management and technology. London: HSMO. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n33

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Organization Design as Process

Contributors: Roger L. M. Dunbar & Beth A. Bechky Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Organization Design as Process" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n34 Print pages: 544-558 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Organization Design as Process Roger L. M. DunbarBeth A. Bechky Organization designs enable organizations to perform tasks and generate desired outcomes. Classic approaches often focused on how organization designs could adapt to environmental pressures, leading to a static perspective. In fact as situations demand, managers adjust and change organization designs. This paper presents a process perspective using case studies to illustrate how designs develop. Later, we show how conflicts over desired outcomes destroy design effectiveness. Our approach contrasts with discussions of organization designs that seek to identify a fixed structure – a ‘contingent fit’ – that fixes dimensions of organizational coordination and control to accommodate environments and accomplish goals (Galbraith, 1973; Thompson, 1967). This static perspective suggests organization designing is a planning activity that is to be kept separate from the processes organizations use to take action (Thompson, 1967: 55). Our view is that organization designing and the managing of an organization design are both aspects of ongoing organizational activities. While contingency theorists focus on structural aspects of design ‘fits’ (Van de Ven, Delbecq and Koenig, 1976; Argote, 1982), they also argue that as environmental uncertainty or instability increases, designs should rely less on structures like hierarchies, programs, and rules, and more on assessments of changing conditions (Galbraith, 1973, 1977; Lawrence and Lorsch, 1967; March and Simon, 1958; Mohr, 1971; Thompson, 1967). Typically, assessment processes call on supervising managers to interpret reports of financial results, customer satisfaction, etc., and to decide on what the implications for a design may be. While such output measures may indicate design performance, they are often reviewed at a distance far from where ongoing designed activities occur. Interpretations made at a distance can easily conflict with the views of those directly involved with managing a design. Our perspective seeks to be as close as possible to where designed activities are carried out. We also think processes of designing and managing organization activities can be highly personal and involving. Consider Frank Gehry, the architect, and how he designs a building. With respect to planning activities, he says, ‘I don't know where I'm going when I start’ (Yoo et al., 2006: 217). He begins a building design by interviewing everyone who has an interest in it to learn of the features they want it to have. He also builds models to explore the building's scale, how its parts relate, how it may fit into its location, and what the construction issues may be. As he learns what is possible, he takes copious notes, and gradually his design emerges. His design integrates different materials and shapes into a building with a unique look and feel and a lot of user functionality. In describing his practices, Gehry emphasizes how he draws upon many different sources and experiences to learn and develop his design (Yoo, Boland, and Lyytinen, 2006). Different assumptions can underlie an organization design. Our approach assumes that the design aim is to support people working in an organization to achieve a desired outcome. Adler and Borys (1996: 61) report that organization members experience such a design as enabling because it ‘provides needed guidance and clarifies responsibilities, thereby easing role stress and helping individuals be and feel more effective.’ Another approach holds that organization designs should complement the power of top management and include top-down checks to impose order on an organization. Organization members often experience a top-down design as coercive because it ‘stifles creativity, fosters dissatisfaction, and demotivates employees'(Adler and Borys, 1996: 61). Depending on the design approach, people may experience an organization design as enabling because it provides support for mastering specific tasks, or as coercive, consisting of directives they must comply with. While organization members may perceive organization designs as being enabling or coercive, the designer's status usually determines whether or not a particular design is adopted within an organization. It likely will be adopted if the designer is an organization owner, or has a position of authority in an organization, or has expertise in a particular field. We begin with cases illustrating the processes used to develop organization designs intended to support tasks and achieve desired outcomes. Later, we discuss cases that illustrate how Page 2 of 16

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efforts to impose top-down views can disrupt successful organization designs.

An Initial Organization Design We begin with a start-up organization to illustrate the components of a design. Ari Weinzweig and Paul Saginow worked at an Ann Arbor restaurant (Matilda's) where their colleagues had no interest in the food served. Ari and Paul, in contrast, were very interested in the quality of the food served. They talked about opening a deli that would offer the finest artisanal food products and serve the best sandwiches known to human kind. They hoped that deli employees and customers would share their interest in quality food. Their friends were skeptical, though, noting how ‘a dozen had tried and failed during the previous decade’ (Weinzweig, 2010: 29–30). The two friends founded Zingerman's Deli in 1982. In designing the deli, Ari recalled his studies of anarchism, ‘a philosophy based on respect for the individual and freedom from the restrictions of government or external authority… a positive perception of humanity, based on the belief that people want to do the right thing and – if unobstructed by self-serving authoritarian structures – usually will’ (Weinzweig, 2010: 19). Ari thought that the implication for the deli organization design was that he should select employees with an interest in quality food and then let them run the deli as they saw fit. He found, however, that this did not work. Employees had difficulty because situations developed in the deli where they did not know what to do or what they were expected to do. After discussing these concerns with them, Ari formulated rules describing what he wanted them to do in particular situations, e.g., what to do if a customer was dissatisfied. Employees found the rules helpful behavioral guides they referred to when they were uncertain. After further discussions with employees, Ari formulated a series of ‘what to do, when’ rules that became known as Zingerman's Way and the deli's organization design. As employees raised new issues, Ari added new rules. On other matters, however, Ari and Paul encouraged employees to handle situations as they thought best (Weinzweig, 2010: 20). Indeed, to achieve the outcome they most desired – a shared interest in quality food – they depended completely on the initiatives employees chose to take with deli customers. When Zingerman's was 10 years old, Paul observed that although ‘the deli had a reputation for being warmhearted, fun-loving, and food–obsessed, … it had nothing to offer experienced professionals looking for new business challenges … .’ He ‘felt strongly … the business needed to be shaken up (and) … all options should be on the table, including the possibility of opening Zingerman's clones in other cities.’ He and Ari had not thought about ‘how we could take a one-of-a-kind business and replicate it without losing the quality of food and service and, in the process, its one-of-a-kind personality’ (Weinzweig, 2010: 36). As Ari thought that something great was also unique, he feared a clone-based expansion would destroy Zingerman's. In 1994, Ari and Paul presented the members of Zingerman's with a proposal for a new organization design – ‘Zingerman's 2009.’ The new design was not for a single deli but for 12–15 new businesses, all parts of a new ZCob organization (Zingerman's Community of Businesses). Each new business would use the Zingerman's name and emphasized a new specialty that diversified ZCob's food-related services (Baker, 2013). While the new design pleased Ari and Paul, 80% of Zingerman's managers responded by deciding to leave. They did not have the energy to invest in the learning and relationship building the new design would require. Otherwise, the underlying organization design – Zingerman's Way – remained the same, and new employees still made ‘a serious commitment to learning about great food and great service; to help create an exceptional workplace.’ Immediately after being hired, new recruits underwent Zingerman's training to learn the firm's values, Zingerman's Way, and its triple bottom line focus on great food, great service, and great finance (Baker, 2013: 3–5). ZCob emphasized transparency. The underlying belief was that as more people were involved in discussing issues, more concerns would be shared leading to better choice proposals. To help deal with the differences likely to come up with multiple businesses, Ari developed new ZCob rules to facilitate ‘caring confrontation.’ Page 3 of 16

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The role of Ari and Paul was to support deli values, that included learning about food, emphasizing individual agency, and supporting the ZCob organization design. For the diversified businesses to stay integrated, the new design required that all ZCob members be involved in a continuous learning process.

Organization Designs for Coordination A different type of organization design enables specialists to form temporary organizations to work together as film crews. In these short and intense projects, film crews expect their colleagues know the roles different specialists play and how to coordinate these roles when they work together (Bechky, 2006). But how do film crews learn this design, and what processes keep it effective? Film crewmembers start their careers as production assistants, a catchall role where they learn what and how specialist groups such as the grip or the electric department work on a film crew. Because film crew activities are also highly interdependent, production assistants interact with the members of other specialist groups and so they also learn how they function, the tasks they do, and their role in a film crew. From the start of their career, then, film specialists learn the roles that are the basis of the design for working together on film sets (Bechky, 2006). Although film crewmembers often have an academic degree related to their work specialty, they learn how designs for coordinating film work function through on-set experiences. For new crewmembers, seasoned members also offer informal guidance – jokes, teasing, or quick directions – to let colleagues know what to do (Bechky, 2006). On the set, electricians learn how to place power cords, production assistants figure out the terms used for specialized pieces of equipment, and craft service people learn never to leave their table. They learn not only what is expected, but the ready availability of informal guidance also helps them deal with the idiosyncrasies of some well-known role holders. Film production projects most often last a very few days, and then crewmembers move to a new project. Through work experiences, they have learned film crew roles and relationships, and this knowledge goes with them from job to job. As a camera operator described it: These systems have been established for years; there are clear lines of communication. When I get on a show, if I need something moved, I know to go to transport; the medics, the food, the systems are in place to take care of every need. And they are the same from show to show. They are like jump rope rhythms, passed off from child to child. (Bechky, 2006: 9) These role understandings combined with the informal on-set guidance enable crewmembers to easily coordinate their work, even if they are complete strangers working together for the first time and under the pressure of compressed production times.

Organization Designs to Eliminate Uncertainty Sometimes the intent of an organization design is to remove all sources of uncertainty so that users can take system functioning for granted and focus on achieving other goals. At Pirelli Tires, for example, the aim was to develop a radical, new tire-manufacturing process that would enable tire designers to ignore the uncertainties associated with manufacturing and focus on building tires that buyers wanted. This was a massive manufacturing redesign. In terms of background, ‘Pirelli … specialized in the medium and high end of the market … and … was finding it difficult to maintain its reputation as an innovative leader. … Pirelli's top management decided to reinvest to rebuild Pirelli's tire-making capabilities and innovative reputation.’ In 1997, ‘Pirelli's new CEO and owner, Page 4 of 16

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Marco Tronchetti Privera, gave Renato Caretto the task of developing a radically new production process to be the flagship of this renewed emphasis on innovation’ (Brusoni and Prencipe, 2006: 181). At the time, the tire industry was concentrated, international, and mature even as industry technologies were changing, tires lasted longer, larger buyers wanted lower prices, and margins shrank as material costs rose. Traditionally at Pirelli, tire making required the preprocessing of vast quantities of raw materials. After this, operators used their tacit knowledge to manage the interdependent tire-manufacturing activities on the assembly line (Brusoni and Prencipe, 2006). Caretta viewed the existing manufacturing process to be complex, uncertain, and difficult to manage. His new manufacturing process would not use preprocessed materials managed by workers on an assembly line. Instead, a robot-based process would build tires separately on rigid drums with the aim of giving tire designers control of the manufacturing process for each tire. He chose three engineers he had worked with before to be the first members of his design team and then added two programmers and two tire designers. To establish that his ideas were feasible, his team began building individual tires by hand on rigid drums (Brusoni and Prencipe, 2006: 179–183). The design team drew on a wide range of experiences that were summarized in notes and vast amounts of recorded information. They interviewed the assembly-line operators, for example, and asked them to describe their work in order to make their tacit knowledge of tire assembly explicit. These relationships were later programmed into the IT infrastructure called the Modulated Integrated Robotized System (MIRS) that they developed for manufacturing tires. Traditional tire assembly fixes the tension and angle of the nylon layers that hold the rubberized tire materials together to determine tire performance. The design team found, however, that by varying how long robots stood in front of extruders and by rotating the drums as the extruders emitted components, MIRS could adjust and change these parameters, giving the tire designers not only control of manufacturing but also of each tire's performance. The design process for developing the new tire-manufacturing system relied on team-developed knowledge and extensive notes and recording files. As the use of a fixed drum was better understood, new rules for manufacturing emerged. These insights drew on the formal knowledge team members learned in universities, the knowledge they had gained by working on Pirelli's assembly lines and talking with the operators, and the knowledge they generated working together to build MIRS. When completed, MIRS was able to remove the uncertainty that had traditionally characterized Pirelli's tire-manufacturing process. In turn, this enabled Pirelli's tire designers to focus on finding out what the tires were that buyers wanted and then building these tires.

Organization Designs to Make Change Routine Ideally, organization designs not only support task activities but also adapt as environments change. Garud et al. (2006) suggest that the organization design of the firm Infosys has this capacity. As Infosys managers identified it, the firm's design has four elements: the firm's employees, the firm's culture emphasizing ‘asking,’ a system of quality control processes, and a technology for storing and sharing knowledge. As each element is seeded with generative properties, each not only does particular things but can change what it does and how it does it. This design has enabled Infosys to move up ‘the IT services value chain into consulting and end-to-end IT solutions while continuing to offer low-end software services’ (Garud et al., 2006: 278). Infosys employees are the first element of the firm's organization design. As Infosys recruits top students from India's best engineering schools, it focuses on their knowledge and skills. When it actually hires, Infosys staff assess each candidate's ‘learnability,’ i.e., their ‘ability to derive generic lessons from specific situations.’ Infosys employees are chosen, then, not only because of their knowledge and skills but also because they are able to recognize how solutions in one context may also have application in other contexts. Initially, recruited employees are taught Infosys's models of how to do things, e.g., the Infosys customer relaPage 5 of 16

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tionship model. Employees not only learn the firm's way of doing things, but are also encouraged to consider the implications for other firm activities. Infosys's Education and Research Center asks employees to share their experiences working with Infosys models, technologies, and software and to note ways they might be improved. As a result, the Infosys Education and Research Center is a training center, a repository of the models Infosys uses to do things, and the storage place for employee accounts of how the use of firm models might be improved (Garud et al., 2006: 279). Governance at Infosys is built around an ‘asking’ culture. While Infosys decision making is decentralized and distributed, people are expected to share information and debate issues to identify the best approaches for specific situations. Managers learn new perspectives as they ask and talk with one another. As a discussion proceeds about a particular issue, the aim is to identify ‘binding aspects’ that people with different perspectives agree on. Binding aspects reflect an informed consensus, and so Infosys can make commitments based upon them. Quality Control and Assurance processes are another element of the Infosys organization design. By examining its completed projects, Infosys learned how it could increase its development speed, improve the quality of its software, and reduce its costs. After first establishing credibility with its clients, Infosys introduced its Global Delivery Model. The model maintains a small staff at the client's location, but software development is moved back to India, where each project team is self-contained in terms of the expertise it needs. Each team has periods of software prototyping and piloting in order to learn about improvement possibilities and quality control issues. In 1996, Infosys introduced a companywide intranet that became its central information resource, including a People Knowledge Map to locate Infosys experts. The intranet immediately extended the reach of the Infosys asking culture. As Infosys also made its intranet easy to use, this facilitated cooperation between units across Infosys. To facilitate a move up the value chain, Infosys created specialist groups to generate both industry-specific and technology-specific knowledge. These research groups were sensing mechanisms, using the intranet to send contextual and technical information to all members of Infosys that could be used to anticipate market developments. In sum, while the elements of the Infosys design provide specific day-to day services, they also have generative abilities enabling them to develop new ideas. Faced with new situations, for example, Infosys employees recall other situations and consider the implications. More generally, the generative capabilities built into its design elements have enabled Infosys to update its technologies, its clients, and its knowledge of the environment to develop new opportunities, enabling Infosys to change its industry position and grow rapidly.

An Organization Design Gone Wrong We now consider an organization design that not only did not work as intended but destroyed the desired outcome. Specifically, Barker (1993) describes how in practice, an enabling organization design evolved into a coercive iron cage. The case was a manufacturing firm assembling circuit boards with self-directed teams. The firm VP was committed to self-managed teamwork, and his managers and plant workers also endorsed his vision. He described his organization design: We will be an organization where each … is a self-manager who will • • • •

Initiate action, commit to, and act responsibly to achieving objectives Be responsible for ISE's performance Be responsible for the quality of individual and team output Invite team members to contribute based on experience, knowledge and ability. (Barker, 1993: 420)

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The original team workers developed a consensus about what the VP's vision meant for their work practices and came up with norms team members agreed to follow. As the firm grew, new teams were added, and the original team members were sent to the new teams to introduce these norms to them. The intention may have been for the original team members to play facilitator roles so the new teams could develop their own norms as the original group had done. In fact, however, the original team members played enforcer roles, telling new team members they were expected to follow the original team's rules by, for example, coming to work on time, staying late to deliver product, and even coming in on weekends. New workers felt everyone was watching them, and a new hire described senior workers as ‘judge, jury, and executioners’ (Barker, 1993: 427). The original team had used a team discussion process to develop norms based on the VP's self-management vision. In dealing with the new teams, the original team members ignored this self-management process and, instead, emphasized the behavioral norm outcomes the original team developed that they wanted the new teams to adopt. As a result, the new teams did not experience a self-managed rule development process but, instead, had the original team's norms imposed upon them. A design intended to support team self-management required new team workers to follow specific rules.

Organization Designs in the Face of Conflicting Desired Outcomes When they were first formed, open source software projects were democratic communities where programmers volunteered to code, and decided whose code to adopt and what code to complete (O'Mahony and Ferraro, 2007; O'Mahony and Bechky, 2008). Typically, organization designs for open source software production are simple: participants are volunteers who invest time and effort building the parts of the code they want to work on. Those who produce a lot of quality code become the decision makers who influence the project's technical direction. The visionary leaders of the Linux and Wikipedia communities, for example, developed organizational designs that supported project development. As open-source communities became involved with surrounding software environments, promises of collaboration led to proposals to change project governance structures to facilitate growth. Indeed, it was growth that brought about change in the Debian software community when the leadership was ‘handed down’ to a lieutenant of the founder who was autocratic and overreaching (O'Mahony and Ferraro, 2007). The lieutenant saw the community did not like how he used authority, and so he suggested that it elect a new technical governing board. His design required elected project leaders to build a consensus about the technical direction of their project, or run the risk of being recalled by the board. The new board also adjudicated code disputes and advised project leaders. There was a shift from a design supporting voluntary coders to a top-down design emphasizing assessment of coder's work. Using a similar approach, for-profit firms have sought to build collaborative relationships with open source communities. For-profits want representative participation in community project governance. Yet counter dependency traits run deep in these communities, often uniting members against a common enemy (e.g., Microsoft), and so they resist if they see potential for projects to be subject to corporate railroading. As community members code for fun, they do not want to be coding to meet commercial organization deadlines (O'Mahony and Bechky, 2008: 435). Yet community members also see benefits from collaborating with firms. Collaborative projects can be larger and more complicated, and so members can work on more interesting coding challenges. Firm involvement also means more users are likely to adopt the software. In response, several open source communities developed nonprofit foundations to change their project governance to support commercial collaborations. For example, the membership of foundation boards might have quotas on the numbers of for-profit firm and individual coder representatives aiming to ensure balanced decision making. The project governance boards defined community member rights and the roles firm-sponsored contributors should play in projects.

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While originally, open source community organization designs supported code writing and code assessment, the new collaborations have led to top-down designs where firms often gain the right to assess and shape project direction. The apparent focus has been on ensuring equal representation among participating stakeholders rather than on making sure there is continuing support for what programmers want to do. Representative boards are often top-down designs that set goals, measure results, and dictate priorities, notwithstanding the wishes of community members. Community members who are used to designs supporting their freedom to work as they want often feel uncomfortable with the new designs and the directions they have taken. Finding ways to defend a community's organization design intended to support the work of volunteer programmers has been a continuing concern. The conflicts reflect the contrast in assumptions and desired outcomes underlying the different organization designs (O'Mahony and Bechky, 2008: 443–444).

Replacing an Organization Design A desire to increase top-down control motivated a redesign of an IT department in a European insurance firm (Vaast and Levina, 2006). The firm sold property and life insurance to small businesses and relied on longterm relationships with loyal customers. Its organization design emphasized collaboration between staff and its long-term customers in order to provide high-quality, user-friendly mainframe services along with consultation and advice on technology issues. The redesign was directed by a newly appointed chief information officer (CIO) who thought the firm's IT department should be run more efficiently. In particular, he thought it needed clearer structures, and so he documented new and clear responsibilities for departmental roles. He also streamlined and standardized client relationships to eliminate what he saw as ‘wasted’ consultation time. He also decided that IT alone would make all IT technology decisions as the IT department had expert knowledge that other departments did not have. Instead of having self-organizing teams providing IT support for different client groups, the new CIO reorganized the department around specialized technologies and unit-wide functional services, i.e., ‘design’ and ‘implementation’ processes. To increase efficiency, only those who were involved in a project had access to its documents. This contrasted with the earlier situation that integrated programming and production efforts in order to maximize project information sharing. Older workers did not like the new system and resisted using the new documents the CIO developed. Over two years, half the department (400 professionals) left. Most remaining had little client experience or contact and relied on the CIO's documentation system for their work understanding. In fact, the new system based on functional responsibilities often prevented them from understanding user issues or what clients wanted. The CIO's new organization design formally identified projects and tracked the workflow, assignments, and responsibilities associated with them. This structure reshaped the relationship between IT and its clients. The CIO assigned people to project roles, for example, based on their technical qualifications and formal training. He distinguished between permanent and temporary employees and had trainings for permanent employees that highlighted project stages and efficiency measures. He placed design people on one floor and implementers on another. Monthly, he had meetings with his managers and permanent workers, and mailed the minutes to other IT members. A clear hierarchy emerged with IT members working with other IT members having high status, and implementers working with clients having low status. The organizational redesign saved resources, and projects were completed faster. Eventually, most permanent employees accepted the CIO's approach. Clients who had not worked with the previous regime were satisfied, and IT was proud that it delivered its systems efficiently. Clients who had worked with the previous regime, however, were dissatisfied because too often, what the new system delivered did not match their Page 8 of 16

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wants. Given IT's use of new and unfamiliar terms, they often also did not know what to do. It was only the low-status temporary workers doing implementation tasks who had direct client contact. Annoyed by what they considered project mishandling due to the CIO's top-down design, the HR department spoke to the CEO and convinced him to allow them to outsource their projects. Other departments followed, and the IT department activity levels dropped. The CIO was asked to resign. The redesign was built around clear hierarchical controls that imposed clear boundaries that distinguished the IT department and what it could do with the aim of achieving cost-efficient service. Absent were previous discussions between IT and its clients that had enabled both sides to work out what was wanted. Clients missed this discussion. To get it back, they outsourced to external vendors who provided them with liaisons to ensure they understood what was wanted.

Professional Conflict over an Organization Design Our last case considers the design of a pediatric infant care unit (PICU) in a hospital (Madison et al. 2006). A new director appointed in 1988 had seen how hierarchical adherence in hazardous situations caused accidents as a pilot in the Vietnam war. In studying medicine, he saw the same top-down organization design and how caregivers, e.g., resident nurses, could spend hours monitoring a patient while the responsible physician might spend little time with them. He thought that often, the bedside caregivers were in the best position to detect patient changes that could signal health issues. Intensive care in a pediatric ward is complex with a high risk of treatment-induced complications. As an organization designer, the director wanted to avoid the mistakes he had seen in the navy and in traditional medical units, and so he wanted nurses and support staff involved in patient care decisions. As the unit began admitting patients, he asked nurses for their opinions concerning patient care options and to perform tasks traditionally reserved for physicians, but his requests were not well received. He realized the nurses were not trained to do what he asked, and so he asked for dedicated staff in the PICU unit and then slowly persuaded the PICU nurses to make patient care decisions. He also introduced training to teach the nurses about patient conditions and treatment. The unit admitted 500 children in its first year. The director then recruited an assistant director with a background in fire department emergency services, and the unit moved to a new building with 25 beds. The PICU grew from 8 to 25 beds and in 1999 had 1300 admissions, making it among the largest in the United States. This growth was helped by a transport system for critical care pediatric patients that the assistant director established in 1990. In 1994, the PICU became a separate unit within the hospital. The directors delegated care decisions to nurses, to respiratory care practitioners and residents, but this was possible only as long as the PICU had separate and dedicated staff. This also required staff training, and so the directors taught staff how to identify medical problems and treat complications that could arise because of disease or inappropriate care. Typically, physician relationships with nurses and other hospital staff emphasize the hierarchical authority of the physician. Physician specialists in the rest of the hospital were not accustomed to seeing staff having so much knowledge or decision-making power. The rest of the hospital grew increasingly resistant to the PICU's design and approach. Some saw staff participation in training as a waste and the caregivers as potentially dangerous. To protect the PICU from these physicians, the directors sought to completely buffer the PICU from the rest of the hospital working with the nurses and respiratory care practitioners assigned to the unit. As physician specialists still came from the hospital to the PICU to treat critically ill patients, this porosity was a potential hazard to the organization design, and so the directors learned to do the specialties themselves, e.g., difficult ENT intubations, in order to avoid calling on the hospital's specialists. For the first two years, the mortality rate of the unit was average but then it improved rapidly and stayed low. Page 9 of 16

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Staff innovated to improve patient care, e.g., for children with asthma, they changed the blend of helium and oxygen on ventilators to increase their energy, and they rested children on their stomachs because they saw that in this position, they had better lung function. These changes, reflecting learning in the PICU, led to high satisfaction and low staff turnover. Residents reported the PICU was the most difficult and also the most enjoyable part of their residency. In 1997, rapid expansion and the departure of physicians trained in the unit led to new physicians joining who were trained elsewhere. Some did not like the PICU's approach, and as physicians did not always control patient treatment, they wondered if it constituted malpractice. These negative views resonated with the views of some of the hospital physicians. Administrators used these feelings to justify not assigning any more dedicated resources to the unit. The director and assistant director left in 2000. The PICU design then quickly changed. Physicians from the rest of the hospital reasserted their authority over patient care and ignored the suggestions of bedside staff members. The staff quickly learned to keep opinions to themselves and to follow the instructions of the physicians. Staff training stopped as staff turnover and patient mortality increased.

Discussion Organization Designs Involve Learning What have we learned about developing an organization design? Underlying an organization design is an intention to achieve a desired outcome. Frank Gehry, for example, wants those who use his buildings to like them. Ari and Paul want Zingerman's employees and customers to share an interest in quality food. Members of film crews want their coordination on the set to be seamless. Pirelli wants a reliable tire-manufacturing system that will allow designers to focus on making tires buyers want. What processes contribute to these desired outcomes? How do they do so? Table 34.1 summarizes the cases we have discussed, the outcomes they strove for, the design details, and the insights the cases provide about organization design as a process. Table 34.1Summary of cases, desired design outcome and design details, and insights for organization design processes Case

Organizational design features

Insights for organization design processes

Frank Gehry (Yoo, Boland, and Lyytinen, 2006)

• Desired Outcome: Users like his building • Design: • Asks everybody with an interest in the building about what they want. Makes models to explore the building's technical issues.

Desired outcome stays the same. As he learns, Gehry adjusts his design, which is emergent and reflects many different inputs.

Zingerman's (Baker, 2013)

• Desired Outcome: Deli promotes interest in food. • Design: • Employees raise issues about

Desired outcome stays the same, but as an emergent design deals with growth, the new learning required creates tensions for managers and a need for transparency.

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working in the deli that lead to: • (1) Rules to guide behavior • (2) An emphasis on transparency.

Film sets (Bechky, 2006)

• Desired Outcome: Seamless coordination on film sets • Design: • (1) Industry-wide roles known • (2) Informal guidance reinforces roles.

Desired outcome leads to similar emergent designs across organizations and over time.

Pirelli (Brusoni and Prencipe 2006)

• Desired Outcome: Reliable tire manufacturing system • Design: • Experiments uncover new task processes, and tacit knowledge gathered from operators that is then programmed into a new system.

The desired outcome required input and learning from all parts of the Pirelli organization in order to develop the new MIRS process.

Infosys (Garud, Kumaraswamy, and Sambarmurthy, 2006)

• Desired Outcome: A firm-wide generative learning capacity • Design: Desired outcomes emerge, as generative • Employees, an asking culture, learning processes are designed into all quality control systems, and an design elements. intranet are all design elements. All generate learning easily diffused across Infosys.

Manufacturing firm (Barker, 1993)

• Desired Outcome: Self-directed manufacturing teams • Design: • Representatives of the first self-directed team impose rules on the new teams.

Desire for self-direction is not communicated, and instead, the emergent design imposes rules on new teams, blocking self-direction.

Open Source projects (O'Mahony and Ferraro, 2007; O'Mahony and Bechky, 2008)

• Conflict in desired outcomes: Want coding support and collaboration • Design:

Given conflicts in the desired outcomes, emergent designs create tensions. Until the desired outcomes are reconciled, a stable design seems impossible.

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• Designs move from giving support to coders to top-down project assessment using commercial criteria.

IT firm (Vaast and Levina, 2006)

• Conflict in desired outcomes: New CIO wants efficiency in a context emphasizing customer service. • Design: • Emphasizes top-down role definitions and efficiency. • Department emphasizing service is restructured in ways that block service.

Conflict between desired outcomes results in an imposed design that enables efficiency but creates tension for managers and clients.

PICU (Madison, Desai, Roberts, and Wong, 2006)

• Conflict in desired outcomes: Improve patient care using real-time knowledge vs. depending on physicians’ remote expertise • Design: • Teaches caregivers, giving them decision-making power to improve patient care.

Teaching enables decentralized patient care. Hospital leaders ignore patient care and impose a top-down design.

Once a desired outcome has been identified, effective designers launch a learning process to find out the concerns of those who will be affected by the design. Every time Frank Gehry designs a new building, he interviews those who have an interest in the building to learn their ideas and concerns and the features they want. Through such a process, designers may also learn that some ideas are not right for a situation. By talking to Zingerman's employees, for example, Ari realized he had been wrong to assume his workers could be left alone to run his deli. He then developed rules to guide their behavior. In general and before deciding on how to proceed, designers should collect the views of those affected by the design. Such information clarifies the constraints a design must satisfy. Yet in cases where the desired design outcomes are in conflict, our cases suggest that such learning does not usually occur. A design may be built around particular approaches in the form of rules, repeated routines, machine applications, or meetings focused on particular topics. Designers know the logic guiding their design choices, and usually develop a record that explains their design. In the Pirelli and Infosys cases, for example, a record of the design development process and the logic underlying the design was available to all. A record helps those who come later to understand a design as they reconsider it and possibly change it. In order to manage a design, organization members need training in the designed way of doing things. The Zingerman's design specifies rules to guide employees and helps them deal with particular situations. To ensure employees know these rules, they go through Zingerman's training, where the rules and the firm's values Page 12 of 16

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are explained. Similarly, the newly hired Infosys engineers went through training sessions where they learned the firm's ways of doing things. To use an organization design, organization members are usually trained so that they know the desired outcomes, the logic underlying the design, and what this means for their behavior. The cautionary tale of the self-managed manufacturing groups illustrates why in training, the logic underlying an organization design needs to be understood; otherwise, rules are easily viewed as directives to be obeyed rather than part of a process to be understood. Designers draw on their knowledge and experience to develop an organization design. Such knowledge may relate to university studies, e.g., the training the Pirelli and Infosys engineers had. It could be based on past experiences, e.g., the experiences the pediatric ward directors had earlier had in the military and the fire brigade. It can also be based on insights that design teams develop in the process of working together, e.g., the ideas members of the design team working on Pirelli's tire-manufacturing system developed, or the code programmers develop as they work together in open source communities. The knowledge underlying an organization design is necessarily unique and involves learning from many sources over time. A record of where the knowledge used comes from and how it developed can help explain why a design does things in specific ways. Several of our cases showed how such a record develops. The Pirelli engineers, for example, kept records of the relationships affecting tire performance that they programmed into the MIRS system. At Infosys, the generative properties built into each element were explained to employees through training and were also documented in repositories that all employees had access to. As changing environments required, Infosys could then draw on these records for ideas on how to adjust and modify its organization design. Support for a wide range of learning processes drawing on many different sources is critical for organization designs (cf., Gibbons et al., 1994).

Different Desired Outcomes Impact Organization Designs The original organization designs for open source communities supported coding practices and programmers. The new foundations introduced top-down structures to facilitate predictable performance rather than support for programming activities. As negotiations between open source communities and software firms are unable to identify shared desired outcomes but instead, introduce governance boards that impose top-down project assessments, collaborations are likely often tension laden. With top-down organization designs, it is also unlikely that the effort needed to learn the concerns of those affected will take place. Rather, the elements that are critical to one party but missing from a proposed design are easily highlighted and, as they are noted but not dealt with, they can perpetuate tension. A record of how a design was developed and why the outcomes it achieves are valuable may help to resolve the conflict. Without such a record, however, there is often a lack of appreciation of the benefits a design provides. In the case of the IT department in the European insurance firm, for example, the earlier design ensured that clients liked the IT services they received. It is not clear that the new CIO understood how the existing design functioned effectively or that he was interested in finding out. It is also not clear that management explained the previous logic to him. Instead and with no challenge, he decided to set up a top-down design to make IT more efficient. Client satisfaction was a missing issue in his design, and this eventually led the firm to abandon his design. There is a similar conflict over desired design outcomes at the PICU. The new directors drew on their experience to develop a design to maximize the care and contact given the sick children. Other hospital physicians, however, wanted a top-down design where doctors were in control of patient care. After the PICU directors decided it was going to be impossible to convince other hospital physicians of the merits of their approach to care, they took steps to isolate the PICU ward from the hospital. The successful treatment design only survived as long as this separation was maintained. Once it collapsed, the PICU reverted to the normal top-down Page 13 of 16

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treatment design that physicians usually adopt. These cases suggest that as the desired outcomes designs seek to achieve are different or questioned, a record of design development may at least help explain the other side's perspective and so help understanding. Without such a record, most people will assume a top-down approach and will often not record the concerns of different stakeholders or how a design accommodates or ignores these concerns. There is always the potential for a top-down design to replace a design achieving specific desired outcomes in an organization. Where records of design development are kept, e.g., in Zingerman's or at Pirelli, the organization design is more easily explained and defended and hence subject to less threat from a top-down approach.

The Role of People in Organization Design In most organization designs, people play the role of designer and also of manager supporting the execution of the organization design. To be effective, therefore, the knowledge underlying an organization design has to be transformed into simple rules and directives so that the people managing the design can easily understand it. Designers and managers usually expect people to combine the help a design provides with their own best judgment to respond to ongoing events. In this sense, an ideal organization design is both supportive and incomplete, letting people take appropriate initiatives as emerging situations demand. Given a specific situation, for example, managers may be guided by what a design suggests, e.g., follow Zingerman's rules, or they may use their decision-making discretion to explore a different path. If they explore a different path, it is important that they know the organization design logic. The Zingerman's case illustrated this balance. The Infosys case showed how an organization design can generate an enormous range of possibilities that people may choose from. We believe such discretion is also more likely to be found and used effectively in those designs focused on achieving specific outcomes that are agreed upon by all those involved. A design process starts when a designer decides an organization should achieve a desired outcome. At the start, how best to achieve it is never clear. As a result, the designer has to embark on a step-by-step gathering of information to develop a vision of what the appropriate design should be. In this process, the designer learns that one cannot go directly to a desired outcome without first going through the step-by-step design process. The designer also learns that others do not know what is required, and so to be effective, others must be trained in the logic of the design and the role people are expected to play. In assessing organization designs, the usual focus is on what an observer expects to see but finds missing. Many observers expect to see a top-down design. This is not what we have focused on although we have provided illustrative cases to show how they can be disruptive. Our view is that an organization design should seek to achieve a desired outcome and should exhibit a process to achieve this that also takes into account stakeholder concerns. In evaluating a design, assessors are likely to focus on the steps in the process intended to achieve a desired outcome and also on stakeholder concerns that have been overlooked. This is in contrast to a top-down approach, where the desired outcome is to provide top management with the tools necessary to impose order and control on an organization. If these are missing, a top-down perspective will certainly perceive something to be wrong. But how serious is this? In the PICU, for example, the hospital physicians focused on the physicians’ rights to control patient care that the PICU design overlooked. But it is not clear they were concerned about the desired outcome of the PICU's directors, to significantly improve patient health. Different underlying assumptions can lead to either learning, or to much conflict surrounding organization designs. Page 14 of 16

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Conclusion An emphasis and a reemphasis on learning processes seems to be the way to both sustain and defend organization designs intended to achieve desired outcomes. People are at the center of this process, determining the desired outcome, design development, and how the designed organization is managed. An organization design directs action, and people update activities as situational circumstances change. People managing a design usually have some discretion to discuss and respond to emerging issues, thus making it more likely that desired outcomes will be achieved. People are always assessing what designs do and how they do it, and so organization designs should evolve as contexts change. In fact, an organizational design is a part of any ongoing organizational story.

References Adler, P. S. and Borys, B. (1996) Two types of bureaucracy: Enabling and coercive, Administrative Science Quarterly, 14(1): 61–89. Argote, L. (1982) Input uncertainty and organizational coordination in hospital emergency units, Administrative Science Quarterly, 27: 420–434. Baker, W. (2013) Zingerman's community of businesses: Broad-based ownership, governance and sustainability. Ann Arbor, MI: WDI Publishing. Barker, J. R. (1993) Tightening the iron care: Concertive control in self-managing teams, Administrative Science Quarterly, 38: 408–437. Bechky, B. A. (2006) Gaffers, gofers and grips, Role-based coordination in temporary organizations, Organization Science, 17(1): 3–21. Brusoni, S. and Prencipe, A. (2006) Making design rules: A multidomain perspective, Organization Science, 17(2): 179–189. Galbraith, J. R. (1973) Designing complex organizations. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Galbraith, J. R. (1977) Organization design. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Garud, R., Kumaraswamy, A., and Sambamurthy, V. (2006) Emergent by design: Performance and transformation at Infosys technologies, Organization Science, 17(2): 277–286. Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartman, S., Scott, P., and Trow, M. (1994) The new production of knowledge: The dynamics of science and research in contemporary societies. London: Sage. Lawrence, P. R. and Lorsch, J. W. (1967) Organization and environment: Managing differentiation and integration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Madison, P., Desai, V., Roberts, K., and Wong, D. (2006) Mitigating hazards through continuing design: The birth and evaluation of a pediatric intensive care unit, Organization Science, 17(2): 239–248. March, J. G. and Simon, H. A. (1958) Organizations. New York, NY: Wiley. Mohr, L. B. (1971) Organizational technology and organizational structure, Administrative Science Quarterly, 16: 444–459. O'Mahony, S. and Bechky, B. A. (2008) Boundary organizations: Enabling collaboration among unexpected allies, Administrative Science Quarterly, 53: 422–459. O'Mahony, S. and Ferraro, F. (2007) The emergence of governance in an open source community, Academy of Management Journal, 50(5): 1079–1106. Thompson, J. G. (1967) Organizations in action: Social science bases of administrative theory. New York NY: McGraw-Hill. Vaast, E. and Levina, N. (2006) Multiple faces of codification: Organization redesign in an IT organization, Organization Science, 17(2): 190–201. Van de Ven, A. H., Delbecq, A. L., and Koenig, Jr., R. (1976) Determinants of coordination modes in organizations, American Sociological Review, 41(2): 322–338. Weinzweig, A. (2010) A lapsed anarchist's approach to building a great business: Management principles from Zingerman's. Ann Arbor, MI: Zingermans. Yoo, Y., Boland, R. J., and Lyytinen, K. (2006) From organization design to organization designing, Organization Science, 17(2): 215–229. Page 15 of 16

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Improvisation Processes in Organizations

Contributors: Miguel Pina e Cunha, Anne S. Miner & Elena Antonacopoulou Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Improvisation Processes in Organizations" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n35 Print pages: 559-571 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Improvisation Processes in Organizations Miguel Pina e CunhaAnne S. MinerElena Antonacopoulou What do disaster workers and units, SWAT officers and film crews, Soviet special troops, firefighters and medical doctors, and IT workers and bank tellers have in common? How do large firms, governments, and start-ups get sidetracked from their original course of action? How do organizational actors get things done in the face of such uncertainty? According to organizational research, they all improvise. This chapter reviews the empirical literature on improvisational processes, including gaps and frontiers for future research, and suggests that improvisational processes offer a vital framework for further probing organizing processes. We organize our review in three main sections. First, we present a basic working definition of improvisation and explore contemporary assumptions about its pervasiveness and impact. Second, we describe four stylized forms of improvisational processes described in the literature. We arrange the forms using two conceptual axes: the absence/presence of a common goal and the micro/macro approach (individual vs. collective). These axes represent oversimplifications of the ongoing flow of organizational life, but help group prior research. We then describe research on interactions between improvisational levels and other processes. Finally, we consider gaps and promising frontiers for future research on improvisational processes as a core element of organizing.

Definition and Key Assumptions Improvisation is itself a process. To assess whether or not improvisation has occurred, it is not enough to look just at a static outcome. One must also look at the order of activities occurring over time. In the improvisation process, the design of a novel activity pattern approaches convergence with the pattern's enactment. This contrasts with dominant theories of action, where actors first analyze, then decide on what to do, and then implement that choice. Improvisation processes differ, then, from both fully preplanned activity and from the replication of the stable aspects of a routine or other action template. Researchers sometimes highlight different aspects of improvisation, but a minimal formal definition involves three conceptual dimensions (Cunha et al., 1999; Miner et al., 2001; Moorman and Miner, 1998). These include the convergence of design and performance (extemporaneity), the creation of some degree of novel action (novelty), and the deliberateness of the design that is created during its own enactment (intentionality). The process often involves working with an improvisational referent (Miner et al., 2001) such as a prior version of an action pattern or prior plan. The definition implies that improvisation represents a special type of innovation, but not all innovation activity represents improvisation since innovation can also be planned in advance. The definition also implies that improvisation represents a special type of unplanned action: it involves a deliberate new design, and so excludes random change. Thus, not all unplanned action is improvisation. The condensed articulation of these three dimensions results in a minimalist definition of pure improvisation as the deliberate fusion of the design and execution of a novel production. Some improvisation research has focused especially on the degree of extemporaneity in activity, and other work focuses on the degree of novelty, but some degree of both is required for an activity to match this definition. Without this, improvisation collapses into the already developed domains of innovation, organizational change, or unintended outcomes. Throughout this chapter, when we refer to organizational actors, we include individuals, teams, units, and entire organizations (Cunha et al., 1999), even while recognizing that these artificially concrete entities can themselves represent ongoing constructions of many processes. Pervasiveness of improvisation. Two lines of thinking about improvisation's pervasiveness have crystallized to date. At one end of the spectrum, researchers highlight that the enactment of even stable routines or plans involves more than repetition and can include extemporaneous embellishment of daily practice. The organizational actor engages in a flow of activity (Orlikowski, 1996; Tsoukas and Chia, 2002) and tailors some aspects Page 2 of 15

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of action to a specific concrete setting. This can represent an ongoing reconstitution of a prior pattern in a unique response in time and space (Antonacopoulou, 2008) or the filling in of an incomplete design (Garud et al., 2008). From this perspective, improvisation can be seen as part of much if not all performative activity (Feldman and Pentland, 2003). At the other end of the spectrum, improvisation does not just embellish or complete a prior design but instead extemporaneously changes core aspects of an action template (Crossan, 1998; Baker et al., 2003). It differs in kind from making plans and then acting or from replicating stable elements of prior templates, because important parts of the action pattern were not designed in advance. It may involve recombining prior patterns or inventing new-to-the-world elements. In this vision, improvisation often represents a rare event, depending on what level of novelty is used to assess its presence. Although at first glance these visions seem contradictory, current research suggests that both visions have authenticity and important promise. Extant descriptive research supports Weick's observation that much organizational life can be seen as a ‘mixture of the pre-composed and the spontaneous’ (Weick, 1998, p. 551). Clarifying what mixtures can unfold and how they matters reprsents a key frontier for current theory and that can draw on both visions. Impact of improvisation. Contemporary researchers broadly agree that improvisation can produce mixed results. Historically, two undercurrents have influenced improvisation theory. Traditional normative efforts to improve managerial practices promoted replacing improvisation with smarter planning and better routinization, whether in scientific management, TQM, process reengineering or strategic planning. This approach underlies even fields such as manufacturing operations, marketing, and disaster management: planning and/or routinization trumps other approaches, especially under conditions of stability. At the same time, however, careful observers have long argued that emergent, unplanned, and nonroutine processes can have value, especially in dynamic settings (March, 1976; Mintzberg, 1994). Perhaps partly to overcome the historical anti-improvisation undertow, some early improvisation research portrayed it primarily as a helpful source of flexibility, speed, and adaptation. Observation of improvisation in practice, however, led to the rejection of any unconditional impact – either valuable or harmful. Much research now focuses on factors that influence its short-term or long-term impact (Cunha, et al., 2015; Hmieleski et al., 2013; Magni et al., 2009). Improvisation's impact is seen as involving trade-offs (Vera et al., 2014) and dialectical subprocesses (Weick, 1998; Clegg et al., 2002). For example, the relative balance of structure and freedom is assumed to play a key role. Improvising over minimal structures (Kamoche and Cunha, 2001) is theorized to offer a pathway to avoid both the risk of strategic drift or dangerous lack of coordination (Bigley and Roberts, 2001; Ciborra, 1999) and the risk of too much rigidity (Brown and Eisenhardt, 1997; Gong et al., 2006). Other works emphasize the value and limitations of organizational memory (Moorman and Miner, 1998) and the role of routinized activities that can be recombined in improvisational bricolage (Baker and Nelson, 2005).

Four Modes of Improvisation We organize extant streams of research through two conceptual axes: (1) the absence/presence of a common goal which echoes functionalist or political views of the firm, and (2) level of analysis (micro/macro), which differentiates improvisations as local or strategic. Although clearly oversimplifying the ongoing flow of action, the two axes offer a useful heuristic to organize work to date, and they flag coherent issues for future research. They help capture work done in different disciplinary approaches and with diverse degrees of maturity. On the basis of these axes, we identify four modes of improvisation: 1) Micro-improvisation with the presence of a common goal as ad hoc action to accomplish work, 2) macro-improvisation with the presence of a common goal as strategy, 3) micro-improvisation with the absence of a common goal as political ingenuity, and 4) Page 3 of 15

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macro-improvisation with the absence of a common goal as a struggle for strategic domination. We discuss them below in that order.

Improvisation in Pursuit of a Common Purpose Micro-improvisation as ad hoc action to accomplish work. Two conceptually distinct stylized versions of this basic form appear in extant research. Studies reveal complex interactions related to these ‘ideal types,’ but they offer a basic starting point. Baseline improvisation as part of practice. Improvisation process researchers argue that even when organizational actors see themselves as executing familiar routines, or following plans, they inevitably must tailor their action to the specific context and time. We refer to this form of improvisation as baseline improvisation, in the spirit of a basal metabolism rate that is required for a system to operate at all. This type of improvisation is often seen as being nearly ubiquitous whenever action is taken and is a natural part of practice (Antonacopoulou, 2008; Orlikowski, 1996). At least some of the activities in an action pattern can be seen as novel, because they are distinct from prior enactments, due to the unique context, but they represent embellishments rather than redesigns of the core pattern. One important form of baseline improvisation occurs because the design for action is typically incomplete (Garud et al., 2008). Prior templates work as sketches or prototypes. Actors fill in details to match the context without an intention of creating a new design. The prior plan or design is analogous to two-dimensional architectural drawings which expert builders then use when constructing a building. As March argues (1981, p. 564), ‘most of the time most people in an organization do what they are supposed to do; that is, they are intelligently attentive to their environments and their jobs.' Deliberate action template redesign. In the second conceptually distinct form of micro-improvisation, actors deliberately alter the original plan or template guiding action during its enactment. Organizational actors regularly deal with unexpected ‘real life situations’ (Jarzabkowski and Kaplan, 2014) and conclude that a surprise requires an immediate, novel response in order to get things done (Bechky and Okhuysen, 2011; Cunha et al., 2006). Spontaneous improvised corrective action can thus emerge (Crossan and Sorrenti, 1997). This form of improvisation can involve major changes to prior plans or routines during execution (Miner et al., 2001; Vera and Crossan, 2005; Weick, 1998). Improvised core redesign is typically discouraged in modern, formal organizational life and in normative theory. Even emergency workers who acknowledge the potential value of constrained improvisation nonetheless discourage what they call ‘freelancing’ (Bigley and Roberts, 2001) because it can risk lives due to coordination challenges. In both of these forms of instrumental micro-improvisation, improvisers are often motivated by the common purpose of ‘“getting the job done” in an institutionally complex present’ (Smets et al., 2012, p. 894). In baseline improvisation, they routinely fill in details or modestly adjust action to context while acting (Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009), making some form of filling in or replication improvisation a normal feature of organizations’ life (Ciborra, 1999: 78). In other cases, significant adjustments occur (Weick, 1993; Kendra and Wachtendorf, 2003) which are seen as deviant or unusual events. In both forms, actors deliberately adjust patterns of action in real time as they reflect on their actions in the midst of acting (Schon, 1983; Antonacopoulou and Sheaffer, 2014). The more radical the changes embedded in an improvised design, the more coordination challenges arise. Considerable research indicates that attention to real-time information and dialectic interactions between actors can help overcome some improvisational coordination challenges (Crossan, 1998; Moorman and Miner, 1998).

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Field studies of improvisation have revealed two simple process details about micro-improvisation that can improve future theorizing. First, theorists often assume that organizations must improvise when surprises occur. Close observation reveals, however, that even during emergencies, organizations sometimes ignore surprises, follow previously designed backup plans, or stop or make new plans (Bechky and Okhuysen, 2011). This enhances the importance of continuing work on when and how improvisation occurs at all. Second, much work highlights organizational improvisation to overcome problems. Organizational actors sometimes also improvise to take advantage of unexpected opportunities, or to experience real-time transcendence (Hatch, 1997; Weick, 1998; Miner et al., 2001). In some cases, the same event interpreted as a problem morphs into a perceived opportunity (Weick, 1998; Miner et al., 2001; Vera and Crossan, 2005). These observations point to the importance of further work on non-problem-driven improvisation and on improvised meanings (Antonacopoulou, 2009).

Macro-improvisation as Strategy Another body of work has focused on improvisation as a process operating at a macro or strategic level of analysis (Baker et al., 2003; Brown and Eisenhardt, 1997; Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009). The first subset of this work describes discrete improvised strategic actions. Traditional strategy research assumes that firms plan in advance before enacting a strategic action such as a merger, adoption of a market strategy, investment in a new technology, or change in core goals (Mintzberg, 1994). A discrete strategic improvisation refers to the process when an organization deliberately enacts a specific strategic action without planning it in advance. Bingham (2009), for example, describes how some firms improvise foreign market entry. The launch of Virgin Airways represents an iconic popular example. The second major stream of work describes organizations engaging in strategic processes that embrace improvisation in an ongoing way. Eisenhardt and Tabrizi, (1995, p. 106) argue that (strategic) ‘… decision makers avoid planning, because it is a futile exercise when the environment is changing rapidly and unpredictably.’ Brown and Eisenhardt (1997) propose that organizations can benefit from improvisational processes when their environment changes deeply and rapidly. The logic here also holds for developing strategies without routinized stocks of organizational practices (Bingham, 2009; Gong et al., 2006). This work has flagged several conditions argued to promote strategic improvisation's effectiveness. These include the use of simple rules that allow actors to improvise within structural designs that synthesize freedom and order, and cultivating heuristics, which offer enough consistency for efficiency but also flexibility to match unique aspects of particular opportunities (Bingham and Eisenhardt, 2011). Employees at the boundary can actively participate in the process, sensing and transmitting environmental information with potential strategic value (e.g., see Ton, 2014). Strategy, in this perspective, is a co-evolutionary process of constantly adjusting to a changing environment via incessant improvisation within some structure and consistency. The third stream of strategy-related work emphasizes that organizations can show competencies in improvisation itself, which they rely on as part of their enduring style of action. Gong et al. argue (2005, p. 29) that: ‘… firms sometimes solve classes of repeated problems by persistently improvising solutions.’ Baker et al. (2003) called such capabilities ‘improvisational competencies.’ When an organization feels sufficiently confident about its improvisational competence, it may improvise macro-organizational activities such as restructuring (Bergh and Lim, 2008). In this situation, the organization does not repeat a specific new action pattern designed during a discrete improvisational incident. Instead, it repeats the improvisation process itself. The organization may develop practices such as making internal real-time communication easier to support anticipated repeated improvisation (Gong et al., 2005). Such improvisational competencies can become a macro-foundation of organizational competitiveness. The vision of improvisational competencies is also conPage 5 of 15

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sistent with improvisation as a process conducted in a dispersed way by communities of practitioners, – whether within a focal organization or profession – who act face-to-face with operational problems (Charles and Dawson, 2011). Gong et al. (2005) argue, however, that such capabilities can also represent a competency trap. The organization improvises when prior planning would have avoided serious execution problems.

Improvisation in the Absence of Shared Common Purpose Micro-Improvisation as Political Ingenuity One form of accepted potential differences between parts of organizations consists of actors lower in authority structures versus the interests or actions of others at higher levels in the structure. The organizational ‘underlife’ (Manning, 2008) is a space where informal experiments are conducted, outside the formal organization's scope of attention or outside of higher-level formal observers of a given actor or unit. Miller and WedellWedellsborg (2013) argue that improvisation can play a role in efforts to hide actions ‘below’ the formal organization (Burawoy, 1979; Lupton, 1963). It can enable deviations from the organization's directives in a subtle manner (Crozier and Friedberg, 1976). Actors may protect desirable professional identities around carefully maintained improvisational expressions of independence, for example, favoring improvisation over formalized procedures (Orr, 1990). Activities are transmitted via ‘hidden transcripts,’ and discourses stabilize ‘beyond direct observation of those in power’ (Dailey and Browing, 2014, p. 28). Underlife is not necessarily improvisational. Actors can also make hidden plans or follow stable parts of hidden routines outside the observation of formal authority systems. Nonetheless, improvisation can play a key role in underlife processes. One important stream of evidence appears in the innovation literature. Innovators sometimes improvise during their discovery projects and hide these activities from formal scrutiny. In some cases, they conduct experiments in a highly improvisatory way (i.e., enacting the development on the spot without prior planning, bricolaging) but also shield these improvisational experiments, to avoid premature assessment or opposition. Micro-improvisation as political ingenuity goes beyond the assumption that individual actors pursue individual self-interests that diverge from formal goals (Balogun and Johnson, 2004; Mainemelis, 2010; Mantere and Vaara, 2008). It also includes processes in which subgroups have different foci of attention based on different contexts for their experience. Actors also engage in the symbolic management of the degree of improvisation in their own work. They can ‘choose their designs carefully to present some details as new, others as old, and hide still others from view altogether’ (Hargadon and Douglas, 2001, p. 499). As with other forms of improvisation, observers argue that prior experience can affect the resources available as part of political ingenuity. For example, de Certeau (1984, p. 23) argues that, as people gain experience with the inner workings of a system, they develop a first-hand understanding of the actions possible within such a system. The replaying of a game changes the understanding of its rules and opens new possibilities. Such schemas of action represent one vocabulary available for micro-improvisational activities.

Macro-improvisation as Struggle for Strategic Domination Although less well developed than the areas above, descriptions of improvisation also appear in studies of guerrilla warfare, revolutions and social movements, even though traditional normative theories of warfare, internal power struggles and social change highlight developing better strategic plan and acquiring resources. Domination in this context can refer to changing an organization's identity, absorbing its resources, changing its core goals or seeking its total annihilation. Page 6 of 15

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Explicit warfare. Strategic guerilla warfare has long stressed improvisational activity. Improvised surprise attacks are easier to coordinate with smaller groups, and sometimes harder for larger groups to respond to (Guevara, 2002). As is the case inside organizations, improvisation makes it less likely that actions can be thwarted by the larger power, although plans for guerilla actions can also be designed in advance. Control of powerful opponents. Saul Alinsky (2010) describes sequences of improvisational actions involved in the pursuit of control of other organizations. In real time during a struggle, Alinsky and his colleagues improvised by using proxy votes as a way to get publicity and affect corporate policies. The initial improvised action became a template for both the ongoing use of proxies, but also for value of improvising when others had more power (Alinsky, 2010). Many social movements also highlight early improvised actions as touchstones for movement identity, such as Rosa Park's keeping a seat on the front of the bus. Improvised reinterpretation as a tool for control. Macro-improvisation for strategic domination also occurs when the improviser uses on-the-spot reinterpretation of existing meanings as a weapon to gain control. Preston (1991), for example, describes how a manager reinterpreted the firm's industry classification to be one where strikes could not occur, in order to control a pending strike.

Interactions between Levels of Improvisation and Other Processes The dichotomy of micro-processes versus macro-processes oversimplifies the multiple nested subsystems and activities within organizations (Kozlowski and Klein, 2000). Nonetheless, research shows that interactions of improvisational processes can shape long-term organizing patterns. Interactions can involve traditional, explicit feedback loops. In more nuanced process-oriented frameworks, improvisation can generate ‘successive layerings of backtalk’ (Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009, p. 1348) between organizational participants, material contexts, and processes. In many cases, a deliberate improvisational process for temporary purposes leads to unintended, more enduring change at other levels (Baker et al., 2003). In one exemplary study, Smets et al. (2012) describe improvisational activity by lawyers in a firm combining British and German legal expertise. The lawyers repeatedly devise modifications of old action templates in an ad hoc way, often in pursuit of ‘getting things done.’ Smets and colleagues provide convincing evidence that such micro-improvisations have lasting influence on firm-level interpretive systems, and even on field-level norms and practices. Much of the transmission occurs through day-to-day interaction of actors during practice. The study offers an important illustration of low-visibility, high-impact transformation processes. In an extensive study of more visible transformation processes during responses to 9/11, Wachtendorf (2004) describes additional interactions of improvisational forms and other processes. Some improvisational activity involved re-creation of an existing prior command center, and replicated the functions of that center (reproductive improvisation). Other improvisational activity interacted with prior templates, major political struggle, and deliberate planning to create whole new systems to move and sort all debris, including human remains (creative improvisation). This study provides evidence of both gradual and of dramatic transformations that involve improvisational processes. Finally, a study of entrepreneurial firms by Baker, Miner, and Eesley (2003) describes multilevel interactions and impact. Some entrepreneurs design a firm as they execute its founding steps, improvising the entire strategic action of starting a firm. Early improvisational activity also sometimes shapes core organizational identity and values. For example, the founder improvised a positive answer to a valued interviewee who wanted to work at a family-oriented company. A desire for consistency led the founder to actually enact significant formal family-centered policies and identity. Originally improvisational activities morphed into inscribed routines and sources of identity that significantly molded organizations. Page 7 of 15

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These studies underscore several important multilevel interactions related to the improvisation process, each worthy of investigation as a distinct overall process important to organizing. First, actors sometimes improvise an action pattern as a ‘patch’ to resolving a problem, but later discard or replace it with a predesigned pattern (Miner et al., 2001). These may be dropped after execution, but may also sometimes provide unexpected insights that are available to inform disconnected later actions (Antonacopoulou, 2009). In a different sequence of activities, the original proto-routine becomes a legitimate, formally constituted organizational routine within the taken-for-granted templates for action. Broad communities can gain experience via repetition of an initially improvised practice, and transform their improvisations into distinctive organizational practices (Plowman et al., 2007). A focal practice may be retained through many other processes including power interactions, interpretive interactions, simple momentum, and relatively invisible influences during practice (McGinn and Keros, 2002). In another and conceptually distinct sequence, participants first assess the outcome of an initial improvisational process. If they see it as valuable, they repeat its content. Improvisation here serves as a step in trialand-error learning processes that can affect long-term organizational memory, routines, practices, and values (Miner et al., 2001). Different performance feedback frameworks for assessing ‘success’ of a micro-improvisation will lead to different higher-level outcomes. Recent evidence suggests that forgetting may also make ongoing improvisation more effective (Akgun et al. 2007), consistent with selective retention. All of these interaction patterns then, can shape long-term changes in organizing in specific domains such as operations, production, human resources, product development, financial management, external relations, or partnership formation. Long-term change will depend on which of the retention processes, such as power or performance feedback, dominate or interact with each other. These processes to institutionalize a focal improvised action design differ, we suggest, from the processes that shape the tendency to improvise in the future. Developing a tendency to improvise represents a distinct process pathway. This has obvious implications for organizational transformation (Gong et al., 2005). Crossan and Sorrenti (1997) have suggested many organizational contexts that may promote improvisation, pointing to factors to consider in studying potential processes by which it develops. Schon's (1983) work raises interesting questions of whether skillful improvisational activities have distinct development paths compared to unskilled improvisational activities. The extant work, then, describes important ways that interactions of improvisational processes shape organizing patterns. Nonetheless, gaps remain that suggest promising frontiers for future work, which we discuss below.

Gaps and Frontiers in the Study of the Process of Improvisation The analysis above reveals issues both across and within the modes of improvisation where further exploration offers special promise.

Gaps and Frontiers across Modes of Improvisation Four important gaps and frontiers cut across the modes identified above, three theoretical and one methodological. They include further development of the role of interpretation, the role of non-utilitarian motivations, the role of emotion, and methodological challenges in detecting improvisation processes. Interpretive processes and improvisation. Karl Weick (1993) played a leading role in legitimizing organizational improvisation for scholarly research. His iconic explication of the Mann Gulch disaster highlighted nuances Page 8 of 15

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of disruptions of interpretive systems and their link to improvisation processes. In other work, he describes many subtle subprocesses, such as how reinterpretation can play a decisive role: by repeating a note played in error, for example, the improviser can transform a mistake into a meaningful musical phrase (Weick, 1998). Interpretive improvisation can appear in all forms of improvisation. Further development of its role deserves major attention. What is the role of imagination in improvisation? How does improvisational practice interweave with interpretation? Does an improvised reinterpretation unfold differently from a planned reinterpretation? How do problems become reinterpreted as opportunities and the other way round? Motivations for improvisation. Current theory sometimes notes the existence of both problem- and opportunity-driven improvisations, but studies typically fail to trace them separately. Do they involve different microprocesses? Field reports describe how actors sometimes improvise because they enjoy improvising for its own sake. Does this motivation spur different processes than utilitarian improvisation or have different longterm influence? How does a group come to have a shared motivation? Emotion and improvisation. Improvised performances are by definition irreversible: the pattern already performed cannot be undone. This suggests that improvising can generate fear, or relief from boredom, as well as feelings of transcendence (Hatch, 1997; Hmieleski et al., 2013). Do emotional factors influence all forms of improvisation? Does emotion play a distinct role in links between micro- and macro-processes, and the interpretation of improvisation itself? Insights into these issues can not only advance process understanding of improvisation but of how organizational actors embody their practices more broadly (Antonacopoulou, 2008; Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009). Detecting improvisation processes. Researching improvisation presents challenges in part because one cannot deduce from the content of a particular performance how much in what way it involved improvisational processes. Time periods used to bracket the flow of action can affect whether a focal set of activities seems to involve design during execution or instead embody very fast-moving set of cycles of planning then execution (Van de Ven et al., 1999). Choices about the degree of novelty used to indicate improvisational processes will also shape the observed relative presence of improvisation. It will help if investigators clarify their choices on how large a deviation from prior templates (novelty) they require to assess an activity as improvisational, and how they approach assessing convergence of design and execution of a performance.

Gaps within each of the Four Modes of Improvisation Micro-improvisation as ad hoc actions to accomplish work. Although much improvisation research has focused on this form, important questions remain. There is still relatively little detailed examination of how differences in the degree of novelty generated during improvisation influence later processes (Vera and Crossan, 2005). How do we account for the fact that effective organizational actors skillfully navigate baseline improvisation in work practices, but other forms of improvisation can create major coordination problems? How can improvisations with positive ampliative potential be identified? What specific characteristics of improvised processes are perceived as relevant enough to be inscribed in the organization's memory? Conceptualizing memory as a process can offer new perspectives on the unfolding of organizational improvisation. Macro-improvisation as strategy. Eisenhardt and her colleagues’ studies often focused on the fast-moving computer industry, but recent work indicates that principles such as minimal structuring can also be useful in mature industries, such as retailing (Sonenshein, 2014). Longitudinal and comparative research on startups and entire sectors (Ocasio and Joseph, 2008) can advance understanding of how traditional forms of strategy (planning) coexist with improvisation. How does improvisation relate to strategic surprises (Lampel and Shapira, 2001) and sudden organizational collapse? What safeguards reduce the potential dangers of Page 9 of 15

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improvisation that risks an organization's entire resources or identity? What practices reduce the chances of improvisational drifting? How do contingency planning, experimentation, and improvisation play distinct roles (Chia and Holt, 2009; Chia, 2014)? Under what conditions do effective improvisational capabilities thrive versus drifting into ‘improvisational momentum’ (Gong et al., 2006)? How can effective organizational improvisation be learned (Vera and Crossan, 2005; Hmieleski et al., 2013)? Micro-improvisation as political ingenuity in the organizational underlife. The investigation of how power influences practitioner's ability to recognize and pursue non-sanctioned opportunities to acquire resources and to act ‘undercover’ (Mainemelis, 2010) will be immensely helpful for probing improvisation's link to organizing (Kamoche et al., 2003; Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009). The potential for hidden improvisation also highlights the possibility of reverse patterns in which organizational actors hide planning or routines under the guise of improvisation. Macro-improvisation as strategic domination. Reexamination of undertheorized descriptions of improvisation processes in warfare or in social movements offers a promising window for theory development. For example, how do guerilla warfare units achieve transitions to enduring organizations that can operate as equals in a world of enduring, formalized organizations? How do emotional and interpretive activities play a role in improvisation in explicit battles over identity and strategic missions?

Gaps in Research on Interactions between Levels, Forms, and Other Processes Finally, while extant theory reveals rich interactions across levels of improvisation, important frontiers remain. Promising lines of work include but are not limited to deepening understanding of improvisation's links to distinct institutionalization processes, organizational performance, and multilevel outcomes – including cultures or institutional fields, as sketched below. First, more detailed observational data will improve understanding of how actors create improvised content. Further work can usefully probe non-professional settings or improvisation but non-engaged actors, in contrast to much work on engaged professionals. When does a sequence of micro-actions to accomplish work or underlife improvisations become part of a foundational change process? How do evaluation, power, and interpretive processes influence each other and change over time? Second, exactly when and how does an initial improvisational episode or sequence of actions affect later tendencies to improvise at all? What about capabilities to improvise effectively versus ineffectively? Is this a matter of practicing (Antonacopoulou, 2008) and if so, how, precisely, does it unfold? How does this process affect a transactive memory system (Vera and Crossan, 2005; Winter, 2003)? How and when do organizations develop an ‘addiction’ to improvisational processes (Gong et al., 2005). Is it possible that current improvisational tendencies are actually remnants of improvisational processes during organizational formation that are not yet touched by bureaucracy or routines? Improvisation and performance. Interactions between levels of improvisation and other processes can impact outcomes at all levels. How do amplification processes of improvisation create different trajectories for different types of strategic performance – both short term and long term? Does the long-term impact of an improvisational process differ from the performance impact of a planned innovation or a random deviation? What is theoretically new in such models compared to the existing literature on unintended outcomes of local deviations in practice? Multilevel outcomes. Much multilevel work that explicitly flags improvisation tackles interactions between the individual/team and the organizational level (see Smets et al. above for an exception). This invites further exploration of interactions affecting entire institutional fields and on the role of culture. Nollywood, the NigerPage 10 of 15

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ian film industry, offers a case in point. Uzo and Mair's (2014, p. 65) qualitative study describes actors in this industry as habile improvisers and attributes this to the sector's low level of professionalism and to the high value of rapid adaptation. The authors show how a sound technician without preparation can replace an unexpectedly absent actor on the spot and how ‘stories and scripts were spontaneously and collectively improvised as the movie production process unfolded.’ The study suggests a pervasive, cultural comfort with conceiving action as it unfolds. Studies in contexts as geographically diverse as India (Capelli et al., 2010) and Southern Europe (Aram and Walochik, 1996; Cunha, 2005) show that improvisational skills can be enacted up to a point that they become institutionalized as normal features of managerial practice. Here, too, it will be interesting to probe whether this has developed over time, or whether initial improvisational tendencies simply have not been overridden by planning and routinization norms.

Conclusion This review emphasizes empirical investigations of improvisation, whether from an inductive, deductive, or abductive approach (Cederman, 2005). In terms of data and study design, much empirical improvisation research has involved case studies, detailed historical descriptions, and fine-grained analysis of organizational activities. A handful of studies have begun to create a parallel body of theory testing quantitative studies that directly assess the presence of improvisation. Contemporary improvisation research shows considerable variation in terms of ontological and epistemological assumptions, but they are not tightly linked to the four different modes portrayed. We propose, however, that taken as a whole, extant research makes improvisation a potentially vital springboard to advance process and practice theories. First, the improvisation process itself clearly instantiates several key concerns of many process and practice theories. Carefully tracing improvisation in action requires attention to the sequence of design and performance in time or in material interactions, mirroring process/practice theories’ focus on temporal patterns (Langley et al., 2003; Van de Ven et al., 1999). Improvisation by definition involves the deliberate performance of an unplanned novel design, which highlights agency and effortful accomplishment, another hallmark of process/practice theories (Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011). Improvisation theory puts real-time interactions and dialectics center stage, and has begun to probe concrete chains of multiprocess and multilevel interactions as described above (Miner et al., 2001; Vera and Crossan, 2005). At a minimum, then, extant improvisation research contributes to process and practice theory, because it illuminates ‘how processes (rather than things) unfold over time’ (Langley et al., 2003:6) and advances an ‘empirical approach to practice’ (Feldman and Orlikowski, 2001:1240). Much empirical improvisation research does not draw on or knit its insights into a traditional, specific formal practice/process theory, however. Further, many studies retain elements of a variance orientation, whether for conceptual convenience or from ontological assumptions (Feldman and Orlikowski, 2001). They often assume the presence of stable organizational entities whose improvisational activity can yield lawful outcomes. This is important work: it clearly has value to identify contingencies for when, how, and why improvisational processes tend to generate useful versus harmful perceived outcomes, for example. That said, we propose that continuing, deeper empirical investigation of improvisation can help advance process and practice theories in fundamental ways. First, much work remains to be done in terms of interactions between organizational processes and on micro-processes within specific improvisational episodes. Distinguishing and tracing links between imagining, discovering, intuiting, improvising, experimenting, and triPage 11 of 15

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al-and-error learning, will help build more precise understanding of unplanned adaptation, for example. Antonacopoulou (2008, 2009) raises crucial issues of how imagination and pragmatism can help create space for different courses of future action, in her focus on practicing. Explicating different micro-processes within improvisational episodes such as editing, imagining, responding to one's own and others’ previous patterns, and changing the meaning of a prior action through a current spontaneous action (Weick, 1998) represents a fertile investigatory strategy. Conceptual work is needed on how to interpret the ‘deliberateness’ of intended micro-processes that yield unplanned institutional change. Finally, scholars can use precise empirical studies of improvisation as a lens to continue to explore the vision of a complete inversion of ontological assumptions of stability (Weick, 1998): why and how there is ever anything other than improvisation at all (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002)? Social theorists have long offered nuanced models of the origins of organizational regularities, but drawing on precise, empirically grounded, improvisation research may offer novel theoretical windows. In similar vein, there is a need for clearer distinctions in the language employed to speak of the underlying dynamics that define the character of improvisation as a process but also other concepts like emergence, serendipity, ideation, practicing, etc. In summary, management theory long saw improvisation as a rare activity that usually leads to bad outcomes. Some recent revivals initially portrayed it as an unconditionally good-outcome activity to deal with uncertainty. Other work has highlighted its unobtrusive role in the steady flow of practice. The body of research described above offers a richer, more nuanced, but still nascent vision that has the potential to help advance fundamental process and practice theory about key dynamics of organizational life.

References Akgun, A.E., Byrne, J.C., Lynn, G.S. and Keskin, H. (2007) ‘New product development in turbulent environments: Impact of improvisation and unlearning on new product performance'. Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, 24, 203–230. Alinsky, S. (2010) Rules for radicals. New York: Random House. Antonacopoulou, E.P. (2008) ‘On the practise of practice: In-tensions and ex-tensions in the ongoing reconfiguration of practice'. In D. Barry and H. Hansen (Eds.), Handbook of new approaches to organization studies (pp. 112–131). London: Sage. Antonacopoulou, E.P. (2009) ‘Strategizing as practising: Strategic learning as a source of connection'. In L.A. Costanzo and R.B. McKay (Eds.), Handbook of research on strategy and foresight (pp.169–181). London: Sage. Antonacopoulou, E.P. and Sheaffer, Z. (2014) ‘Learning in crisis: Rethinking the relationship between organizational learning and crisis management'. Journal of Management Inquiry, 23(1), 5–21. Aram, J.D. and Walochik, K. (1996) ‘Improvisation and the Spanish manager'. International Studies of Management and Organization, 26, 73–89. Baker, T. and Nelson, R. (2005) ‘Creating something out of nothing: Resource construction through entrepreneurial bricolage'. Administrative Science Quarterly, 50, 329–366. Baker, T., Miner, A.S. and Eesley, D.T. (2003) ‘Improvising firms: Bricolage, account giving and improvisational competencies in the founding process'. Research Policy, 32, 255–276. Balogun, J. and Johnson, G. (2004) ‘Organizational restructuring and middle manager sensemaking'. Academy of Management Journal, 47(4), 523–549. Bechky, B. and Okhuysen, G. (2011) ‘Expected the unexpected? How SWAT officers and film crews handle surprises'. Academy of Management Journal, 54(2), 239–261. Bergh, D.D. and Lim, E.N.K. (2008) ‘Learning how to restructure: Absorptive capacity and improvisational views of restructuring actions and performance'. Strategic Management Journal, 29, 593–616. Bigley, G. and Roberts, K. (2001) ‘The incident command system: High-reliability organizing for complex and volatile task environments'. Academy of Management Journal, 44(6), 1281–1299. Bingham, C.B. (2009) ‘Oscillating improvisation: How entrepreneurial firms create success in foreign market entries over time'. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 3, 321–345. Page 12 of 15

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Hmieleski, K.M., Corbett, A.C. and Baron, R.A. (2013) ‘Entrepreneurs’ improvisational behavior and form performance: A study of dispositional and environmental moderators'. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 7, 138–150. Jarzabkowski, P. and Kaplan, S. (2014) ‘Strategy tools in-use: A framework for understanding technologies of rationality in practice'. Strategic Management Journal, forthcoming. Kamoche, K. and Cunha, M.P. (2001) ‘Minimal structures: From jazz improvisation to product innovation'. Organization Studies, 22, 733–764. Kamoche, K., Cunha, M.P. and Cunha, J.V. (2003) ‘Towards a theory of organizational improvisation: Looking beyond the jazz metaphor'. Journal of Management Studies, 40(8), 2023–2051. Kendra, J. and Wachtendorf, T. (2003) ‘Elements of resilience after the World Trade Center disaster: Reconstituting New York City's Operations Center'. Disasters, 27(1), 37–53. Kozlowski, S.W.J. and Klein, K.J. (2000) ‘A multilevel approach to theory and research in organizations: Contextual, temporal, and emergent processes'. In K.J. Klein and S.W.J. Kozlowski (Eds.), Multilevel theory, research, and methods in organizations: Foundation, extensions, and new directions (pp. 3–90). San Francisco: Jossey Bass. Lampel, J. and Shapira, Z. (2001) ‘Judgmental errors, interactive norms and the difficulty of detecting strategic surprises'. Organization Science, 12, 599–611. Langley, A., Smallman, C., Tsoukas, H. and Van de Ven, A.H. (2013) ‘Process studies of change in organizations and management: Unveiling temporality, activity and flow'. Academy of Management Journal, 56(1), 1–13. Lupton, T. (1963) On the shop floor: Two studies of workshop organization and output. New York: Pergamon. Magni, M., Proserpio, L., Hoegl, M. and Provera, B. (2009) ‘The role of team behavioral integration and cohesion in shaping individual improvisation'. Research Policy, 38, 1044–1053. Mainemelis, C. (2010) ‘Stealing fire: Creative deviance in the evolution of new ideas'. Academy of Management Review, 35, 558–578. Manning, P.K. (2008) ‘Goffman on organizations'. Organization Studies, 29(5), 677–699. McGinn, K. and Keros, A. (2002) ‘Improvisation and the logic of exchange in socially embedded transactions'. Administrative Science Quarterly, 47(3), 42–473. Mantere, S. and Vaara, E. (2008) ‘On the problem of participating in strategy: A critical discursive perspective'. Organization Science, 19(2), 341–358. March, J.G. (1981) ‘Footnotes to organizational change'. Administrative Science Quarterly, 26, 563–577. March, J.G. (1982). The technology of foolishness. In J. G. March, & J. P. Olsen (Eds.), Ambiguity and choice in organizations (pp. 69–81). Bergen, Norway: Universitetsforlaget. March, J.G. (1976) ‘The technology of foolishness'. In J.G. March and J. Olsen (Eds.), Miller, P. and Wedell-Wedellsborg, T. (2013) ‘The case for stealth innovation'. Harvard Business Review, March, 91–97. Miner, A., Bassoff, P. and Moorman, C. (2001) ‘Organizational improvisation and learning: A field study'. Administrative Science Quarterly, 46(2), 304–337. Mintzberg, H. (1994) The rise and fall of strategic planning. New York: Simon and Schuster. Moorman, C. and Miner, A. (1998) ‘The convergence between planning and execution: Improvisation in new product development'. Journal of Marketing, 62, 1–20. Ocasio, W.A. and Joseph, J. (2008) ‘Rise and fall – or transformation? The evolution of strategic planning at the General Electric Company, 1940–2006'. Long Range Planning, 41, 248–272. Orlikowski, W.J. (1996) ‘Improvising organizational transformation over time: A situated change perspective'. Information Systems Research, 7, 63–92. Orr, J. (1990) ‘Sharing knowledge, celebrating identity: War stories and community memory in service culture'. In D.S. Middleton and D. Edwards (Eds.), Collective remembering: Memory in society. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Plowman, D.A., Baker, L.T., Beck, T., Kulkarni, M., Solansky, S. and Travis, D. (2007) ‘Radical change accidentally: The emergence and amplification of small change'. Academy of Management Journal, 50, 515–543. Preston, A. (1991) ‘Improvising order'. In I. L. Mangham (Ed.), Organization analysis and development (pp. 81–102). New York: Wiley. Schon, D. (1983) The reflective practitioner. New York: Basic Books. Page 14 of 15

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Cycles of Divergence and Convergence: Underlying Processes of Organization Change and Innovation

Contributors: Kevin Dooley & Andrew Van de Ven Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Cycles of Divergence and Convergence: Underlying Processes of Organization Change and Innovation" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n36 Print pages: 574-590 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Cycles of Divergence and Convergence: Underlying Processes of Organization Change and Innovation Kevin DooleyAndrew Van de Ven

Introduction A central quest of process research is to identify the order and sequence in which events unfold as things emerge, develop, grow, or terminate over time (Abbott, 1990). Researchers across a multitude of disciplines have used a broad array of theoretical and methodological lenses to describe change of and innovation by individuals, groups, organizations, and institutions (Langley et al., 2013). The collective body of research, models, and theories represents an emergent paradigm about how we conceptualize change in human systems. It is useful to understand how theories are common in ways that are independent of the domain or method of research in order to understand the paradigmatic premises that researchers tend toward. Van de Ven and Poole (1995) grappled with this question by examining thousands of published articles concerning change and innovation in organizational sciences. They defined change as observed differences over time in an organizational entity, and innovation as instances when the observed differences were novel or unprecedented to the entity undergoing change. Using these definitions, they developed a typology of change models: (1) a teleological sequence of divergent dissatisfaction, search, screen, followed by a convergent choice of goals, and implementation, (2) a life cycle sequence of convergent compliance to a prescribed sequence of events interspersed with temporary divergent events, (3) a dialectical pattern of a divergent antitheses confronting and conflicting with a thesis and converging to produce a synthesis, or (4) an evolutionary process of divergent variations that converge through selection and retention event sequences. Dooley and Van de Ven (1999) examined the process patterns underlying these four change models from the perspective of nonlinear dynamical systems, under the premise that all human systems can be observed over time and that there is a typology of underlying statistical patterns that can describe real observations: periodicity, chaos, white noise, and colored noise. These four dynamical patterns emanate from different underlying causal mechanisms, distinguished by the number of causal variables in the system and whether causal variables act interdependently or not. This chapter addresses the question: is there a common pattern underlying all of these process models of change? We address this question by examining the proposition illustrated in Figure 36.1 and initially introduced by Van de Ven et al. (1999; 2008) and Dooley and Van de Ven (1999) that: The process of organizational change and innovation can be explained as a nonlinear cycle of divergent and convergent activities that may repeat over time and at different organizational levels if resources are obtained to renew the cycle.

Figure 36.1Cyclic processes of divergence and convergence

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In other words, when we examine the activities that occur during organizational change efforts, we find that the collective series of activities or events being observed are generally converging toward a common end or generally diverging toward different ends. While this model appears exceedingly general and simple on the surface, its operation at multiple scales of time and multiple levels of organization concerning multiple aspects of behavior can create the type of complexity we observe in real organizational systems. For example, as Figure 36.1 illustrates, internal and external forces act simultaneously but differently over time, enabling divergence and/or forcing convergence. The simultaneity of these positive and negative feedback loops causes the organizational unit undergoing change to behave as a nonlinear dynamical system (Dooley, 1997). When divergent activities are dominant, the change process generally enters a high-dimensional mode, typified by a large number of causal factors that are random or semirandom in nature. When convergent activities are dominant, the process generally settles to a low-dimensional mode, typified by a few causal factors that are periodic or equilibrium based in nature. The exception is a chaotic system, which allows for some divergent behavior while still maintaining low dimensionality. Dimensionality refers to the number of causal factors driving organizational change. Low-dimensional behavior is indicative of few causal factors, leading to convergent behavior, while high-dimensional behavior is indicative of many causal factors, Page 3 of 17

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leading to divergent behavior (Dooley and Van de Ven, 1999). We shall first demonstrate the presence and usefulness of examining change and innovation as cycles of divergence and convergence by describing the methodology and findings used in studying the development of three innovations from concept to implementation (or termination) in the Minnesota Innovation Research Program (MIRP) by Van de Ven, Angle, and Poole (1989), Van de Ven et al., 1999; 2008) and Poole et al. (2000). In doing so, we draw from both theory as well as case data that have been analyzed in various ways previously (Van de Ven and Polley, 1992; Garud and Van de Ven, 1992; Cheng and Van de Ven, 1996). Following this in-depth analysis of divergent and convergent processes, we then discuss the generality of the model for understanding the common dynamical building blocks across many different models of innovation and change in the literature.

A Cyclical Model of Divergent and Convergent Behavior As noted before, we propose that the cyclical process model illustrated in Figure 36.1 explains temporal dynamics in a wide variety of organizational change and innovation processes. The cycle consists of two phases in a set sequence of divergent and convergent behavior. Iterations of the cycle are enabled by an influx of resources and restructuring of the system, and constrained by external rules and internally chosen directions. The model is similar to other proposed models of self-organization in social organizations (Goldstein, 1994; Guastello, 1995; Lichtenstein, 1997; Lichtenstein et al., 2006). Let us examine how divergence and convergence are a part of process theories at different levels of description. Divergence involves branching behavior that explores and expands in different directions. It is triggered by the infusion of resources into a system. Divergence does not occur without the expenditure of attention and time, and such expenditures require additional resources – people, time, ideas, and money – above and beyond the system's normal sustenance. When a system is behaving in a divergent manner, the data we observe from the system will tend to look either random or chaotic because (as discussed below) divergence implies increasing the complexity or dimensionality of system behavior. Convergence is an integrating and narrowing process that focuses on testing and exploiting a given direction. It reduces the dimensions or complexity of a system and moves it toward a periodic pattern of quasi-equilibrium. Convergent behavior is triggered by external and internal dynamics. External constraints include institutional rules and organizational mandates that narrow the boundaries of permissible action. Internal constraints include resource limitations and discovering a possibility that focuses attention and actions in a chosen direction. From this perspective, organizational change and innovation can be described as consisting of a repeatable cycle of divergent and convergent phases of activities that are enabled by resource investments and constrained by external rules and internal discovery of a chosen course of action. Each cycle begins with the design of an organizational arrangement and the infusion of resources from external sources, is followed by a ‘honeymoon’ period of divergent exploratory behaviors that continue until resources are depleted or a solution is found, and concludes with a convergent period of focused behavior to exploit the solution or to embark on a new one. If the latter, the unit restructures itself to satisfy stakeholders’ demands and obtain resources to initiate the next cycle of divergent–convergent phases. Repetitive cycles of divergence and convergence may be thought of as a self-organizing process (Jantsch, 1980), and are an attribute of any living system. The recurrent (but perhaps not predictable) pattern of behavior that a living system exhibits is called an ‘attractor,’ and the attractor creates quasi-equilibrium for the system. For example, while people may eat different things at different times of the day, their behavior is not likely to be random, but follow some loose pattern – this is the system's attractor. When a living system has to respond to external changes, it dampens them in some way so as to maintain the established pattern, or atPage 4 of 17

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tractor. But if external forces become great enough, they can push the living system to a state that is far from this quasi-equilibrium. When a system is in this far-from-equilibrium state, it can diverge to another attractor, or pattern of recurrent behavior, at which point convergent forces once again dominate and bind the system to its new attractor and state of quasi-equilibrium (Dooley and Van de Ven, 1999). For example, in the case of a person's eating habits, the pressure to lose weight via a new diet may become strong enough to cause a person to shift his or her behavior and eat completely different foods, and hence a new set of recurrent behaviors (attractor) would emerge. In order to empirically study this model, it is useful to operationalize divergence and convergence in such a manner that these phases can be identified unambiguously. Dooley and Van de Ven (1999) and Poole et al. (2000) propose a model and methods whereby such diagnoses can be made on the basis of observing a chronological sequence of events in the development of a change process that are then organized into a quantitative time series of coded events. The diagnoses of such a time series lead to a dynamical assessment with one of three outcomes: the process is behaving in a periodic, linear fashion (as denoted by a fixed point attractor or limit cycle); a chaotic (or at least nonlinear) fashion (as denoted by a strange attractor); or as white or colored noise. Dooley and Van de Ven (1999) used two factors to portray this dynamical landscape: dimensionality and independence. Dimensionality (low or high) refers to the number of variables or causal factors driving system behavior (Gell-Mann, 1994). These key mechanisms or ‘state variables’ could be acting relatively independently or could be interacting with one another. A low-dimensional periodic pattern is typically indicative of a few factors acting on the system independently, as opposed to a high-dimensional white noise pattern, which is indicative of many factors acting on the system independently (Ruhla, 1992). While it is possible for highdimensional chaos to exist, our current empirical methods do not allow such discovery (Brock, Hsieh, and LeBaron, 1989; Jayanthi and Sinha, 1998); thus, if we truly find chaotic dynamics in the event time series, it must indicate a low-dimensional system, where the few factors are driving system behavior in some interdependent fashion (Koput, 1992). Conversely, the pattern of colored (e.g., pink or brown) noise indicates a high-dimensional system where the many factors are acting interdependently (for a deeper discussion of these dynamical behaviors, see Dooley and Van de Ven, 1999). In reality, any time series will have many of these components present, indicating the presence of multiple causal factors.

Case Illustrations of Divergent and Convergent Cycles To illustrate divergent and convergent cycles during the innovation journey more closely, let us examine the event sequences in three cases that are featured in Van de Ven et al.'s (1999; 2008) book that synthesizes findings from the MIRP. The cases compare: (a) Qnetics, a new software company startup (Venkatraman and Van de Ven, 1998), (b) CIP, an internal corporate venture involving cochlear implant products being developed within 3M (Garud and Van de Ven, 1992), and (c) TAP, an interorganizational joint venture of Millipore, 3M, and Sarns involving medical technology that removed impurities from blood (Polley and Van de Ven, 1995). Figures 36.2–36.4 provide a graphical representation of the time series of innovation events observed in the three cases. Events were identified historically and in real time with ethnographic and historical field observations by the researchers. The action–event time series was coded as the net number of monthly events in which the entrepreneurs expanded versus contracted their courses of action from the previous event. In other words, a positive number indicates expanding and divergent action, and a negative number indicates contracting and convergent action. Further, this time series can be diagnosed dynamically for further insight. Although numerous organizing events occurred throughout the temporal development of the three cases, the vertical lines indicate times when major changes occurred in the structure and funding sources for the innovations. The time series of action and outcome events for the CIP and TAP innovations look very similar in Figures Page 5 of 17

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36.2 and 36.3, and they appear different from Qnetics in Figure 36.4. Upon closer examination, however, we see that the Qnetics developmental pattern is similar to that of CIP and TAP. In fact, CIP and TAP represent special cases of a more general developmental sequence that Qnetics reflects.

Figure 36.2CIP action events

Figure 36.3TAP action events

Figure 36.4Qnetics action events Page 6 of 17

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Figures 36.2 and 36.3 suggest that after their initial gestation period, CIP and TAP innovations undertook a single overall cycle of divergent and convergent behaviors, although in the opposite sequence. The ‘change points’ identified were determined from the qualitative case history, not from the quantitative event time series data. The change point in the CIP case corresponds to the FDA's first approval of a patent for 3M's single channel cochlear implant device, after five years of development. This was also the time when 3M assigned a formal team and project manager to the effort. The creation of a formal team led to both additional resource investment and process controls and constraints. The change point in the TAP case corresponds to the management decision to ‘decouple’ the two parallel development efforts that had previously defined the scope of action. In both cases, the cycle began after the innovation projects were formed and funded. In the case of CIP, there was a divergent period of development where most events expanded in different directions to explore the idea with the resources available. This was followed by a convergent period of mostly contracting activities and negative outcomes associated with market-entry problems. Thus, even though there was convergence toward a single cochlear design, externalities led to market failure. In the case of TAP, there was an initial period of convergence followed by an almost equal balance of convergence and divergence after the change point. This divergence is indicative of an innovation that failed to determine a detailed design that worked for the market. In terms of the average of the action series, both CIP and TAP show evidence of phases of divergence and convergence. For CIP, prior to the change point, the accumulated action time series data (the value of the time series accumulated over the 59 months of the first epoch) was 169, with an average of 2.86; this very positive value indicates expansion and divergence in actions. After the change point, the cumulative sum is –30, with an average of –0.64, indicating contraction and convergence in action. For TAP, the first epoch demonstrates convergent behavior while the second indicate slightly divergent behavior (the first epoch average is –0.29, and the second epoch average is 0.06). From a dynamical perspective, the TAP series is too short to examine with nonlinear time series models, but CIP time series is long enough to do so. Both Cheng and Van de Ven (1996) and Poole et al. (2000) found that the CIP action event time series was chaotic (or at least nonlinear) in the first epoch, with a dimension of around four, and periodic in the second epoch, with a cycle of about two months. Chaos is dynamically considered a divergent process, while periodicity is considered a convergent process (Dooley and Van de Ven, 1999) — thus, the dynamical analysis confirms the presence of divergent and convergent epochs. Page 7 of 17

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In summary, CIP followed the expected pattern of divergence and convergence, but externalities led to an unsuccessful market entry; TAP was not managed to convergence even after a decision was made to focus on just one invention, indicating the project's inability to fund an acceptable market solution. In both cases, the innovations were eventually terminated. However, the organizational and technical competencies created by the CIP and TAP, innovations were redeployed in other business ventures by the parent organizations. During its life span, Qnetics transformed through three qualitatively different structural and financial arrangements: (a) as two independent new company start-ups, (b) their merger as a computer software company, and (c) remaining financially unsuccessful, the company restructured once again to develop software for an electric load-management device. Figure 36.4 shows that action events grew rapidly to explore or expand in new directions shortly after the start of each restructuring period and then contracted dramatically toward the end of each period because of its repeated failures to generate sufficient revenues from new product sales or venture capitalists to sustain its livelihood. The cumulative action events for the first epoch for Qnetics were 24 (an average of 0.46), while in the second and third epoch it was –4 (an average of –0.17) and 9 (an average of 0.29). This indicates that Qnetics underwent an initial period of divergence, a period of convergence, and another period of divergence. Visual examination of each of the third periods shows, however, that the action–event time series became quite negative at the end of the period, thus providing some qualitative evidence that there was yet another phase of convergence. Each of the two change points corresponded qualitatively to major restructurings and refinancing arrangements necessary to undertake the next cycle. Unlike CIP and TAP, Qnetics’ principals were successful in undertaking the major restructuring and refinancing necessary to initiate each cycle of business development. Like CIP and TAP, each structural arrangement enabled Qnetics to initiate a new cycle of divergent and convergent phases. Within each cycle, divergent exploratory behavior dominated until significant marketing problems arose and resources became scarce, which triggered a shift toward more convergent and focused behaviors. At the end of each cycle, the existing structural arrangement of the fledgling business became a liability that inhibited further resource commitments by investors. These observations suggest that the structural arrangements used to organize and manage the innovation unit were temporary and changed with each cycle. From this, Van de Ven et al. (1999) infer that changes in structural and financial arrangements are necessary to renew the divergent and convergent cycle of innovation development. Qnetics was able to engage in new cycles of development only with major organizational restructurings that generated a willingness in new investors to infuse new resources. CIP and TAP entrepreneurs were unsuccessful in finding investors willing to commit resources to any further plans for organizational restructuring; failing this, the innovations were terminated. We also note that Figure 36.4 indicates increasing volatility in actions across the three periods — indicative of a larger, overall cycle of divergence. This divergent progression over the three periods indicates that Qnetics’ developmental journey may have increased in dimensionality or complexity over time — such a divergent progression could not sustain Qnetics as a viable economic enterprise. Qnetics might have become a sustainable business if its progression across cycles had converged and settled down to a lower-dimensional process over time. Van de Ven et al. (1999) reported that most of the other innovations that were implemented followed a convergent, rather than Qnetics’ divergent, overall progression across cycles. This leads us to the following empirical generalization, as illustrated in Figure 36.5. Organizational change and innovation are only sustainable over time within the context of a ‘full cycle’ of divergence and convergence. Convergence with no divergence will lead to stasis and eventual ‘death,’ and unconstrained or ever increasingly intense cycles of divergence can lead to a state where convergence becomes impossible. However, convergence alone does not predict market success for the innovation, as externalities can still lead to market failure. Thus, we would propose that convergence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for innovation success.

Figure 36.5Random, chaotic, and periodic dimensions in the innovation journey Page 8 of 17

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Source : Van de Ven et al., The Innovation Journey. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 2008, p. 196. In the beginning, a gestation period of seemingly random events set the stage for initiating an innovation project. Some of these gestating events were sufficiently large to ‘shock’ the action thresholds of entrepreneurs and converge on a specific plan used to secure funding and organize structural arrangements to launch an innovative venture. As innovation development begins, the process soon proliferated from a simple unitary process into a divergent progression of ideas and activities. During this exploratory period, Cheng and Van de Ven's (1996) findings suggest that divergent action events followed a chaotic, not a random or periodic, pattern. This divergent pattern was constrained by institutional regulations (e.g., FDA clinical trials and review procedures), leadership directives (e.g., develop the TAP device to achieve specified filtering capabilities and not the treatment of a disease), and internal persistence to an entrepreneurial vision. This divergent and chaotic process continued until significant and measurable setbacks occurred, such as manufacturing failures for TAP, a product recall for CIP, and withdrawal of a bank's line of credit for Qnetics. These tangible ‘shocks’ shifted the divergent progression into a convergent focus on problem solving through trial-and-error testing. Empirically, Cheng and Van de Ven (1996) found the action events during this convergent period to reflect a unidimensional periodic pattern. Ideally, innovations stop when they are adopted and implemented. However, in most of the cases studied by MIRP researchers, initial investments were not sufficient to support innovation to its completion. As a result, innovation development efforts were often terminated when resources were depleted and when investors were unwilling to renew further investments in the innovations. In the case of Qnetics, where new or existing investors were willing to make further investments in the innovations, the divergent and convergent cycle repeated twice but in each cycle with a different structure and leaders for the innovation unit. We have noted Page 9 of 17

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before that Qnetics’ subsequent cycles diverged into higher dimensionality that did not lead to a viable operating business. In other cases, we observed that innovation adoption and implementation occurred by linking and integrating the ‘new’ innovation with the ‘old’ existing operations. For this to happen, the innovation needs to converge to a periodic pattern with that of the existing operating entity at the time of implementation. We now turn our attention to other models and theories of change and innovation, and demonstrate how they too show cycles of divergence and convergence embedded inside them.

Divergence and Convergence in Theories of Change and Innovation One can describe many existing theories of innovation and change as consisting of one or more cycles of divergence and convergence. Consider one of the most common labels used to describe industrial innovation: research and development. Research involves a diligent search among potential solutions (divergence among possible solution paths); development involves the gradual manifestation of a solution (convergence to a final form). Thus, the term ‘research and development’ can be thought of as a different way of saying ‘divergence and convergence.’ Let us examine how divergence and convergence are a part of change and innovation theories at different levels of description.

Divergence and Convergence in Creative Search Almost all theories of creativity describe the process as starting by creating many ideas from which to choose (Amabile, 1988). A prominent assumption is that large quantities of different ideas must be generated to produce ‘creative’ outcomes (e.g., Osborn, 1953; Bailey, 1978). In the extreme case, some propose that highvolume idea production, exclusive of intention and expertise, determines success: ‘Innovative designs are not obtained through some deliberate attempt at producing them, but by generating lots of design alternatives and throwing away the bad ones’ (Navinchandra, 1991: 4). Creative ideas are not simply generated, however. In order for them to become useful in some practical sense, a disciplined process of selection is necessary (Weick, 1989). Convergence occurs when the creative idea is merged with reality. Consider de Bono's much-used model of purposeful creative thought, Provocation and Movement (1992). Provocations are intended to diverge thinkers from previously formed cognitive paths. Provocations can arise by taking notice of contradictions, difficulties, disagreements, etc., and by choosing to treat what you noticed as an opportunity. Simple noticing may be insufficient, however, because previous experience may limit what you notice and/or perceive. De Bono established structured, ‘semimechanical’ methods to create deliberate provocation: escape, exaggeration, reversal, wishful thinking, and random input. Once a Provocation is set up, Movement techniques are used to generate valuable ideas. As with Provocation, Movement can sometimes be gained by general willingness and effort but is more successfully achieved though systematic techniques. It may be noted that certain aspects of the movement techniques are analytical and ‘convergent.’ This is why ‘a general “divergent” attitude of thinking is not sufficient for effective creativity’ (de Bono, 1992: 159).

Divergence and Convergence in Individual and Organizational Learning Divergence and convergence can be seen as a natural dynamic of the learning process. People are generally facile at single-loop learning, the comparison of an observed state to a desired state and subsequent planning and action to reduce the gap to zero (Argyris and Schon, 1978). Convergence between the two states is not unidirectional. Observation is biased owing to bounded rationality, and these cognitive limitations cause convergence between what is seen and what is expected to be seen. The inability to close the gap, however, can Page 10 of 17

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cause cognitive dissonance, and force an abandonment of existing schema in a search for new schema that will more closely explain the exceptional observations. Thus, the individual engages in a divergent process of identifying and selecting alternative schema; upon selection, the individual reengages single-loop learning and resumes converging observations with expectations. The collective action of individual learning is organizational learning. Lant and Mezias (1990) develop a model of organizational learning that mimics the dynamical behavior of punctuated equilibrium. They frame organizational action as a response to the level of slack in the system. When the current state is near or above aspiration levels, routine, incremental learning occurs (e.g., single-loop learning). This status quo can be called into question as slack becomes more negative and aspiration levels become distant. They equate the ‘probability of change’ to the level of slack in the system, and show that such a model re-creates short periods of divergent reorientation coupled with long periods of convergent stasis. Studies of organizational resilience and preparedness echo these findings. They show that organizational resilience and preparedness for disasters are produce by minor variations in divergent and convergent cycles (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2007). March's model of organizational learning as exploration or exploitation (March, 1991) also has parallels to our current discussion, in that exploration is a divergent activity, and exploitation is a convergent activity. Our model differs from March's, though, in that he uses these terms in exclusion of one another, such that only an ‘ambidextrous’ organization can innovate in both modes (O'Reilly and Tushman, 2008). Thus, divergence or convergence connotes action with a current innovation relative to previous innovations; our use of the concepts is not to distinguish the nature of multiple innovations, but rather the dynamics of activity within any single innovation. Thus, whereas March's model would state that an organization can survive and thrive via a set of innovations that diverge from one another over time, our model would claim that within any one of those innovations, there were one or more cycles of divergence and convergence. Different patterns of organizational learning take place during divergent and convergent cycles. Cheng and Van de Ven (1996) found that at the beginning of the development period of the CIP and TAP innovations, the relationships between action and outcome events were unrelated, but they were strongly positively correlated during their ending development period. In addition, during the beginning development period, the divergent actions of the CIP and TAP innovation teams reflected a nonlinear chaotic pattern, and they reflected a more orderly periodic pattern during the ending development period. These findings call for an expanded definition of learning that examines not only how action–outcome relationships develop, but also how prerequisite knowledge of alternative actions, outcome preferences, and contextual settings emerge. This expanded definition distinguishes learning by discovery from learning by testing. Learning by discovery in chaotic conditions is an expanding and diverging process of discovering possible action alternatives, outcome preferences, and contextual settings. Learning by testing during the more stable convergent period is a narrowing and converging process of determining which actions are related to what outcomes (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). Finally, because learning by discovery is a precondition for learning by testing, and vice versa, future research should examine how transitions occur between divergent and convergent phases of the cycle.

Divergence and Convergence in Technological Evolution The cycle of divergence and convergence applies not only to individuals, groups, and organizations; it also applies to the life cycle of technological innovations. Utterback (1994) has observed that across a large number of different industries, a common pattern of growth and decline exists. When an innovation is first introduced, a large number of competing firms enter the market. Product innovation continues until a dominant design occurs, at which point the focus of gaining competitive advantage switches from product to process innovation. This switch is accompanied by a swift decrease in the number of competing firms, until the next major innovation occurs. For example, the number of firms producing typewriters increased from one to over Page 11 of 17

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forty from 1875 to 1907. 1907, Underwood developed what would be the dominant design for years to come, and competitors had dropped to five by 1930. Similarly, the number of U.S. automakers increased between 1890 and 1925 to a high of over seventy; at that time, a significant shift occurred, and the majority of autos became all steel. At this point, entrants declined and exits accelerated, up to the state of today's market with only a few U.S. competitors. In each of these cases, the technology design diverged among many alternatives until a dominant design emerged. This event triggered all competitors to converge to a single, common design, and these convergent periods continued until the next major breakthrough. Our theme can be further extended to apply to an even more macro level of economic development because it is directly compatible with Joseph Schumpeter's (1942) seminal ideas about entrepreneurship and discontinuous cycles of creative destruction. Schumpeter proposed a dynamic evolutionary model of economic development. The model emphasizes that innovations come from within the economic system – not merely from random variations to external changes (Hagedoorn, 1989). He linked macro-economic dynamics with micro-entrepreneurial processes. Schumpeter observed that innovations produced by entrepreneurs at the micro level occur discontinuously and bring about qualitative changes or ‘revolutions’ that fundamentally displace convergent equilibria and create radically divergent macro-economic conditions (Elliott, 1983: 282). As viewed by Marshallian economists, Schumpeter allowed for economic growth as a continuous stream of small changes adapting to ‘demographic data’ from the economic system (Awan, 1986). But he explicitly distinguished this economic growth from economic development as a difference between convergent equilibrium and divergent revolutions. In his own words: Development … is entirely foreign to what may be observed in the circular flow or in the tendency towards equilibrium. It is a spontaneous and discontinuous change in the channels of the flow, disturbance of equilibrium, which forever alters and displaces the equilibrium state previously existing. … Add successively as many mail coaches as you please, and you will never get a railway thereby. (Schumpeter, 1942: 64) In striking parallel with Karl Marx, Schumpeter proposed a dialectical theory that explained why economic development proceeds cyclically rather than evenly because innovations appear discontinuously in groups or swarms (Elliott, 1983). Schumpeter's theory reflects cycles of divergent and convergent development, as is represented in a ‘punctuated equilibrium’ model (Gould, 1989; Tushman and Romanelli, 1985) or a model of partial cumulative synthesis, originally proposed by Usher (1954). Lichtenstein's five-stage model of organizational emergence (Lichtenstein, 2014) demonstrates a cycle of convergence (disequilibrium organizing), divergence (stress and experiments, amplification), and convergence (a critical event, new order through recombination, and stabilizing feedback), and these same stages are also present in the case studies of organizational emergence by Chiles, Meyer, and Hench (2004) and Plowman et al. (2007).

Divergence and Convergence between Change Process Models Finally, we return to our introductory paragraph to consider how divergent and convergent cycles underlie process theories of organization change. Tuckman's (1965) model of group development can be interpreted as a life cycle model of convergence (forming), divergence (storming), and convergence (norming and performing). Gersick (1988) found that groups go through long periods of time in relative inertia – convergence to established goals – punctuated by short periods of reassessment and redirection – divergence from established goals. Thus, punctuated equilibrium can be considered a special case of the cycle, where divergence occurs over very short periods of time and is characterized by tumultuous activity, and convergence occurs over long periods of time and is characterized by relative stability and predictability. At the level of the organization, Tushman and Romanelli (1985) introduced the model of punctuated equilibPage 12 of 17

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rium to the issue of organizational change, drawing upon Miller and Friesen's findings (1980) of momentum and revolution in organizational adaptation. Tushman and Romanelli posit that these periods of divergence – strategic reorientation – occur due to performance pressures. They emphasize the discontinuity of change, and the re-creation of new core values. As divergence leads to selection, organizations converge upon core values, markets and technologies, distribution of power, organizational structure, and the nature of control systems. Virany, Tushman, and Romanelli (1992) observed that periods of divergence are often accelerated purposefully by not only strategic reformulation, but executive succession. Their finding of a rare but successful change strategy – turnover of the executive staff with retention of the CEO – further underlines the necessary balance between divergence and convergence. Each of the four archetype models of change identified by Van de Ven and Poole (1995) have elements of divergence and convergence embedded inside them. Life cycle theories emphasize development over time, with the entity progressing in an irreversible fashion. From one perspective, differentiation is always increasing over time, and thus a divergent process is in place; conversely, there exist institutional forms to which growth converges. In teleological models, the organization progresses toward a goal state; herein, for example, resides Lant and Mezias’ (1990) model of organizational learning. In order to reach a goal, an organization is first likely to consider and perhaps explore a number of different pathways to reach the goal (divergence), but in the end commit toward a single path of action that leads to goal achievement most efficiently (convergence). In dialectic models of change, divergence occurs among entities within a system, and when those divergent opinions become strong enough to engage the status quo, conflict occurs. Conflict is resolved by opposing entities converging upon a third stance that represents the synthesis of thesis and antithesis. Finally, evolutionary models of organizational change speak of variation (a divergent process), and selection and retention (a convergent process). Thus, the divergence–convergence cycle appears to underlie all four of these basic models of change.

Conclusion This chapter proposed that cycles of divergent and convergent behavior underlie many processes of organization change and innovation. These cycles may be nonlinear and may repeat over time and at different organizational levels if resources are obtained to renew the cycle. Evidence for this pattern of convergent and divergent cycles was presented in an analysis of the chronological event time series that unfolded in three innovations studied in the MIRP. These findings were generalized by showing this cyclical pattern in some popular theories and models concerning creativity, organizational learning, technological development, and organizational change. We now conclude with a discussion of some important implications of this cyclical pattern of divergence and convergence for future theory, research, and practice on organizational processes. First, finding that there may be a simple pattern underlying the temporal order and sequence to change processes is immensely helpful in understanding relationships among different process models of organization change in the literature. The cyclical model of divergent and convergent behavior is at one level exceedingly simple and easy to understand, but as we discussed, at a deeper level the model reveals some important new concepts and patterns for understanding change processes, such as dimensionality, interdependence, divergence, and convergence in periodic, chaotic, and random event time series. Second, as the complexity or dimensionality of this cyclical process of divergence and divergence increases, the change process becomes less controllable in a deterministic sense, yet maneuverable in a stochastic sense. In other words, when an organizational change process increases in complexity, it simultaneously becomes more difficult for managers or participants to comprehend the state of the system and respond appropriately. In these situations, management cannot control the process, but can learn to maneuver boundaries, dimensions of differentiation, and connectedness within the system to increase the odds of a desired Page 13 of 17

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outcome. Practicing methods and routines for addressing likely challenges when and if they are encountered increases the likelihood of completing the change journey, but the odds of success remain low and outside one's control. Third, conceptualizing change as divergent and convergent cycles suggests the need for considering leadership behavior through a slightly different lens than is conventional. During divergent periods of discovery, learning and adaptability are enhanced when leaders reflect the multidimensional perspectives inherent in the activities being undertaken. During divergent periods of innovation development, a quest for consensus among leaders toward a single strategic vision may not be effective. Unidimensional leadership of multidimensional activities tends to squelch consideration of diverse and opposing viewpoints inherent in ambiguous tasks and often results in near-sightedness. Such myopic behavior occurs when leaders become strategically committed to and invest the ‘corporate treasury’ in a course of action that in hindsight turns out to be wrong. Multidimensional leadership behavior increases the chances for technological foresight and decreases the likelihood of oversights (Garud, Nayyar and Shapira, 1997). Fourth, the divergence–convergence cycle appears to share a great deal of similarity with March's notion of exploration and exploitation in organizational learning (March, 1991) and with the notions of ambidexterity discussed by O'Reilly and Tushman (2008) and Benner and Tushman (2003). They differ, however, in important respects. March observes that firms engage in activities that attempt to discover new knowledge (divergent exploration behaviors), and also engage in activities that attempt to make maximal use of existing knowledge (convergent exploitation behaviors). March argues that both are essential for organizations, but that in practice, learning how to explore is much more difficult than learning how to exploit because of the limited opportunities where an organization will actively engage in exploration. So, too, Benner and Tushman (2003) discuss the needs for ambidexterity by organizations simultaneously pursuing exploration and exploitation activities in different units or levels of the organization. While not denying these pluralistic ambidextrous processes of exploration and exploitation in different organizational units simultaneously, our cyclical model of divergence and convergence calls attention to the temporal order and sequence in which organizational processes unfold over time. This calls attention to the need for change managers to gain ambidextrous capabilities for maneuvering their organizational change initiative through divergent and convergent cycles of the process over time, as illustrated in Figure 36.1. Fifth, there are some potential implications to the numerous disciplines and associated scholars who examine change and innovation processes. Theoretical contribution typically is associated with differentiation from existing work. This encourages researchers examining the same phenomena to ignore each other's work, especially across disciplinary boundaries, and emphasize differences that exist between theories, rather than look for commonalities. This chapter attempts to demonstrate that it is equally insightful and useful to look for the common premises and conceptual building blocks between theories, models, and frameworks cutting across multiple domains and research methods, lest we get trapped in perpetual cycles of ‘The Two Cultures’ paradigm wars, which itself is a model of divergence and convergence (Snow, 1959; Abbott, 2001; Dooley, 2009). Finally, there are some important limitations to our cyclical model of divergent and convergent behavior that underlies organizational change processes. Our empirical generalizations are only based on a few cases, and our observations concerning the presence of convergence and divergence in other theories was not done in a rigorous way to enable possible refutation. If you look for divergence and convergence, like any other pattern, one is probably biased to see it everywhere. But then again, perhaps we see it in most theories and models because it actually is there, if at least a shadow in the background. In that spirit, we encourage the reader to contemplate their own favorite theories and model of change and innovation and consider if they too can be thought of usefully as having cycles of divergence and convergence. In conclusion, is our model of divergent – convergent cycles nothing more than a simplistic way of saying that things are unpredictable but tend to waver above and below some average value? Our model does not Page 14 of 17

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address the micro-level variation that exists in all systems, but rather the meta-pattern that any organizational system along a path of change or innovation exists. We discussed how repetitive cycles of divergence and convergence represent ‘attractors’ that reflect recurrent processes of all living systems. We showed via Figure 36.1 that patterns of behavior of a convergent attractor are reasonably well known and predictable, and behaviors in a divergent attractor are somewhat less well known in the management literature. But the unpredictable, stochastic part of life is how and when shifts occur from one attractor to another. Our model addresses these temporal dynamics by arguing that most organizational change and innovation journeys consist of a nonlinear dynamic system of divergent and convergent activities that may repeat over time and at different organizational levels if enabling and constraining conditions are present. The practical implication for innovation and change managers is a need to learn to ‘go with the flow,’ because while they can learn to maneuver the journey, they cannot control its flow. These implications profoundly challenge mainstream theories that managers can control complex organizational processes. Instead, they call for theories and research on learning, practicing, and rehearsing how to deal with various challenges encountered in divergent and convergent cycles of organizational changes. By learning to maneuver various obstacles as they arise, managers and participants can increase their odds of a successful journey, but they cannot control the process.

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Van de Ven, A.H., Polley, D., Garud, R., and Venkataraman, S. (1999; 2008) The innovation journey. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Venkataraman, S. and Van de Ven, A.H. (1998) ‘Hostile Environmental Jolts, Transaction Set and New Business Development'. Journal of Business Venturing, 13(3): 231–255. Virany, B., Tushman, M.L., and Romanelli, E. (1992) ‘Executive succession and organizational outcomes in turbulent environments: An organizational learning approach'. Organization Science, 3: 72–91. Weick, K. E. (1989) The Social Psychology of Organizing, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Weick, K.E., and Sutcliffe, K.M. (2007) Managing the unexpected: Resilient performance in an age of uncertainty. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n36

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PARTV

Process Perspectives

The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Process, Practices, and Organizational Competitiveness: Understanding Dynamic Capabilities through a Process-Philosophical Worldview

Contributors: Robert Chia Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Process, Practices, and Organizational Competitiveness: Understanding Dynamic Capabilities through a Process-Philosophical Worldview" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n37 Print pages: 593-600 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved.

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This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Process, Practices, and Organizational Competitiveness: Understanding Dynamic Capabilities through a Process-Philosophical Worldview Robert Chia

Introduction Process organization studies have emerged as a coherent and useful way of understanding the goings-on in everyday organizational life. Yet, it has not sufficiently fulfilled its potential in showing how such everyday goings-on actually eventuate in tangible organizational outcomes such as competitiveness, sustainability, and success. How can process studies of organizational life help us better understand why some firms succeed while others fail? This is a question that urgently needs exploring if, as a field of study, it is to provide genuinely valuable insights regarding the relationship between actions, practices, and firm performance. How a firm achieves and sustains its competitive advantage over its rivals has been the perennial question posed within the strategic management literature (Porter, 1980; Lippman and Rumelt, 1982; Ghemawat, 1986; Hansen and Wernerfelt, 1989; Barney, 1991; Peteraf, 1993). It is a concern that must be directly addressed by process organization studies if it is to be both theoretically useful and practically relevant to the world of business. One way to do this is to integrate the focus of process organization studies with the Resources Based View (RBV) of the firm (Wernerfelt, 1984; Peteraf, 1993). Process studies of organization can then help extend our understanding of how firm-specific characteristics such as its ‘dynamic capabilities’ (Teece, Pisano, and Shuen, 1997) emerge and play a crucial role in determining organizational performances and outcomes. The term dynamic capabilities has been defined as a firm's unique ability to continually create added-value products/services by ‘integrating, building and reconfiguring internal and external competencies to address rapidly changing environments’ (Teece, Pisano, and Shuen, 1997: 516). Understood thus, it is seen as a uniquely cultivated resource within an organization that gives it a competitive advantage over its rivals. This leads to a further question about ‘how’ such an advantage accrues over time in process terms. How can/do everyday organizational actions and practices eventuate into a unique and valuable capability that can make a critical difference between success and failure? This is where a process-based ‘practice turn’ in social theory can help throw fresh light onto the becoming of an organization's dynamic capabilities; one in which the notion of ‘habitus’ can be shown to play a critical role. Understanding dynamic capabilities, as a habituated predisposition rather than as ‘resource', ‘routines', or ‘best practices’ helps explains how organizational actors are, oftentimes habitually and non-deliberately oriented towards seeking out fresh opportunities for value creation when confronted with the immediacy of challenges faced in a rapidly changing environment. To fully appreciate this way of understanding dynamic capabilities, however, we need to first begin with a processphilosophical approach towards analyzing firms.

A Process-Philosophical Worldview: Practices, Purposiveness, and Predispositions A process-philosophical worldview provides a set of (essentially unverifiable) metaphysical presuppositions about how to view our social world in a way that throws fresh light onto social phenomena such as organization. From this worldview, reality is assumed to be perpetually fluxing, changing, and undifferentiated. Pattern, order, identity, and coherence are exceptional stabilizations and deemed to emerge as a consequence of human actions, interactions, and interventions into the flow of reality. In this regard, social reality is irretrievably the result of ongoing social construction and reconstruction. Furthermore, within this socially constructed world, relationships and practices take priority over social entities and their identities. The imperative associated with this process-philosophical outlook then, is not so much about studying ‘processes’ as is about Page 3 of 8

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studying material actions and social practices to see how entities and ‘resources’ are configured, realized, and sustained. Since process is already taken as fundamental, it is actions, interactions, and practices that help stabilize, sustain, and extend social reality including especially organizational reality. Actions, interactions, and practices therefore provide the ‘raw material’ for any process-based organizational analysis because they and their stabilizing effects are eminently observable. For process organization studies, therefore, it is about attending more closely to the ways actions, interactions, and practices are spontaneously synchronized such that a coherent pattern of relatively stable relations that we call ‘an organization’ and its attributes is able to emerge. From this process-philosophical lens, organizations, like societies and other social institutions, are nothing more than precariously stabilized amalgams of historically shaped social relations and practices. Such relations and practices have been arrived at aggregatively through multifarious historical attempts at extracting, harnessing, and exploiting energy sources and economizing effort to aid survival chances and to expand our degrees of freedom of movement in order to achieve a higher state of existence (Sahlins and Service, 1960/ 1988: 16–22). The instinct to organize and to channel our collective efforts and attention towards greater gain given the limited resources available have, therefore, been with us since mankind crawled out of the caves and began groping their way towards a more sustainable form of independent existence. Organization, as such, in this most fundamental sense, has been around since time immemorial. It is what makes our modern world appear so eminently necessary, familiar, and reassuring and what makes us instinctively think of it as a solid entity rather than in process terms as a relatively stabilized pattern of relations and practices. Furthermore, in attempting to understand the phenomenon of organization, there has been a general tendency to impute deliberate purposefulness (in the sense of having a predefined end goal in mind) to it as a social entity. Organizations are often regarded as deliberately conceived and designed to achieve a predefined end. Yet, this is often not the case. Organization often emerges inadvertently as an unintended consequence of the multitude of actions and interactions taking place within a social domain across time. This kind of ‘spontaneous emergence’ (Hayek, 1948: 86–87) of social institutions including especially organizations is far more common than is generally acknowledged. The Scottish Enlightenment figure Adam Ferguson (1767/ 1966: 122, my emphasis), echoing Adam Smith's (1759) earlier notion of the ‘invisible hand', encapsulates this understanding well when he wrote: ‘mankind … in striving to remove inconveniences … arrive at ends which even their imagination could not anticipate … Every step and every movement of the multitude … are made with equal blindness to the future, and nations stumble upon establishments which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design'. Social institutions such as organizations inadvertently emerge because people come together to productively fulfil their immediate needs and to ‘remove inconveniences’ without necessarily having any longer-term ‘end goal’ in mind. Much of human everyday activity can therefore be described as being purposive (in the sense of being absorbed and preoccupied with immediate concerns) without necessarily being purposeful (Dreyfus, 1999: 93). The overwhelming academic tendency to assume that all human action is somehow necessarily deliberate and purposeful, in the sense of having a ‘consistent set of pre-existent goals’ (March, 1972: 419), is deeply embedded in Western culture. Yet, as March rightly points out, action is ‘as much a process for discovering goals as for acting on them’ (March, 1972: 420). In many facets of ordinary everyday life, people regularly act purposively without necessarily being purposeful; an overall sense of purpose may indeed arise subsequently, but it need not necessarily precede purposive action. This distinction between purposiveness and purposefulness (Chia and Holt, 2009: 108–111) helps us better account for how small iterative changes and adaptations made at the ‘coal face’ of business in situ – and often sponte sua – to overcome immediate concerns and problems can aggregatively lead to the development of a unique firm-specific predisposition that serves as the source of competitive advantage over its rivals. Although purposive action does not involve much deliberate thought, it nevertheless acquires a certain consistency over time because it simultaneously shapes and is shaped by a cultural predisposition that comes from being inducted and socialized into a set of established organizational practices. How this socially embedPage 4 of 8

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ded, skilled, practical coping predisposition is acquired is what underpins the recent process-inspired ‘practice turn’ in social theory (Bourdieu, 1977, 1990; Schatzki, 2001; Barnes, 2001; Dreyfus, 2001) and in anthropological studies (Ingold, 2000, 2011). This notion of a cultivated organizational predisposition provides us with an alternative way of accounting for how organizational integrity, coherence, and performativity are achieved without ever needing to resort to the language of deliberate intentions, goals, plans, and pre-thought strategies. According to practice social theorists, practices embody tendencies, responses, skills, and discriminations that are often silently and unintentionally transmitted through observing and emulating other people's actions rather than through discourse or instruction. ‘Body hexis speaks directly to the motor function, in the form of a pattern of postures that is both individual and systematic … schemes are able to pass directly from practice to practice without moving through discourse and consciousness’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 74). A good illustrative example of how this happens is the effect of contrasting child-rearing practices on cultural predispositions. Child-rearing practices in the United States produce, on the one hand, an active, stimulated, responsive, and exploration-oriented baby, whereas in Japan, on the other hand, they produce a passive, soothed, contented, and quiet baby (Caudill and Weinstein, 1972: 78, quoted in Dreyfus, 1999: 17). These cultural predispositions are willy-nilly transmitted to children simply through parents doing what naturally comes to them as a result of their own immersion in the socialization process. Often such predispositions stay with them throughout their lives. Practices therefore serve as a repository of established ways of engaging that equips the individual with a flexible repertoire of means for dealing with the exigencies and unexpected turns he or she is likely to encounter in social situations. Being ‘embodied, materially mediated arrays of human activity’ (Schatzki, 2001: 2), they reflect the cumulative ‘accomplishments of competent members of collectives’ (Barnes, 2001: 24–25). As such, they have wide-ranging organizational implications in terms of how they shape outcomes (Nicolini, 2011; Rasche and Chia, 2009). Social practices serve to transmit a ‘durable transposable set of dispositions’ or ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 52) that ensures a certain consistency in the collective orchestration of action without ever presupposing conscious agency and/or deliberate intention. As Bourdieu puts it well, habitus is able to express itself in practice ‘without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 53). Understood thus, everyday practical coping actions, adjustments, and improvisations invariably shape – and are shaped by – this internalized ‘habitus’ which realizes itself in the form of a modus operandi in the conduct of everyday practices. The notions of habitus and modus operandi, therefore, create a theoretical space for understanding how it is possible to achieve consistency and congruence of actions in organizational life simply through carrying out seemingly mundane practical coping actions (Chia and Holt, 2006: 638). It provides us with an alternative way of appreciating how organizational attributes, including especially its dynamic capabilities, can emerge nondeliberately just by routinely taking seemingly innocuous adaptive actions on an ongoing basis. This background understanding of how actions and practices gives rise to a unique set of predispositions or habitus enables us to rethink the nature of the modern ‘firm’ and its attributes.

A Practice View of Dynamic Capabilities and Firm Competitiveness A firm is usually assumed to be a purposeful organization deliberately set up to mobilize and employ resources to produce products and/or services that are then offered in the market with the explicit aim of making a profit. It is traditional to maintain that firms are organizations, but not all organizations are firms since not all organizations are deliberately profit-making entities. Yet, fundamentally, a firm as an organization is, as we have shown, nothing more than a relatively stabilized pattern of relations and practices created by people coming together because they need to purposively fulfil their own immediate survival needs. A ‘firm’ is fundamentally the result of a ‘firming up’ of ostensibly productive social practices and relationships that are deemed advantageous to all concerned. In this regard, the emergence of firm is no different from that of any Page 5 of 8

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other social phenomena; it arises inadvertently as a consequence of individuals ‘striving to remove inconveniences’ thereby arriving at ‘ends which even their imagination could not anticipate'. By definition, therefore, a firm survives, persists, and prospers because it has cultivated an advantageous set of idiosyncratic predispositions that enable it to flexibly adapt to the complex challenges of an uncertain and ever-changing business environment. This is what makes for its competitive advantage. To understand this better, we need to retrace the current debate surrounding the notion of dynamic capabilities.

Dynamic Capabilities: The Contested View Within the strategic management literature, the question of what constitutes the source of a firm's competitive advantage remains a pressing one. From an RBV perspective, it is internal factors such as a firm's superior assets, resources, and capabilities (Wernerfelt, 1984; Barney, 1991; Peteraf, 1993) that explains why it is able to perform better than its rivals. These assets, resources, and capabilities are presumed to be heterogeneously distributed across competing firms, and this accounts for why they perform differently under similar circumstances. In particular, a superior firm is one possessing unique and idiosyncratic capabilities that are (V)aluable, (R)are, (I)nimitable, and (N)no-substitutable (Barney, 1991: 106–112). Yet, how such capabilities arise and competitive advantage achieved remains unanswered. Teece, Pisano, and Shuen's (1997) attempt over nearly two decades to define and elaborate on what they mean by ‘dynamic capabilities’ as the source of competitive advantage is by no means unproblematic or uncontroversial (Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000; Peteraf, 2013). He and his associates have referred to it as a set of ‘routines’ and have called it a ‘higher-level competency’ (Augier and Teece, 2009) involving activities such as sensing, seizing, and transforming opportunities in the competitive environment (Teece, 2012: 1396). Others like Zahra, Sapienza, and Davidsson (2006: 918) define dynamic capabilities in terms of the ability to ‘reconfigure a firm's resources and routines', while Helfat et al. (2007: 121) point out that it consists of a patterned and practised activity. Barreto (2010: 271) sees it as a firm's unique ‘propensity to sense opportunities and threats (and) to make timely … decisions', while Eisenhardt and Martin (2000: 1106–1107) view it as ‘organizational and strategic routines by which firms achieve new resource configurations'. For Eisenhardt and Martin (2000: 1108), even if dynamic capabilities are idiosyncratic in their detail and path dependent in their emergence, there is nevertheless much commonality across effective firms. As such, they are essentially ‘best practices’ and therefore more substitutable than traditional RBV thinking implies. Within the mainstream strategy literature, therefore, there is a confusing array of terms used to describe dynamic capabilities, including ‘higher-level competency’ (Augier and Teece, 2009: 412); ‘routines’ (Teece, Pisano and Shuen, 1997; Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000; Peteraf, 2013); and ‘best practices’ and ‘simple rules’ (Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000: 1108–1111). They are deemed to reflect, not so much individual skills or expertise, but rather an organization's collective learning (Teece, 2012: 1396) and are often tied to their ‘complex corporate histories’ (Teece, 2012: 1400). Eisenhardt and Martin (2000: 1107) cite ‘product development', ‘knowledge brokering', or ‘patching’ as useful examples of dynamic capabilities, while in a more recent piece, Teece (2012) suggests that it is much closer to ‘entrepreneurial action’ (Teece, 2012) than it is to the knowledge-based terms currently employed. We can therefore see that there is an inevitable straining towards a more adequate way of expressing what dynamic capabilities might be.

Dynamic Capabilities as Habituated Predispositions One way out of this theoretical quagmire is to understand dynamic capabilities, following our ‘practice turn', not so much in terms of specifiable competencies, rules, routines, or best practices, but as an internally cultivated set of predispositions or ‘habitus’ that is associated with an organizational modus operandi. Predispositions are not quite like functional ‘best practices’ or competencies although they may be more akin to soPage 6 of 8

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cial competencies, and modus operandi are not quite ‘routines’ or ‘simple rules’ either. Unlike rules, routines or so-called ‘best practices’ predispositions, as we have argued, are not amenable to deliberate intentional transmission through discourse. Instead, they are tacitly and often unconsciously acquired. They are more a kind of ‘knowledge-by-exemplification’ rather than ‘knowledge-by-representation’ (Chia and Holt, 2008: 480); more a ‘how to’ that a ‘what to do'. An individual is socialized into a way of doing things within a firm that is deemed acceptable by the collective of which he or she forms a part. He or she acquires an organizational habitus – its collective repository of accepted practices, its internalized predisposition towards in situ problem solving, and its ongoing (re)configuring of internal relationships and experiences to maintain organizational coherence – and this is what irretrievably helps form and shape the spontaneous responses that ensue when confronted with environmental challenges. It is these developed tendencies and dispositions that better describe dynamic capabilities. When Augier and Teece (2009) talk about dynamic capabilities such as involving activities such as sensing, seizing, and transforming opportunities, when Zahra, Sapienza, and Davidsson (2006) refers to the ability to ‘reconfigure a firm's resources and routines', when Helfat et al. (2007) point out that it is practised activity, and when Barreto (2010) sees it as a propensity to sense opportunities and threats, they begin approach the sense of what we mean here by habitus. Yet, it is clear that there is not the social-theoretic language of purposiveness, predispositions, and social practices to aid them in their attempt to theorize dynamic capabilities. Understood through practice-based theoretical lenses, however, the predisposition to sense opportunities and to reconfigure routines and resources is more reminiscent of the kind of entrepreneurial verve that Teece (2012) subsequently alludes to when he strains to describe dynamic capabilities as a kind of ‘entrepreneurial action'; one that is, by definition, performed in situ and sponte sua. It is born of a habituated predisposition. But such a predisposition cannot be construed in knowledge-transferrable or competency-based terms, or even in terms of ‘best practices'. Rather, it is about perceptual sensitivity, peripheral awareness, and an imaginative capacity for making seemingly unrelated connections; a capacity to ‘relevate’ (Chia, 2014) whereby the seemingly irrelevant is made relevant through the forging of novel relationships. These are capabilities that can be displayed but that defy easy communication through ordinary academic discourse. They can be exemplified and practised as in an apprenticeship, but they cannot be transmitted through formal rules and/or instruction. Understanding dynamic capabilities as habitus implies that a firm's competitive advantage derives from an underlying modus operandi which predisposes it to respond to external challenges in a unique and idiosyncratic manner that sets it apart from its competitors. In this sense, dynamic capabilities are necessarily ‘path dependent'. Habitus provides the organizational modus operandi for everyday skilled coping actions to be carried out in situ and sponte sua so that desirable outcomes are attained smoothly, expeditiously, and often without much deliberate thought. Yet, habitus is by no means restrictive or mechanistic. Habitus, ‘“like every art of inventing”, is what makes it possible to produce an infinite number of practices that are relatively unpredictable … but (that are) also limited in their diversity’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 55). Habitus serves as an inexhaustible source of improvisation that enables a firm to develop the kind of flexible responsiveness needed for it to cope with unforeseen and constantly changing situations. Habitus helps explain why an organization's success is often deemed to be inimitable and non-substitutable.

References Augier, M. and Teece, D. J. 2009. Dynamic capabilities and the role of managers in business strategy and economic performance. Organization Science 20(2): 410–421. Barnes, B. 2001. Practices as collective action. In T. R. Schatzki, K. Knorr-Cetina, and E. von Savigny (Eds.), The practice turn in contemporary theory (pp. 17–28). London: Routledge. Barney, J. B. 1991. Firm resources and sustained competitive advantage. Journal of Management 17: 99–120. Page 7 of 8

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Barreto, I. 2010. Dynamic capabilities: A review of past research and an agenda for the future. Journal of Management 36(1): 256–280. Bourdieu, P. 1977/2002. Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. 1990. The logic of practice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chia. R. 2014. From relevance to relevate: How university-based business schools can remain seats of ‘higher’ learning and still contribute effectively to business. Journal of Management Development 33(5): 443–455. Chia, R. and Holt, R. 2006. Strategy as practical coping: A Heideggerian perspective. Organization Studies 27(5): 635–655. Chia, R. and Holt, R. 2008. The nature of knowledge in business schools. Academy of Management Learning & Education 7(4): 471–486. Chia, R. and Holt, R. 2009. Strategy without design: The silent efficacy of indirect action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Caudill, W. and Weinstein, H. 1972. Maternal care and infant behavior in Japan and in America. In C. S. Lavatelli and F. Stendler (Eds.), Readings in child behavior and development. New York: Harcourt Press. Dreyfus, H. L. 1999. Being-in-the-world: A commentary on Heidegger's being and time, Division 1. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Dreyfus, H. L. 2001. On the Internet. London and New York: Routledge. Eisenhardt, K. M. and Martin, J. 2000. Dynamic capabilities: what are they? Strategic Management Journal 21(10–11): 1105–1121. Ferguson, A. 1767/1966. An essay on the history of civil society. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ghemawat, P. 1986. Sustainable advantage. Harvard Business Review, -->Sept–Oct: 53–58. Hansen, G. and Wernerfelt, B. 1989. Determinants of firm performance: The relative importance of economic and organizational factors. Strategic Management Journal 10: 399–411. Hayek, F. 1948. Individualism and economic order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Helfat, C. E., Finkelstein, S., Mitchell, W., Peteraf, M., Singh, H., and Winter, S. G. 2007. Dynamic capabilities: Understanding strategic change in organizations. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Ingold, T. 2000. The perception of the environment. London: Routledge. Ingold, T. 2011. Being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge and description. London: Routledge. Lippman, S. A. and Rumelt, R. P. 1982. Uncertain imitability: An analysis of interfirm differences in efficiency under competition. The Bell Journal of Economics 13: 418–438. March, J. G. 1972. Model bias in social action. Review of Educational Research 42(4): 413–429. Nicolini, D. 2011. Practice as the site of knowing: Insights from the field of telemedicine. Organization Science 22(3): 602–620. Peteraf, M. A. 1993. The cornerstones of competitive advantage: A resource-base view. Strategic Management Journal 14(3): 179–191. Peteraf, M. A. 2013. The elephant in the room of dynamic capabilities: Bringing two diverging conversations together. Strategic Management Journal 34: 1389–1410. Porter, M. E. 1980. Competitive strategy: Techniques for analyzing industries and competitors. New York: The Free Press. Rasche, A. and Chia, R. 2009. Researching strategy practices: A genealogical social theory perspective. Organization Studies 30(7): 1–22. Sahlins, M. D. and Service, E. R. 1960/1988. Evolution and culture. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Schatzki, T. R. 2001. Introduction: Practice theory. In T. R. Schatzki, K. Knorr-Cetina and E. von Savigny (Eds.), The practice turn in contemporary theory (pp. 1–14). London: Routledge. Teece, D. J. 2012. Dynamic capabilities: Routines versus entrepreneurial action. Journal of Management Studies 49(8): 1395–1401. Teece, D. J., Pisano, G., and Shuen, A. 1997. Dynamic capabilities and strategic management. Strategic Management Journal 18(7), 509–533. Wernerfelt, B. 1984. A resource based view of the firm. Strategic Management Journal 5: 171–180. Zahra, S. A., Sapienza, H. J., and Davidsson, P. 2006. Entrepreneurship and dynamic capabilities: A review, model and research agenda. Journal of Management Studies 43(4): 917–955. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n37 Page 8 of 8

The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies

The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Process as the Becoming of Temporal Trajectory

Contributors: Tor Hernes Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Process as the Becoming of Temporal Trajectory" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n38 Print pages: 601-606 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Process as the Becoming of Temporal Trajectory Tor Hernes At a meeting of the Royal Society in London in 1919, the empirical confirmation of the validity of Einstein's general theory of relativity was formally declared. Alfred North Whitehead, who was present at the meeting, described it as the formal ending of the Newtonian era: The whole atmosphere of tense interest was exactly that of a Greek drama: we were the chorus commenting on the decree of destiny as disclosed in the development of a supreme incident. There was a dramatic quality in the very staging: the traditional ceremonial, and in the background the picture of Newton to remind us that the greatest of scientific generalisations was now, after more than two centuries, to receive its first modification. Time and space were no longer to be seen as separate entities. On the contrary, they would be seen as forming part of a continuum in the description of movement and evolution. In the Newtonian framework, an event would be located by four coordinates: three spatial and one temporal. For example, an object could located along the spatial axes x, y, and z, and t, the point in time of the location. Movement would be described as the movement from x1, y1, and z1 at t1 to x2, y2, and z2 at t2. In such a framework, time is seen as linear and external to the movement of the object, and hence every movement could be plotted on a flat plane. Einstein's work had shown that as speed approached the speed of light, time was no longer a constant, but dependent on speed. In other words, movement would depart from a linear progression and in a sense double up on itself, and the planes would no longer be flat, but curvilinear, as time can no longer be assumed to be linear, but changes with speed. From a linear conception of time and space, we then move towards a contingent conception, where each point is an event with its own locally defined coordinates. In existing organization studies as well as in the social sciences, the conception of events still seems to be subject to a linear, Newtonian logic, without the possibility of working with its own locally defined coordinates. Instead of being seen as forces of process, they tend to be seen as mere happenings along a timeline that stretches from the past to the future. In this conception, events are seen as making up the form of the progression over time; however, they are not seen as forming that progression. Put otherwise, they are neatly organized into a grander pattern, but they are not seen as actively making up that very pattern. Such an understanding of organization and time is not just widespread; it is dominant in organization studies. Curiously, although theoretical physicists could declare the Newtonian worldview a thing of the past in 1919, social science scholars have found it more difficult to incorporate more bold conceptions of time in their work. As of today, there does not seem to be a concerted effort in organization studies to attempt a departure from the Newtonian view and develop novel sets of understanding of time, other than pointing out the limitations imposed by a Newtonian view of time (e.g., Wiebe et al., 2012). In 1919, philosophers adhering to a process view of things did not need to be convinced that individual events should be seen as unique and not ordered as linear succession, what the pragmatist William James (1890: 607) denounced as what he called a serial ‘string of beads’ conception of time. In his magnum opus Being and Time, Heidegger (1927) describes Dasein as constituted by time and he used the term ‘thrownness’ to underline that his notion of time is ontological; time belongs to the world, and Dasein finds itself as already being in the world. Bergson made important contributions to the understanding of memory, movement, and time, explaining conscious versus pure experience of time. In drawing this distinction, Bergson was able to explain the influence of the mind on the nature of time. Working from time as the passing of nature, Whitehead considered the connecting of events as constituting actors; as their becoming. An atom, for example, to Whitehead, may be seen as the becoming of an event in time. Where Whitehead departed from other process philosophers in his conception of time was particularly in insisting on time being in nature and not a construction of the mind. To Whitehead, time and space arise from events. Objects are in events or make ingressions into events, and they become features of events. Still, it is the ‘eventness’ of objects that makes for our sensation of time. Hence, if we go with Whitehead, an event is not ordered in time. On the contrary, the event Page 2 of 6

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is the ordering of time. Importantly, a temporal view sees the events that people are part of as connecting, rather than the people connecting. People are in events, but they are not constitutive of those events. There is nothing really mystical about shifting agency from people to events, no more so than, for example, Luhmann's (1995) theory of social systems, in which he treats communicative events, or bits of communication, as his unit of analysis. In his framework, people exist, but as environment to the communicative system. In organization studies, this has been pursued, for example, by Hendry and Seidl (2003), who, on the basis of Luhmann's autopoietic theory, employ the notion of episodes to understand how the bracketing off of formal and informal social encounters enables their temporal structuring, as well as how the episode connects in time to the broader discursive structure of the organization. The notion of agency is of primary importance, particularly as a process view invites us to see organizations as streams (Cohen et al., 1972), flux (Nayak and Chia, 2011; Weick et al., 2005), movement (Chia, 1999), or flow (Hernes, 2014a; b) that precede actors and not vice versa. If actors, including organizations, emerge from streams and not vice versa, which is a key tenet of process thinking, it is hard to see how they can also be invested with agency, as it does not make much sense to invest someone with agency and at the same time assume that that someone emerges from the process, albeit as a provisional outcome. Still, a process view invites us to look for forces in ongoing flows. Process presumes creative energy rather than interacting masses (Helin et al., 2014). Energy does not generate without tangible actors, but is not synonymous with those actors. Events, although they may have people in them, are not reducible to those people. For example, a management meeting may result in a decision to call another meeting. The decision is a product of a collective effort, but is not reducible to the individual efforts in the meeting. The idea is that there is more to the event than what goes on in the event (Fogh Kirkeby, 2013). What is important to retain is that events connect; moreover, in this view, it is not entities that connect, but events, which nevertheless include entities and their acts. Entities, such as human beings, may be part of events, and the becoming of events is due to their work at those events. Still, the connecting takes place between events. Herein lies a contentious issue for many organizational scholars, who are trained to see actors, such as people, doing the connecting and becoming connected.

Becoming in the Flow of Time Let me for a short while leave the notion of events aside while reflecting on the idea of becoming, which is commonly used to distinguish process views from entity-based views. Chia (1999), for example, contrasts what he calls a ‘becoming realism’ with a ‘being realism'. Evidently, applying the word ‘becoming’ sensitizes the reader to the eternal state of being in the making, of not being arrested, of potentially leading to something else, just like the ‘bulbs’ and ‘tubers’ of the rhizome being able to take its growth in a new direction (Chia, 1999). ‘Becoming’ sensitizes us to what Weick (1995) and Feldman (2000) call organizations as ongoing accomplishments, which suggests how organizations, even in their seemingly stabilized state, are subject to continuous work. The question that needs answering is, what is ongoing accomplishment directed towards? We know that organizations are never accomplished in any final state, but that does not mean that the work involved in the ongoing accomplishment is without direction. It may never achieve its goals, but that does not mean that it is direction-less. Therefore, the question needs to be answered is, what does the idea of accomplishment entail if it is not the accomplishment of an entity or a stable state? Deeper reflection on a definition of the nature of becoming demands that we look beyond the becoming–being distinction, because the distinction comes in the way of thinking being into becoming. Hartshorne (1998), for example, states that it is a misconception to draw the distinction as if there is only either becoming or being. He suggests that a process view is about thinking being in becoming. The question still remains, however, as to the nature of this ‘being in becoming'. It should not be seen as an entity in space or time, subject to what Whitehead (1929) called ‘simple location'. A simple location logic would mean that we superpose becoming onto being, while still keeping the two notions separate. We would then arrest an entity in time and space Page 3 of 6

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while allowing it to change, which would be a contradiction. Anyway, the notion of change does not work well with process thinking. If anything, change is the antithesis to becoming. Entities, according to Whitehead, cannot change; they can only become. However, thinking cannot proceed without some form of object, although it cannot be a tangible object. A thing cannot be the object of becoming, as that would defy the very basis of process thinking. The object of thinking of organization as becoming, I suggest, is the temporal trajectory of the organization, which actors are constantly involved in reconstructing. A temporal trajectory is a pattern, or patterning, of events that stretches back into time and extends into the future. A temporal trajectory requires work, which consists of articulation performed at various moments and in various places. The work of becoming is the work of performing the temporal conditioning of that very same work. In this way, the organization ‘is’ its becoming in time, not as an entity, but as a trajectory that never really starts or ends. For example, following the death of Steve Jobs in October 2011, Apple continued to grow and in May 2013 was more affluent, dominant, and profitable than ever before. Still, even though indicators seemed overwhelmingly positive, analysis spoke of a crisis, since the Apple share value had dropped from almost USD 700 to USD 400 per share. Part of the answer lies in seeing the company as becoming as opposed to being. Analysts asked, what is happening to Steve Jobs’ famously ritualistic ‘one more thing’ at the end of his appearance at Apple's public product launch meetings? In a temporal sense, every time he used this phrase he evoked multiple occasions in the past that heralded a novel future to come, while at the same time heralding the potential new future at that ‘present present'. When analysts spoke of a possible crisis two years after his death, their worry was that the current situation was not a reflection of a past in which Apple would lead by regularly redefining the reality to come. Every time Steve Jobs spoke at those occasions, he took part in constituting Apple's trajectory of becoming in time. Events, such as those mentioned here, are not to be seen as representative of a trajectory, but as performing the trajectory. Every event takes active part in performing the temporal trajectory, by defining the present events in the context of its predecessors and antecedent events. At the same time, it becomes that particular event through the enactment of other events (Hernes, 2014a). Past events are not historical remains, but they form active parts of possible trajectories back in time. They form part of selected trajectories from lived experience that are constructed and reconstructed as new challenges and opportunities present themselves. And because events to come are possibilities rather than lived facts, the temporal work performed will always be anticipatory; thus, the temporal trajectory is a possibility extending into past and future. Maybe for this reason, every act of organizing is an act of creative energy, and why every act of ordering is inherently creative (Whitehead, 1929). Chia's (1999: 224) suggestion is fitting here, which goes as follows, ‘Acts of organizing, much like the ceaseless building of sand-dykes to keep the sea at bay, reflect the on-going struggle to tame the intrinsically nomadic forces of reality'. The ‘nomadic forces of reality', I would argue, are played out as possibilities in time, passing via the present into the past and the future. The nomadic forces of reality are the forces of time.

The Becoming of Temporal Trajectory If becoming does not refer to the becoming of a thing, the present discussion opens the way for the becoming of a trajectory; of a movement in time. The becoming of movement solves the problem of thinking becoming in terms of a becoming thing. Instead, it is the trajectory of the thing that becomes and not the thing in itself. Chia (1999) laments that we are not good at thinking movement. Thinking movement, however, seems somewhat paradoxical, because movement is arguably intuited rather than thought. Although intuition is important at the level of the individual, organizing and organizations rely on thinking, driven by purposely and socially generated signs, articulation, and discourse. Time can be intuited, but temporal trajectories can be thought (at least in part), because they consist of connected events whose linkages and architecture can be articulated. Page 4 of 6

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The elements of a temporal trajectory are events. Events are not to be thought of as decisive events or marker events, but as basic building blocks of organizational life. Again, this marks a departure from the idea that people are the forces of organization. As mentioned above, although events are constituted by people and their individual acts, they are not reducible to them. The power of an event, rather than being reliant on who were present, lies in its power to connect to other events, as it is the connecting power between events in time that provides organizations with their temporal existence. Moreover, it is the power of the event to connect to other events while creating itself that confers agency upon an event. As events connect to other events and consequently create themselves in their connecting process, they begin to form their mutual relations, and hence structures (Whitehead 1920) or formations of events (Hernes, 2014a), which may usefully be seen as temporal trajectories. Whereas in traditional organization theory events are seen as mere happenings along a timeline, the becoming of temporal trajectory implies that every event takes part in making or unmaking that trajectory. In most cases, events contribute to a continuation of the trajectory by reproducing the preceding pattern of events. A budget decision that more or less reproduces the budgets from previous years is likely to extend the current trajectory. At certain times, however, the trajectory may be altered, or rather the process of altering the trajectory begins to take hold. This may happen as a result of reconstructing the meaning of past as well as future events. At certain times, actors may instigate inquiry (Dewey, 1998) involving a revision of the meaning of past events, or they may choose to focus on events that have taken place but which have not previously been the object of attention. Inquiry may result in a change of the trajectory, or it may result in holding on to the current trajectory. In either case, becoming applies to the trajectory. At the same time, the outcome of the very process of inquiry may lead to unforeseen change, as the inquiry itself becomes an event or series of events that enter the trajectory and take part in its becoming. Still, an event that contributes to setting a powerful agenda for what is to come, and for what has been, can only gradually modify the trajectory. A temporal trajectory represents not only actuality, but also potentiality. As actuality, it signifies the trajectory as a temporary representation of becoming. In Schultz and Hernes (2013), for example, early events in the history of LEGO were connected to events in the present to explain the state of the company. The trajectory was depicted as one showing how the company had ‘lost its way’ from having been a craft-based company to engaging in brand extension, meaning that they had engaged in a number of business areas that were not related to their initial craft-based philosophy. The potentiality of the trajectory, on the other hand, was manifest in the possibilities for change that it embodied. As potentiality, it revealed itself as an opportunity for change. In a way, it became a resource for the process of its own change, as people at LEGO set out to project a different future back onto their past. Whitehead clearly recognised the importance of becoming and events in his writings. Because he was rooted in metaphysics, his notion of events was broad. In organization studies, we may work from a narrower and more clearly defined notion of events and show how their trajectories may represent a sense of organizational becoming in time. While various notions of time, ranging from chronos to kairos and from social to individual, are important, an event-based scheme of analysis would assume events as time. Rather than seeing events residing in time, time would be seen as residing in events (Hernes, 2014a). That would locate each organizational arrangement in the organization's own time.

References Chia, R. (1999) A ‘Rhizomic’ model of organizational change and transformation: Perspective from a metaphysics of change. British Journal of Management 10: 209–227. Cohen, M. D., March, J. G., and Olsen, J. P. (1972) A garbage can model of organizational choice. Administrative Science Quarterly 17(1): 1–25. Dewey, J. (1998) L. A. Hickman and T. M. Alexander (Eds.), The Essential Dewey Vol. 1: Pragmatism, education, democracy. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Feldman, M. S. (2000) Organizational routines as a source of continuous change. Organization Science 11: Page 5 of 6

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611–629. Fogh Kirkeby, O. (2013) Eventologien. Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur. James, W. (1890) The principles of psychology. London: MacMillan Hartshorne, C. (1998) The development of process philosophy. In D. Browning and W. T. Myers (Eds.), Philosophers of process. (pp. 391–407) New York: Fordham University Press. Helin, J., Hernes, T., Hjorth, D., and Holt, R. (2014) Process is what process does. In J. Helin, T. Hendry, J. and Seidl, D. (2003) The structure and significance of strategic episodes: Social systems theory and the routine practices of strategic change. Journal of Management Studies 40(1): 175–196. Heidegger, M. (1927) Being and time. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Hernes, T. (2014a) A process theory of organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hernes, T. (2014b) Alfred North Whitehead. In J. Helin, T. Hernes, D. Hjorth, and R. Holt (Eds.), Oxford handbook of process philosophy and organization studies (pp. 255–271). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hernes, D. Hjorth, and R. Holt (Eds.), (2014) Oxford handbook of process philosophy and organization studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Luhmann, N. (1995) Social systems. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nayak, A. and Chia, R. (2011) Thinking becoming and emergence: Process philosophy and organization studies. Research in the Sociology of Organizations 32: 281–309. Schultz, M. and Hernes, T. (2013) A temporal perspective on organizational identity. Organization Science 24(1): 1–21. Weick, K. E. (1995) Sensemaking in organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Ltd. Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K. M., and Obstfeld, D. (2005) Organizing and the process of sensemaking. Organization Science 16(4): 409–421. Whitehead, A. N. (1920) The concept of nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Page numbers refer to 2004 version published by Prometheus Books.) Whitehead, A. N. (1929) Process and reality. New York: The Free Press. Wiebe, E., Suddaby, R., and Foster, W. M. (2012) The momentum of organizational change. In S. Maguire and M. Schultz (Eds.), Constructing identity in and around organizations (pp. 235–260). Series: Perspectives in Process Organization Studies. Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n38

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Deconstructing the Theoretical Language of Process Research: Metaphor and Metonymy in Interaction1

Contributors: Joep Cornelissen, Dennis Schoeneborn & Consuelo Vsquez Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Deconstructing the Theoretical Language of Process Research: Metaphor and Metonymy in Interaction1" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n39 Print pages: 607-615 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Deconstructing the Theoretical Language of Process Research: Metaphor and Metonymy in Interaction1 Joep CornelissenDennis SchoenebornConsuelo Vsquez In this chapter, we reflect on process perspectives on organizations from a meta-theoretical viewpoint and discuss the language that researchers use to conceptualize organizations as process. Our considerations are based on two main premises: First, in general, we believe language to be performative in the sense that it constitutes reality (cf. Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969); second, and more directly related to the focus of our inquiry, the ways researchers conceptually reason in terms of implicit assumptions is fundamentally shaped by the language they use (Cornelissen, 2005). More specifically, and in line with studies of science in action (e.g., Nersessian, 2008), we argue that the modes of theorizing we use as organizational scholars tend to be primarily driven by analogical or metaphorical forms of reasoning. Researchers, in fact, often tend not to directly reason through formal logic (e.g., deduction, abduction, or induction) within specific contexts of research, but typically work from analog representations, which they cognitively construct, manipulate, adapt, and evaluate through the use of natural language (e.g., Cornelissen and Durand, 2014; Nersessian, 2008). The focus of our contribution is thus to explore how through specific forms of language use, particularly metaphor and metonymy, researchers approach the task of theorizing about organizational phenomena from a process perspective, and how they may do this differently as well as more reflectively. This very focus on metaphor and metonymy is, we believe, useful, as it ‘naturally’ foregrounds the analog nature of our theoretical frameworks, or models, and the processes of imagination through which we develop a framework for modeling and understanding organizational phenomena (Cornelissen, 2005; Cornelissen and Durand, 2014). Metaphors and metonymies are, in fact, economical ways of reasoning and thinking about an abstract and complex subject such as organizations (Cornelissen, 2005; Morgan, 1986), with a concrete and more familiar language being used to either stand in for the larger subject or as a prime or proxy to foster our thinking in a particular direction. In other words, these forms of language use can serve as a way of seeing relationships between sets of ideas and of conceptualizing and understanding a particular subject in terms traditionally associated with another subject or domain of knowledge (Gentner et al., 2001; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, 1999). The difference between metaphors and metonymies depends on the kind of analogical reasoning it involves. Metaphors draw analogies across familiar registers of language use and categories of knowledge, while metonymies establish analogies between parts within the same domain of language use and knowledge – a part–whole substitution (see Manning, 1979). Together, metaphor and metonymy provide the ‘bipolar structure’ of language (Jakobson, 1956/1990; see also Eco, 1979; Lodge, 1977) by developing meaning through statements of similarity (metaphor) and contiguity (metonymy). Focusing on metaphors and metonymies in process-theoretical frameworks in particular provides us with a specific methodology to deconstruct and understand ways in which processes are theorized, and to foster ways in which such theorizing can be strengthened and enhanced (see also Schoeneborn et al., 2016). As we will discuss later on in this commentary, process research in organization studies is based on a whole range of metaphors and metonymies. Depending on the actual mechanics of the analogical reasoning – that is, whether it is primarily metaphorical or metonymical, or both – these images may, however, create rather different views of organizations. On the basis of an analytical model that we have developed elsewhere for this purpose (Schoeneborn et al., 2016), we will discuss the implications of such processes of imagination in terms of the value that they have for thinking and theorizing about organization from a processual point of view.

Metaphor and Other Tropes in Our Theoretical Language The groundbreaking work of Gareth Morgan (1980, 1983, 1986) on metaphorical images of organizations is well known in our field. His work has led to rich and ongoing streams of research on organizational metaphors Page 2 of 9

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(Cornelissen et al., 2008). Much of this research has in particular focused on mapping the ‘root’ metaphors, as theoretical images, that are used across various domains of organizational scholarship, from communication (Putnam and Boys, 2006) to leadership (Alvesson and Spicer, 2010). While ongoing research in this vein has been fruitful to depict the primary metaphors that shape organization studies and organizational practice, we want to suggest here that there is value in moving beyond a strict metaphorical analysis towards linking metaphors more closely to metonymies. This shift was already highlighted by Morgan (1996) himself in one of his later writings on the topic where he acknowledged a strong interdependence between the metaphorical and the metonymical: ‘Metaphor and metonymy are always interconnected. You cannot have one without the other’ (Morgan, 1996: 231). While Morgan argued that ‘a metaphorical image relies on some kind of metonymical reduction, otherwise it remains thin air’ (1996: 231), he equally suggested that ‘metonymy is entirely dependent on metaphor, for without a prefiguring image we have nothing to see’ (1996: 231). In this chapter, we base our argumentation on an analytical model (see Figure 39.1) that is premised on the idea of close connections between metaphor and metonymy (see also Schoeneborn et al., 2016). Understanding and working with these connections enables, we argue, to better grasp and explain images of organizations where organizations, as larger metaphorical images, are figuratively invoked through metonymic statements around specific parts, causes, or relationships.

Figure 39.1Types of metaphor–metonymy dynamics (Schoeneborn et al., 2016)

The actual relationship between metaphor and metonymy can take different forms (see Figure 39.1; Schoeneborn et al., 2016). A first possible relationship between the two is one in which metonymies rely Page 3 of 9

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upon metaphors and are therefore seen as a subclass of metaphor (e.g., Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Searle, 1979). This understanding comes close to Morgan's (1996) initial ideas about metonymy being part of a larger metaphor and supplying the broader metaphorical image with specific details or parts. The linguist Goossens (1990, 1995a, 1995b) labeled this connection as ‘metonymy within metaphor', which occurs when ‘a metonymically used entity is embedded within a (complex) metaphorical expression’ (Goossens, 1995a: 172). The best example of this kind of connection is the images provided in Morgan's Images of Organization (Morgan, 1986). Metaphors such as ‘organization as machine', ‘organization as organism', or ‘organization as brain’ first involve the projection or imposition of a broader image, as the primary way of seeing and knowing and as the focal heuristic for thinking about organizations. In turn, each of these images is then developed in terms of particular lines of reasoning, ideas, or implications – i.e., in terms of the specific metonymic parts that provide the necessary detail and, in a sense, also hold the broader image together. Another relation between metaphor and metonymy involves a ‘metaphor from metonymy’ (Deignan, 2005; Deignan and Potter, 2004; Goossens, 1990, 1995a, 1995b). In this relation, an expression or thought initially develops a meaning vertically through metonymy. This meaning is then mapped metaphorically onto another domain or cues a further metaphorical interpretation. An example of this relation is the idea of an organization as an institutional actor (King et al., 2010), which presupposes a metonymy wherein separate actions, materials, and actors are compressed into one entity, which are then in turn metaphorically understood as those of a single acting agent. In this case, because of the metonymy, we come to experience the parts and the whole as compressed into one, which also naturalizes the metonymy and leads us to see the whole (the organization) as directly implied in any specific activities or parts (e.g., a corporate advert or an executive decision) as ‘identity referents’ (Whetten, 2006). The main difference between the two kinds of connections is that in ‘metonymy within metaphor', the processing and understanding of an expression or idea starts with a metaphor, which in turn highlights metonymic details as entailments or implications associated with the metaphor. In ‘metaphor from metonymy', the whole expression or idea is initially a metonymy, but then it gives rise to a further metaphorical interpretation to complete the interpretation. As we can see in Figure 39.1, the heuristics we use to study and understand organizations differ fundamentally, depending on whether we follow a ‘metonymy-within-metaphor’ or a ‘metaphorfrom-metonymy’ mode of thinking. As we will discuss next, we believe that the potential for process theorizing lies primarily in the ‘metaphor-from-metonymy’ route. The advantage of the ‘metaphor-from-metonymy’ mode of thinking is that it enables an analysis of the changing and unfolding process of organization (or organizing) by focusing, above all, on how parts and the whole interrelate – and thus on how organization (as an abstract concept) is at the same time present, or implicated, in specific actions, communications, resources, or any other particular set of details on the ground (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002). This recursive way of thinking of how the entity and process of organization are implicated in one another is a heuristic that we think offers the most fruitful avenue for theorizing about processes in organization studies.

Imagining Organization as Process Generally speaking, within process organization studies, scholars tend to distinguish between two major streams of research that fundamentally differ in their assumptions regarding the organization–process relation (see Hernes and Weik, 2007; Langley et al., 2013). Exogenous (sometimes also referred to as ‘weak') process views are united by the assumption that ‘processes themselves reflect movement within the boundaries of the organization. From this perspective, the organization represents the context within which the movement occurs’ (Hernes and Weik, 2007: 254). In other words, exogenous process views are based on an ‘entitative’ understanding of organization, that is, by assuming that the organization as a social entity exists separately from the processes that occur within its boundaries. In contrast, endogenous (or ‘strong') process views propose that organizations essentially consist of processes in a self-reproducing way. From this viewpoint, the process ‘interacts with itself, with its own past, carried forward as a basis for further processes', thus forming an organization in time (Hernes and Weik, 2007: 258). Page 4 of 9

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On the basis of our analytical model (see Figure 39.1 above), we can analyze these two distinct ways of imagining organizations based on the interrelations between metaphor and metonymy that they presuppose. Existing works within ‘organization as process’ in both variants, exogenous and endogenous alike, tend to follow a ‘metonymy-within-metaphor’ logic of imagination (cf. Goossens, 1995a). There are, however, stark differences between these traditions. Researchers following an endogenous process view (e.g., Tsoukas and Chia, 2002) seemingly start with a metaphorical analogy between two domains in inviting us to rethink organization not as a (rather stable and fixed) social entity but rather as a precarious and fluid non-entity that is in a continuous process of becoming (e.g., the metaphorical analogy of a river; see also Morgan, 1986). Furthermore, an endogenous understanding of the process–organization relation implies a metonymic logic, as well, even though it may follow after and is secondary to the metaphorical analogy. This metonymic logic comes into play by imagining organization as part–whole relations between processes (the parts) and the organization (the whole). For instance, Chia (1995) suggests that an organization is ultimately an ‘aggregation’ or ‘assemblage’ of the very processes that constitute its existence (p. 597). Similarly, research following an exogenous process view tends to depart from a metaphorical analogy when imagining organizations. However, in this case, the (implicit) understanding of organization follows an already given ‘container’ metaphor of organization (e.g., Van de Ven and Poole, 1995). In other words, in this view, organizations predate and exist largely independently from the processes that occur within their boundaries. Accordingly, the metonymic dimension of this variant of the ‘organization as process’ image is less pronounced, given that exogenous views do not necessarily imply that processes are the very parts that constitute the organization as a whole. In contrast to existing works from both variants, we argue that the ‘metaphor from metonymy’ route of imagining organizations offers a particularly fruitful heuristic and has great analytical potential but has to date only been used to a limited extent within process organization scholarship. More specifically, when theorizing organization as process, starting with metonymic reasoning invites us to direct the focus of imagination to the relation between organization (as a whole) and processes (as its parts) – and especially to the question of how the parts and the whole are interrelated and may take on a variable form in time. In turn, following the ‘metaphor from metonymy’ logic, the metonymic focus on parts–whole relations can then serve as a springboard for mobilizing further metaphors and for opening up new ways of seeing and understanding organization as process. Importantly, however, such metaphors would not provide yet another analogy of what an organization is but instead would need to be based on metaphors of a different kind (i.e., those metaphors that are intimately and contiguously linked to metonymies), by helping us to understand the organization–process relation itself. A few examples may help put our considerations in perspective: for example, one can think of the (metonymical) organization–process relation in different metaphorical terms such as (1) production, (2) perturbation, (3) constitution, or (4) camouflage. Each of these metaphors, in turn, yields different implications for imagining, and reasoning about, organization as process: 1. The metaphor of production implies that the organization is the originator and producer of its (business) processes. It follows that organizations are in control of such processes to a considerable degree; for instance, by further optimizing those processes on a continuous basis or by learning from errors. This metaphorical understanding of the organization–process relation is the underlying assumption, for instance, in the literature on organizational development and strategic change (e.g., Dunphy and Stace, 1988) or large parts of the organizational learning literature (Easterby-Smith et al., 2000). 2. The metaphor of perturbation implies that processual dynamics occur within the confined space of an organization. Such dynamics, however, are themselves able to irritate, shape, and transform the organization as a social entity and partly in unexpected ways. This Page 5 of 9

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metaphorical understanding of the organization–process relation seems to be the underlying assumption, for instance, in that part of the organizational change literature that acknowledges the complexities and emergence of change (e.g., Van de Ven and Poole, 1995), in research on organizational routines (at least in those variants drawing on the work of Feldman and Pentland, 2003), in theories of path dependence (e.g., Sydow et al., 2009), and in large parts of process organization scholarship situated in the ‘exogenous’ camp (e.g., Langley et al., 2013). 3. The metaphor of constitution implies that organizations do not predate the very processes they consist of. In turn, processes are the constitutive element through which organizations come into existence and perpetuate themselves from the one moment to the next. This metaphorical understanding of the organization–process relation underlies a diverse set of literature in management and organization studies that shifts the focus to processes at a fundamental ontological level. This includes works drawing on Luhmann's theory of systems and the idea of the autopoiesis (i.e. self-reproduction) of organizations (e.g., Hernes and Bakken, 2003), research focusing on the communicative constitution of organizational phenomena (e.g., Nicotera, 2013), practice-based ontologies of organization (e.g., Schatzki, 2006), and large parts of the ‘endogenous’ camp of process organizational scholarship (e.g., Hernes, 2014). 4. The metaphor of camouflage, finally, implies that entitative conceptions of organizations are a mere illusion and that they represent a too reified understanding of organization. Instead, these works suggest that organizations are only temporary occurrences of order out of a continuous state of flux or becoming. This metaphorical understanding of the organization–process relation is visible in radical variants of endogenous process organization scholarship (e.g., Tsoukas and Chia, 2002), in fundamental reconsiderations on the role of time in the formation of organizations (e.g., the quantum theory of organizational change by Lord et al., 2015), or works that study the organizational character of loose and fluid social collectives (e.g., Dobusch and Schoeneborn, 2015; Wilhoit and Kisselburgh, 2015). As a set, these metaphors not only highlight the stark differences between entity and process images of organizations, but within the latter category they also demonstrate the significant variety that exists in process organizational scholarship. We obviously do not have the space here to elaborate on each of these images and their specific implications for process organization scholarship. Instead, our aim for this commentary is a more modest and practical one; namely, to simply suggest that different forms of reasoning and imagination – specifically, by employing different combinations of metaphors and metonymies – will produce different process images. While this suggestion in itself may not be that surprising, it offers nonetheless a specific way of becoming more reflective of the theoretical language that we use to imagine organizations from a process perspective. At the same time, our considerations can be seen as an invitation for process scholars to mobilize and discuss further metaphorical imaginations of the organization–process relation, thus advancing process organization scholarship by drawing on a ‘metaphor-from-metonymy’ logic.

Implications for Process Researchers The implications that we see for process researchers directly follow from the analytical model (see Figure 39.1) and what it suggests when it is applied to the analysis of processual images of organization. The first implication is that the model allows researchers to position different images regarding different processes of imagination (i.e., either ‘metonymy within metaphor’ or ‘metaphor from metonymy'). It also may help them understand the different emphases of images, such as differences between a primary focus on parts or on how the parts and whole (organization) interrelate. Such understanding, in turn, can be useful for researchers to reflect on, and evaluate, the grounds upon which their images are constructed, and be in turn more evaluative in their approach. Specifically, it forces researchers to work with and evaluate the details and mechanics of Page 6 of 9

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a particular image – its heuristic architecture so to speak – and what this offers, rather than simply inventing new metaphors or introducing new source images from the humanities or social sciences (which we often do as organizational researchers) in a quest to make novel contributions (Boxenbaum and Rouleau, 2011; Cornelissen and Durand, 2014). This reflectivity, we believe, is also an important basis for being truly generative in our theorizing by shifting grounds, or by inverting the logic of an image into a counterfactual image (Cornelissen and Durand, 2014; Putnam, 2013; Putnam and Boys, 2006; Schoeneborn et al., 2013). Unfortunately, three decades since Morgan's pioneering work, we still do not reap the benefits of a truly reflective approach to our metaphors within organization studies, applying our metaphors instead in a largely habitual and rote manner (Morgan, 1997). The second implication is an even more concrete suggestion. We have made the point that the ‘metaphorfrom-metonymy’ heuristic is a particularly valuable one for process research. This heuristic, as a mode of thinking, has great potential for organization studies in general and process research in particular, as it requires researchers to think of organizations and their parts as manifestations in contiguous and unitary terms – as something of a particular kind – before we make any metaphorical leaps in our thinking. A good example is Morgan's own discussion of organization as ‘flux and transformation’ (Morgan, 1986). Following our model (see Figure 39.1), we might say that in this discussion Morgan first operates metonymically by highlighting the importance of focusing on detailed interactions and changing patterns of organizational behaviour on the ground, interactions and patterns that implicate larger macrostructures and concepts such as ‘organization', ‘environment', and ‘society'. He then refers to a wide range of writings, from complexity science and self-organizing systems to ecology, which as metaphorical ways of thinking, present possible connections to work out patterns of causality and emergent effects. Importantly, these ways of thinking only follow from the initial metonymic focus on specific ‘patterns’ of action and interaction (Morgan, 1986). We believe that, similarly, process researchers can benefit from directing their focus in the first instance to metonymic parts and manifestations, and their changeable yet contiguous form, before making any broader leaps to metaphorical realms of understanding. This ensures that the images that result are not only able to make images tangible from a process perspective but also account for how changing, yet similar, parts interrelate with a larger picture or image that we understand as an organization.

Note1Some of the theoretical considerations in this chapter are further elaborated on in an article by the same authors published in Human Relations [see full reference: Schoeneborn, D., Vásquez, C., & Cornelissen, J. (2016). Imagining organization through metaphor and metonymy: Unpacking the process-entity paradox. Human Relations, 69(4), 915–944.]

References Alvesson, M., and Spicer, A. (Eds.). (2010). Metaphors we lead by: Understanding leadership in the real world. New York: Routledge. Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Boxenbaum, E., and Rouleau, L. (2011). New knowledge products as bricolage: Metaphors and scripts in organizational theory. Academy of Management Review, 36(2): 272–296. Chia, R. (1995). From modern to postmodern organizational analysis. Organization Studies, 16(4): 579–604. Cornelissen, J. P. (2005). Beyond compare: Metaphor in organization theory. Academy of Management Review, 30(4): 751–764. Cornelissen, J. P. and Durand, R. (2014). Moving forward: Developing theoretical contributions in management studies. Journal of Management Studies, 51(6), 995–1022. Cornelissen, J. P., Oswick, C., Christensen, L. T., and Phillips, N. (2008). Metaphor in organizational research: Context, modalities and implications for research. Organization Studies, 29(1): 7–22. Deignan, A. (2005). Metaphor and corpus linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Deignan, A., and Potter, L. (2004). A corpus study of metaphors and metonyms in English and Italian. Journal Page 7 of 9

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of Pragmatics, 36: 1231–1252. Dobusch, L. and Schoeneborn, D. (2015). Fluidity, identity, and organizationality: The communicative constitution of anonymous. Journal of Management Studies, 52(8): 1005–1035. Dunphy, D. C., and Stace, D. A. (1988). Transformational and coercive strategies for planned organizational change: Beyond the OD model. Organization Studies, 9(3): 317–334. Easterby-Smith, M., Crossan, M., and Nicolini, D. (2000). Organizational learning: Debates past, present and future. Journal of Management Studies, 37(6): 783–796. Eco, U. (1979). The role of the reader. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Feldman, M. S. and Pentland, B. T. (2003). Reconceptualizing organizational routines as a source of flexibility and change. Administrative Science Quarterly, 48(1): 94–118. Gentner, D., Bowdle, B., Wolff, P., and Boronat, C. (2001). Metaphor is like analogy. In D. Gentner, K. J. Holyoak, and B. N. Kokinov (Eds.), The analogical mind: Perspectives from cognitive science (pp. 199–233). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Goossens, L. (1990). Metaphtonomy: The interaction of metaphor and metonymy in expressions for linguistic action. Cognitive Linguistics, 1: 323–340. Goossens, L. (1995a). Metaphtonomy: The interaction of metaphor and metonymy in expressions for linguistic action. In L. Goossens et al. (Eds.), By word of mouth: Metaphor, metonymy and linguistic action in a cognitive perspective (pp. 159–174). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Goossens, L. (1995b). From three respectable horses’ mouths: Metonymy and conventionalization in a diachronically differentiated database. In L. Goossens et al. (Eds.), By word of mouth: Metaphor, metonymy and linguistic action in a cognitive perspective (pp. 175–204). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hernes, T. (2014). A process theory of organization. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Hernes, T. and Bakken, T. (2003). Implications of self-reference: Niklas Luhmann's autopoiesis and organization theory. Organization Studies, 24(9), 1511–1535. Hernes, T., and Weik, E. (2007). Organization as process: Drawing a line between endogenous and exogenous views. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 23(3): 251–264. Jakobson, R. (1956/1990). Two aspects of language and two types of aphasic disturbances. In L. R. Waugh and M. Monville-Burston (Eds.), On language/Roman Jakobson (pp. 115–133). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. King, B. G., Felin, T., and Whetten, D. A. (2010). Finding the organization in organizational theory: A metatheory of the organization as a social actor. Organization Science, 21(1): 290–305. Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. New York: Basic Books. Langley, A., Smallman, C., Tsoukas, H., and Van de Ven, A. H. (2013). Process studies of change in organization and management: Unveiling temporality, activity, and flow. Academy of Management Journal, 56(1): 1–13. Lodge, D. (1977). The modes of modern writing: Metaphor, metonymy, and the typology of modern literature. Ithaca; NY: Cornell University Press. Lord, R. G., Dinh, J. E., and Hoffman, E. L. (2015). A quantum approach to time and organizational change. Academy of Management Review, 40(2): 263–290. Manning, P. K. (1979). Metaphors of the field: Varieties of organizational discourse. Administrative Science Quarterly, 24: 660–671. Morgan, G. (1980). Paradigms, metaphors and puzzle solving in organizational theory. Administrative Science Quarterly, 25: 605–622. Morgan, G. (1983). More on metaphor: Why we cannot control tropes in administrative science. Administrative Science Quarterly, 28: 601–607. Morgan, G. (1986). Images of organization. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Morgan, G. (1996). Is there anything more to be said about metaphor? In D. Grant and C. Oswick (Eds.), Metaphor and organizations (pp. 227–240). London: Sage. Morgan, G. (1997). Imaginization. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Nersessian, N. (2008). Creating scientific concepts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Nicotera, A. M. (2013). Organizations as entitative beings: Some ontological implications of communicative Page 8 of 9

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constitution. In D. Robichaud and F. Cooren (Eds.), Organization and organizing: Materiality, agency, and discourse (pp. 66–89). New York: Routledge. Putnam, L. L. (2013). Dialectics, contradictions, and the question of agency: A tribute to James R. Taylor. In D. Robichaud and F. Cooren (Eds.), Organization and organizing: Materiality, agency, and discourse (pp. 23–36). New York: Routledge. Putnam, L. L., and Boys, S. (2006). Revisiting metaphors of organizational communication. In S. R. Clegg, C. Hardy, T. B. Lawrence, and W. R. Nord (Eds.), Sage handbook of organization studies (pp. 541–576). London: Sage. Schatzki, T. R. (2006). On organizations as they happen. Organization Studies, 27(12): 1863–1873. Schoeneborn, D., Blaschke, S., and Kaufmann, I. M. (2013). Recontextualizing anthropomorphic metaphors in organization studies: The pathology of organizational insomnia. Journal of Management Inquiry, 22(4): 435–450. Schoeneborn, D., Vásquez, C., and Cornelissen, J. (2016). Imagining organization through metaphor and metonymy: Unpacking the process-entity paradox. Human Relations, 69(4): 915–944. Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Searle, J. R. (1979). Metaphor. In A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and thought (pp. 92–123). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Sydow, J., Schreyögg, G., and Koch, J. (2009). Organizational path dependence: Opening the black box. Academy of Management Review, 34(4): 689–709. Tsoukas, H., and Chia, R. (2002). On organizational becoming: Rethinking organizational change. Organization Science, 13(5): 567–582. Van de Ven, A. H., and Poole, M. S. (1995). Explaining development and change in organizations. Academy of Management Review, 20(3): 510–540. Whetten, D. A. (2006). Albert and Whetten revisited: Strengthening the concept of organizational identity. Journal of Management Inquiry, 15(3): 219–234. Wilhoit, E. D., and Kisselburgh, L. G. (2015). Collective action without organization: The material constitution of bike commuters as collective. Organization Studies, 36(5): 573–592. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n39

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Embedding Process: Situating Process in Work Relations

Contributors: Hugh Willmott Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Embedding Process: Situating Process in Work Relations" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n40 Print pages: 616-624 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Embedding Process: Situating Process in Work Relations Hugh Willmott ‘Each closure textures the world and thereby enables us to do things in the ‘world'. The choice of closure is not a merely theoretical affair, for it determines the possibilities of action available to us'. (Lawson, 1985: 129)

Introduction In social science, process has become paired with structure as each concept is defined in relation to the other. ‘Structure’ is invoked to characterize something comparatively enduring and static, such as a framework or a generative mechanism. ‘Process', in contrast, is deemed to be comparatively dynamic and transient. In the field of organization studies, analyses of process accompanied an expansion of social scientific thinking in business schools (e.g., Silverman, 1970; Burrell and Morgan, 1979). A boost was then received from the sjgnificance ascribed to ‘processes’ in prominent consultancy prescriptions – notably, organizational learning (Senge, 1990), where ‘personal mastery’ is conceived as a ‘process', (ibid: 142) as well as from business process reengineering (Hammer, and Champy, 1993). As interest in ‘process’ has steadily burgeoned from a low base,1 so too have the meanings ascribed to it (Hernes, and Weik, 2007). In this chapter, ‘labour process’ analysis is considered another significant but seldom recognized variant of process studies. The approach adopted here heeds the caution that ‘in the absence of an unambiguous foundational truth in the social sciences, the only sensible way forward can be conscious pluralism’ (Pettigrew, 2001: S62). In its interpretation of ‘conscious pluralism', the chapter points to the varied politico-ethical bases of analyses of process (Ezzamel and Willmott, 2014). More specifically, forms of hegemonic power associated with different ethical orientations are understood to coalesce and become institutionalized in plural methodologies devised within diverse epistemic cultures (Knorr Ketina, 1999). Politico-ethical considerations are, arguably, of key importance in generating, endorsing, and subscribing to particular forms of knowledge (e.g., of ‘process'). The connection is perhaps most clearly demonstrated in studies that reject, and then radically counteract, the myth of value-free social science – for example, in feminist critiques of patriarchy in science (see Harding, 1986; Fox Keller and Longino, 1996). Ontological and epistemological assumptions that, in conventional analysis, are considered to underpin and inform social scientific knowledge are reappraised as articulations of politico-ethical commitments. It is those distinctive commitments that authorize, yet can never fully realize, specific closings of accounts with reality (James, 1983). Accordingly, the plausibility or validity of competing conceptions and accounts of ‘process’ are not assessed in relation to their claimed correspondence to features ascribed, self-referentially, to what they seek to mirror or capture. It is assumed, instead, that knowledge of such features does not exist independently of the methodological means of their identification and analysis. Moreover, successful – that is, plausible – representations are seen to rely upon productive, yet simultaneously restrictive, exercises of power institutionalized as ‘regimes of truth’ (Foucault, 1984). Regimes invariably carry some measure of moral force – force that surfaces when norms are breached – as they are by proponents of labour process analysis in relation to mainstream accounts of workplace relations – and steps are taken to restore normality.

The Coming of Process: Conditions of Possibility and Analytical Challenges Contemporary interest in process among practitioners and students of organization(s) has accompanied ‘post-rationalist', ‘postbureaucratic’ changes ascribed to organizations and organizing (see Clegg, 1990). As well as ‘network', the term process has been invoked to signal a claimed shift away from ‘mechanistic’ and ‘hierarchical’ designs of organization(s) towards more fluid forms, often linked to a replacement of sequential Page 2 of 9

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by parallel work processing. ‘As change sweeps through industries', it has been suggested, ‘we are seeing a surge of interest among organizational researchers in process theory and dynamic phenomena’ (Langley, 1999: 691). Yet, thirty years earlier, Silverman (1970) challenged advocates of the then dominant systems thinking on organizations to study ‘social process whereby symbols [such as ‘organizational goals'] develop and lose legitimating significance’ (ibid: 6; see also contributions to Hassard and Parker, 1994). Silverman's interest in process was not stimulated by attributions of change to organizational practice but, rather, by a broadly phenomenological interest in countering the structure-centrism of systems thinking so as to attend more closely to organizational participants’ enactments of the realit(ies) of organization(s). In an early review of process-oriented contributions to organizational analysis, Benson (1977) identifies two main strands of work. First, there is a ‘negotiated order’ approach (e.g., Manning, 1977) that, in common with Silverman (1970) focus upon actors’ frames of reference and addresses how ‘organizational arrangements’ continuously arise out of ‘the ongoing interactions of participants’ (Benson, 1977: 14; see also Elger, 1975). In this strand of analysis, organizational phenomena ‘are not treated as entities but as enactments – unfolding processes’ (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002: 577). Some variants of this first approach conceive of actors’ ‘negotiations’ as articulations of distinctive and potentially conflicting collective frames of reference that develop within a broader social landscape comprising inter alia ‘community affiliations, labour market circumstances, and occupational associations’ (Elger, 1975: 126). Those that take fuller account of actors’ embeddedness in social relations conceive of the ‘social landscape’ as providing differential access to resources. Institutionally, as well as strategically, the social context is seen to allow, or impede, the opportunity for actors ‘to bring organizational arrangements into alignment with [their] designs and priorities’ (ibid: 98). Here, we move in the direction of a second strand of analysis in which the processes through which ‘order(s)’ are ‘negotiated’ are seen to be shaped within asymmetrical relations of power – systems of domination, such as feudalism or patriarchy, and related media of control and resistance – considerations that, in common with affect and embodiment, for example (Jones, 2013), are conspicuous by their absence from the process-oriented stream of work on sociomateriality. The principle form of analysis within the second body of work identified by Benson (1977) is Marxist-influenced scholarship in which dialectics and the understanding of process as ‘practical sensuous activity’ are central. For Marx (1975), interpretations of the world, including analyses of ‘process', are not products of contemplation per se. Even what may appear to be disinterested, cerebral interpretations are considered to be embroiled in embodied, politico-ethical struggles. They result from value-laden efforts to make sense within, and through, particular ‘ensemble[s] of social relations’ (ibid: 423) (e.g., of workplaces and/or of business schools) that support but also confront and torment their participants. When taking aim at Feuerbach's (1989) penetrating critique of religious self-estrangement, Marx argues that The Essence of Christianity recalls and reclaims the secular origins of the ‘religious world’ but then omits to locate the generation of Feuerbach's own analysis in ‘the cleavages and self-contradictions’ (ibid: 422) of the secular world. In effect, Feuerbach is accused of dissembling the worldly politico-ethical inspiration and significance of [his] thinking. What is lacking, for Marx, is a reflexive recognition of the basis of The Essence of Christianity in the sensuousness of Feuerbach's dissatisfaction and frustration with established self-understandings of religion. Moreover, and relatedly, in Feuerbach's critique of Christianity, there is, for Marx, scant appreciation of how, beyond contemplation, the removal of such frustration requires the (revolutionary) removal of social ‘cleavages and self-contradictions'. And advances of scholarly knowledge that, in practice, leave these sources of suffering largely undisturbed. Marxist analysis situates the study of process in a theory of history conceived as an outcome of dialectical change in which praxis, most fully exemplified in a fusion of reflection and action, is key. Human existence is defined by entanglements (cf. Hernes, 2007) in confusions and contradictions – notably, in Marx's thinking, those pertaining to the organization of productive forces – which become an impediment to human flourishing, thereby precipitating emancipatory struggle. For Marx, the animator of those forces is ‘labour’ that is ‘first of Page 3 of 9

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all, a process between man and nature’ in which s/he ‘confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature’ (1976: 283). Marx terms this process ‘the nature-imposed condition of human existence’ (ibid: 290). It is a ‘condition’ which, as a consequence of its comparatively open, non-determined character, takes particular, historical, socially organized forms. To illustrate his thinking, Marx (1976) adopts the example of a skilled bootmaker who becomes employed in a capitalist enterprise. The actual process of making boots, Marx observes, ‘does not necessarily change’ when becoming and employee as ‘the particular methods and operations employed in boot making are not immediately altered by the intervention of the capitalist’ (ibid: 291). What does change when the bootmaker becomes an employee of the capitalist is the process of control over the bootmaker, as well as forms of resistance that may develop in response to this change. As the bootmaker is now an employee, his labour power, along with leather and other factors of production, is purchased by the capitalist as a commodity. Crucially, control over the application of his labour passes from the bootmaker to the capitalist, as does ownership of the product – the finished boots. In sum, when undertaken within the historically distinctive, socially organized, capitalist ‘ensemble of social relations', producing goods and services becomes a commodified process – ‘a process between things that the capitalist has purchased, things which belong to him’ (ibid: 292). Marx embeds the analysis of the ‘process(es)’ that comprise the production of boots in the activity of labour; and he also situates that activity in an historically specific ‘ensemble of social relations', thereby connecting its enactment to ‘sensuous human activity’ and to political economy. The sense of these processes as labour processes is invoked to disclose how, within a capitalist ‘ensemble of social relations', labour power is treated as a commodity, thereby rendering it equivalent to leather or laces: market relations are extended to the exchange of labour power. When reviving Marx's analysis of the labour process in Labor and Monopoly Capital, Braverman (1974) shows how the creative capacity of labour is systematically subordinated to the dictates of capital, as interpreted by a cadre of ‘scientifically’ trained managers. Later contributions to labour process analysis have demonstrated how the (re)production of politico-economic relations within capitalism is more complex and contradictory than Braverman's self-consciously limited and strategic focus upon ‘the “objective” content of class’ (ibid: 27) admits. Accordingly, sympathetic critics of Braverman's analysis have called for much greater account to be taken of ‘subjective’ aspects of work processes, or what Burawoy (1986: 35) terms ‘political and ideological processes'. Departing from Braverman's orthodox Marxist ascription of distinctive interests to those occupying an ‘objective’ structural location of ‘labour', Burawoy (1986) insists that ‘interests’ do not exist objectively: ‘they cannot be imputed; they are produced and reproduced in particular ways’ (ibid: 28–29, emphasis added). Counteracting Braverman's economic determinism, Burawoy highlights the importance of numerous other processes through which the subordination of labour to capital is accomplished.2 This revisionist variant of labour process analysis emphasizes the importance of ideological and political, in addition to economic, factors when accounting for how, for example, exploitative and degrading work is maintained with the active cooperation and consent of employees. Yet it retains the assumption that the respective positions of capital and labour are essentially, but latently, antagonistic. It is considered that workers should, and eventually will, collectively resist capital when they are no longer blinded by ‘ideological and political processes’ (Burawoy, 1986: 35) that are held to obscure how surplus value, extracted by capital, is pumped from workers’ productive activity. It is assumed, in other words, that ideological and political processes temporarily ‘conceal’ (ibid: 38) relations of exploitation, and so only delay an inevitable revolt of the working class whose destiny is structured into the capitalist ensemble of social relations.3

Process in Discourse Questioning the destiny ascribed by structuralist analysis to wage labour (or, more specifically, the working class) challenges the presumption that the extraction of surplus value must be ‘conceal[ed]’ (ibid) from wage Page 4 of 9

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labour in order for capitalist labour processes to be smoothly sustained. Today's employees do not have to subscribe to a Marxian understanding of how surplus value is pumped out of them in order to appreciate that capitalists’ wealth is, in substantial part, derived, directly or indirectly, from their productive efforts. Disarmingly, enough that truth is now widely recognized and taken for granted. It turns out to be unnecessary for the truth of systematic exploitation to be masked, ideologically and/or politically, for sufficient productive effort to be secured. This truth may become manifest not only as comptempt for, and in conflict and resistance to, but also as admiration or adulation of, those who, like CEO Donald Trump, have acquired or expanded their wealth by exploiting labour. Antagonisms may ultimately galvanize revolutionary struggle. But scenarios of progressive liberation can unfold only within a field of discursivity in which the ‘degradation’ and ‘exploitation’ of labour, for example, is de-normalized. From a poststructuralist perspective, the emergence those ‘fields’ is contingent, not structurally predestined. Reference to discourse, in the form of ‘a field of discursivity’ immediately risks being (mis)understood as subscribing to the view that everything in the world is reducible to, or conflated with, what can be said about it. On the contrary, it is assumed here, following Laclau and Mouffe (1985), that the very intelligibility of language depends upon materiality, where the latter does not necessarily depend upon any human practice’ (Jones, 2013: 213), its meaning is. It is radically doubted that any discourse, or combination of discourses, has the capacity to capture what it aspires to represent. All efforts to represent ‘process', for example, are seen to be vulnerable to disruption as their credibility depends upon a hegemonic, and so precarious, closing of accounts with reality. Such disruption is evident in how, for example, post-Bravermanian analysis perturbs the giveness widely attributed to ‘interests'. This perturbance is articulated, in post-Marxist analysis, through the (psychoanalytic) concept of overdetermination (e.g., Laclau and Mouffe, 1985, whose significance, as Gibson-Graham (1996) observe, resides in its radical ‘undermin(ing of) the certainties of western thought’ (ibid 27) where hardened dualisms prevail (Introna, 2013). When examined within this poststructuralist framework, every identity, such as the identity attributed to wage labour as being essentially antagonistic to capital, ‘is reconceived as uncentred, as in process and transition, as having no essence to which it will tend to revert’ (ibid: 28, emphasis added). The idea of overdetermination questions the very possibility of ‘social agents', or any other such (research) ‘objects', having a fixed identity, or essence, and so recalls the processes that precariously and temporarily hegemonize and fix particular identities. Each identity is conceived as inescapably ‘incomplete, open and politically negotiable’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 104). What Marx terms a ‘class-for-itself', for example, is understood to be a contingent, not inevitable, development: it is reliant upon actors’ identification with a particular tangle of discursive practices that privileges class identity rather than, say, an identity invested in consumerism or nationalism. Crucially, appreciating the open and politically negotiable nature of every ‘object’ and ‘identity’ does not deny or marginalize the significance of the social, ethico-political processes through which they may become comparatively fixed. Rather, this perspective on process addresses the complaint that ‘research that concludes simply that process “is complex” … is limited in its appeal’ (Langley, 1999: 694). It does not deal with this complaint by taking the empirical realist route of assuming or endeavouring to establish the existence of ‘explanatory mechanisms’ (ibid) to which is ascribed a capacity to account for how identities are established, maintained and transformed. Privileging this quest for explanation is a priority for many forms of process theory. Others, including phenomenological as well as post-Marxist conceptions of process, are guided by different politico-ethical priorities that include facilitating mutual understanding of the dynamics of process and/or fostering emancipatory struggles to overcome the forms of domination institionalized within and through processes. In such approaches, the value of knowledge is understood to reside in its capacity to change the world in which socially unnecessary ignorance and suffering has become normalized, and not in making predictions based upon the anticipated continuation of established institutions.

Discussion: Distal and Proximal Accounts Basic differences of politico-ethical commitment, resulting in diverse analyses of process, are illuminated by Page 5 of 9

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Cooper and Law (1995), who distinguish between distal and proximal modes of thinking. Distal forms of analysis are understood to assume and sustain ‘the illusion of an objective reality [that] exists apart from the investigator's perception’ (ibid: 7). It is this ‘illusion’ to which Marx refers when recalling the situatedness of Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity. It is also what proponents of labour process theory point towards when insisting that the analysis of productive activity should be located within specific modes of production. In each case, the target of (ideology) critique is the engagement of ‘representationalist principles of division, simple location, isolation, classification …’ (Chia and Tsoukas, 2002: 197) that populate and dominate the fields of discursivity of Christianity and productive activity. Despite its dialectical pedigree, Marx's analysis also retains a residue of a ‘being-realist ontology'. With his dialectical forceps, Marx sought to ‘grasp’ the ‘transient aspect’ (Marx, 1976: 91) of historical development but, in doing so, he paid minimal attention to the politico-ethical contingency of the epistemic stance of the representations set out in Capital, in which an objective class position and destiny are assigned to wage labour (and to Capital). Marx's politico-ethical commitment was manifest in his determination to discern and expose what he considered to be ‘the natural laws of capitalist production’ (Marx, 1976), and thereby reveal how humankind could, and assuredly would, be released from their progressive, but ultimately, oppressive operation. Marx's subscription to an ontology of ‘being realism’ requires that, of necessity, consideration of ‘the very processes involved in [the] initial “organizing” of the disciplinary objects of analysis’ (Chia, 1996: 26) is suspended. To put this another way, Marx's critique of Feuerbach's debunking of The Essence of Christianity is highly pertinent for interrogating the critique of political economy advanced in Capital. Proximal analysis comprehends the world as ‘an indefinite and open multiplicity in which relations are relations of reciprocal implication’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962 cited by Cooper and Law, 1995: 239). Proximal analysis assumes a ‘becoming ontology’ (Chia, 1996) that deconstructs any fixing of reality into discrete, identifiable features differentiated from ‘relations of reciprocal implication'. A move in this direction occurs in some postBravermanian studies of labour processes where, for example, ‘interests’ are conceived to be organized within social relations rather than given by ‘objective’ class position. Analysis that is fully proximal assumes the primacy of interdependence and doubts the foundationalism assumed by many post-Bravermanian studies as there is an assumption of contingency ‘all the way down'. To be clear, this stance does not imply that there is only fluidity or that any notion of ‘structure’ is incompatible with the study of process(es). On the contrary, it invites an examination of how ‘relations of reciprocal implication', such as those of labour and capital, are practically, though precariously, fixed hegemonically within and through processes of domination and exploitation. A further benefit of taking up the distal/proximal distinction is that it becomes evident how ‘process’ has been invoked as a new object of distal analysis. Ironically, a turn to the study of ‘process’ may simply emulate and sustain thinking that ‘stresses boundaries and separation, distinctiveness and clarity, hierarchy and order’ (Cooper and Law, 1995: 39). ‘Process’ is then treated as another quasi-entitive research object where, for example, the focus is upon how data on the processual features attributed to production/strategy/leadership/ culture, etc., can be adequately captured, as if those features are ontologically continuous with ‘objects’ such as ‘structure’ (see, for example, Chakravarthy and White's (2002) review of strategy process research). Pettigrew (1997), for instance, conceptualizes process as ‘a sequence of individual and collective events, actions and activities unfolding over time in context’ (ibid: 338, cited in Wood, 2005: 1108), but then commends the study of their sequential emergence so as to ‘catch reality in flight’ (ibid). Merely focusing upon ‘process’ as an object of study, or taking a ‘process-centred approach’ to study of established ‘objects’ of knowledge – such as ‘strategy', ‘leadership', or ‘culture’ – does not, of itself, mark a departure from distal forms thinking.

Conclusion The intention of this chapter has been to stimulate reflection upon the motivation and boundaries of studies of process. Their motivation has been explored through the conjecture that politico-ethical commitments anPage 6 of 9

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imate diverse accounts of process. The issue of boundaries of process theory have been tested and challenged by attending to a tradition – of labour process theory – that ‘process studies’ have tended to ignore or marginalize. The distinction between distal and proximal modes of thinking and related enquiry serves to highlight the plurality of studies of process as well as major differences of politico-ethical orientation that are more conventionally represented in terms of (ostensibly apolitical) differences of ontology and epistemology. Making an informed decision between modes of enquiry is here seen to involve a politico-ethical commitment in relation to the value and constitutive effects of the knowledge produced. Modes of inquiry place (precariously maintained) limits on the knowledge of ‘process’ that is generated within them. They can be seen to articulate different theories of process that are, in Langley's (1999) words, ‘neither intrinsically better or worse but may have different strengths and weaknesses’ (ibid: 694). What becomes significant, then, is how analyses of process are, in practice, counted, politico-ethically, as better or worse; and how their strengths may be hyped and their limitations ignored. To return to the quote that opens this chapter, Lawson (1985) reflects upon how, through the use of language, ‘we close the openness that is the world’ (ibid: 128), thereby highlighting the performative power of language. Language is deeply political as it ‘determines’ (ibid) – that is, conditions – ‘possibilities for action’ (ibid). Use of the term ‘closure’ is, however, a rather imperfect and deeply ironic metaphor for conveying the potency of language. For each closure is invariably partial and contested – by what it excludes as well as by other, competing closures. The ‘openness', or impossibility, of closure, which gives the lie to any primacy that is ascribed to language, has been illustrated when explicating the diverse accountings of process in analyses of organization.

Notes 1‘Process’ receives only two entries in the index for The Sage Handbook of Organization Studies (Clegg, Hardy, and Nord, 1996) prepared during the early 1990s; and it is listed in relation to the activity of undertaking action research, rather than to processes of organizing, or processes within organizations. In contrast, there are twenty-eight entries on variants of structure. The equivalent ratio in Baum (2002) is 18/82 entries. Neither book includes a chapter, or even a section, devoted to process as a focus of study. 2This agenda has been most vigorously pursued in Foucauldian-influenced studies of the workplace (e.g., Knights and Willmott, 1989; McKinlay and Starkey, 2000). 3Burawoy (1986) goes so far as to equate capitalist control with the simultaneous obscuring and securing of surplus: ‘I would suggest that capitalist control – the simultaneous obscuring and securing of surplus – sets limits on the form of the separation of conception and execution. Too little separation threatens to make surplus transparent, while too much threatens the securing of surplus’ (ibid: 49).

References Baum, J. (Ed.) (2002), The Blackwell Companion to Organizations, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Benson, J. K. (1977), ‘Introduction: Innovation and Crisis in Organizational Analysis', in J. K. Benson (Ed.), Organizational Analysis: Critique and Innovation, Sage: London. Braverman, H. (1974), Labor and Monopoly Capital, New York: Monthly Review Press. Burawoy, M. (1986), The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes Under Capitalism and Socialism, London: Verso. Burrell, G. and Morgan, G. (1979), Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis, London: Heinemann. Chakravarthy, B. S. and White, R. E. (2002), ‘Strategy Process: Forming, Implementing and Changing Strategies', in A. Pettigrew, H. Thomas, and R. Whittington (Eds.), Handbook of Strategy and Management, LonPage 7 of 9

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don: Sage. Chia, R. (1996), Organizational Analysis as Deconstructive Practice, Berlin: de Gruyter. Chia, R. and Tsoukas, H. (2002), ‘Everything Flows and Nothing Abides: Towards a “Rhizomic” Model of Organizational Change, Transformation and Action', Process Studies, 32, 2: 196–224. Clegg, S. (1990), Modern Organizations: Organization Studies in the Postmodern World, London: Sage. Clegg, S. R., Hardy, C., and Nord, W. R. (1996), Handbook of Organization Studies, London: Sage. Cooper, R. and Law, J. (1995), ‘Organization: Distal and Proximal Views', in S. B. Bacharach (Ed.), Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, pp. 237–274. Elger, T. (1975), ‘Industrial Organizations: A Processual Perspective', in J. B. McKinlay (Ed.), Processing People: Cases in Organizational Behaviour, London: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Ezzamel, M. and Willmott, H. (2014), ‘Registering “the Ethical” in Organization Theory Formation: Towards the Disclosure of an “Invisible Force”', Organization Studies, 35, 7: 1013–1039. Feuerbach, L. (1989), The Essence of Christianity, London: Prometheus. Foucault, M. (1984), ‘Truth and Power', in P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader, Harmondsworth: Peregrine, pp. 51–75. Fox Keller, E. and Longino, H. E. (Eds.), (1996), Feminism & Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibson-Graham, J. K. (1996), The End of Capitalism (As We Know It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, Oxford: Blackwell. Hammer, M. and Champy, J. (1993), Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution, New York: HarperBusiness. Harding, N. (1986), The Science Question in Feminism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hassard, J. and Parker, M. (1994), Towards a New Theory of Organizations, London: Routledge. Hernes, T. (2007), Understanding Organizations as Processes: Theory for a Tangled World, London: Routledge. Hernes, T. and Weik, E. (2007), ‘Processual Approaches in Management and Organization Studies', Scandinavian Journal of Management, 23, 3: 251–264. Introna, L. D. (2013), ‘Otherness and the Letting-Be of Becoming: Or, Ethics Beyond Bifurcation in P. R. Carlile, D. Nicolini, A. Langley and H. Tsoukas (Eds), How Matter Matters: Objects, Artefacts and Materiality in Organization Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press James, W. (1983), The Varieties of Religious Experience, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Jones, M. (2013), ‘Untangling Sociomateriality’ in P. R. Carlile, D. Nicolini, A. Langley and H. Tsoukas (Eds), How Matter Matters: Objects, Artefacts and Materiality in Organization Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press Knights, D. and Willmott, H. C. (1989), ‘Power and Subjectivity at Work: From Degradation to Subjugation in Social Relations', Sociology, 23, 4: 535–558. Knorr Ketina, K. (1999), Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985), Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London: Verso. Langley, A. (1999), ‘Strategies for Theorizing from Process Data', Academy of Management Review, 24, 4: 691–710. Lawson, H. (1985), Reflexivity: The Post-Modern Predicament, London: Hutchinson. Manning, P. (1977), ‘Rules of Organizational Context: Narcotics Law Enforcement in Two Settings', in J. K. Benson (Ed.), Organizational Analysis: Critique and Innovation, London: Sage. Marx, K. (1975), ‘Concerning Feuerbach', in K. Marx, Early Writings, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 421–423. Marx, K. (1976), Capital, Volume 1, Harmondsworth: Penguin. McKinlay, A. and Starkey, K. (Eds.), (2000), Foucault, Management and Organization Theory: From Panopticon to Technologies of Self, London: Sage. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962), The Phenomenology of Perception, New York: Humanities Press. Pettigrew, A. (1997), ‘What is a processual analysis?'. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 13, 4: 337–348. Pettigrew, A. (2001), ‘Management Research After Modernism', British Journal of Management, 12: S61–S70. Senge, P. (1990), The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, New York: Doubleday. Silverman, D. (1970), The Theory of Organizations, London: Heinemann. Page 8 of 9

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Tsoukas, H. and Chia, R. (2002), ‘On Organizational Becoming: Rethinking Organizational Change', Organization Science, 13, 5: 567–582. Wood, M. (2005), ‘The Fallacy of Misplaced Leadership', Journal of Management Studies, 42, 6: 1101–1121. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n40

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Making Process Visible: Alternatives to Boxes and Arrows

Contributors: Martha S. Feldman Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Making Process Visible: Alternatives to Boxes and Arrows" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n41 Print pages: 625-635 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Making Process Visible: Alternatives to Boxes and Arrows Martha S. Feldman S: But what about invisible entities acting in a hidden way? P: If they act, they leave some trace, then you have some information, then you can talk about them. If not, just shut up. S: But if they are repressed, denied, silenced? P: Nothing on earth allows you to say they are there without bringing in the proof of their presence. That proof might be indirect, exacting, complicated, but you need it. Invisible things are invisible. Period. (Latour, 2004: 70 and Latour, 2005: 150)

Introduction Scholars have identified two forms of process theorizing (Emirbayer, 1997; Langley et al., 2013; Hernes, 2008, Czarniawska, 2008; Chia and Holt, 2009). These have been described in various ways: as the difference between an orientation to being or to becoming (Chia and Holt, 2009); as weak or strong process ontologies (Hernes, 2008; Chia and Langley, 2005 cited in Hernes, 2008); as substantialist or emergent and relational (Emirbayer, 1997; Langley, Smallman, Tsoukas, and Van de Ven, 2013); and as oriented to nouns or oriented to verbs, or at least gerunds (Czarniawska, 2008; Mesle, 2008). These different ways of theorizing process make action more or less focal. Process explanations oriented to being and substances show that a process must have occurred because we started out in one place and ended up in another. Process explanations that focus on becoming and relationality are more likely to highlight the specific actions taken by specific people (or sometimes machines) in specific times and places, though these explanations, too, may rely upon invisible abstractions. As the latter form of process explanations have become more prevalent in organizational research, there has been some discussion about ways of making actions more visible in the boxes and arrows diagrams we often use to depict models. Recent discussions of process theorizing have noted that something may be missing in our current representations of models as boxes with words in them and arrows often without words (Czarniawska, 2008; Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011; Langley et al., 2013). Indeed, Langley et al. note that ‘The convenience of unlabeled arrows and feedback loops may sometimes obscure the causal complexity that process theorizations are intended to explain’ (2013: 8). These same authors, however, note that ‘attempts to faithfully capture the complexities of process can result in diagrams that are busy and equally opaque’ (2013: 8). This points to an interesting problem of representation. If labeling the arrows of our boxes and arrows diagrams does not solve the problem of obscuring what we are trying to explain, then perhaps we need different ways of representing process. In this commentary, I suggest that moving away from the boxes and arrows can be very useful.1 I provide a brief example of an observation and three different ways of explaining it by showing the situated, relational nature of the observation. The three are actor-network theory, action nets, and narrative network analysis. The first has been developed by many people but is most closely associated with Latour (2005). The second has been developed by Czarniawska (2004; 2008) and the third by Pentland and Feldman (2007). Despite the difference in names, all three are described by their authors as methods. In the following, I describe each of these in only as much detail as I need to show their potential to help us make processes and the relationality of actions in process visible.

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A Brief Example In a recent meeting of scholars, most of whom do qualitative research, one of the participants described an experience she had in a course that introduced her to qualitative methods. She was sent out to observe something/anything in a public space. The assignment was open ended, which she described as somewhat disconcerting. Ultimately, however, she found it a powerful experience, in part, because she saw something she had not imagined prior to the observation. What she saw was not bizarre in anyway, it was just not in the range of her own experience or anything she had read about.2 The assignment provided her with a lasting realization that observing real life can open your eyes to things going on that might not be found in the literature and that you might not imagine. As she finished describing her experience, other members of the reading group chimed in with their experience. Around the table people recounted similar experiences. The participants had taken their qualitative methods courses in different places around the world and some had taught qualitative methods courses in different places around the world, and yet the practice of sending students out to observe something/anything going on in a public space was common to each experience. Acknowledging that there are likely to be other ways to teach qualitative methods and that we are making no claim about the statistical likelihood of qualitative methods courses engaging in this practice, there is nonetheless an interesting regularity represented in the observations by the reading group members. How does this regularity come about? How can we account for the empirical observation that qualitative methods professors around the world are sending their students out to observe random public spaces? What process or processes are in play? The substantialist form of process theorizing focuses on the nature of things (such as a person, an organization, or a technology). The nature of these things (the identity of the person, the character of the organization, the norms of the society, the features of the technology) explains outcomes and how these outcomes occur. In this mode, one could account for the observation as caused by a norm: the practice of sending students out to observe public spaces has become a norm and to qualify as part of the field of qualitative methods, professors of these courses align themselves with the norm. Aligning with the norm produces a consistent outcome that reinforces the norm. Another, similar type of explanation might involve dispositions: it is in the nature of qualitative methods teachers to send people out to observe public spaces. Identity is another version of this explanation. These are each examples of the first kind of process explanation described above. We identify a change (or a regularity) and look for an explanation in the form of a substance we can identify as causing the regularity. The substance is often an abstraction. A graphic depiction of this kind of explanation might look something like Figure 41.1 above. In this kind of depiction, the presence of action appears to be the professor's actions. Even with words on the arrows, there is little insight into how a norm aligns these actions, how the actions produce the consistency, or how the consistency reinforces the norm. The power in this example is in the norm, and it is an invisible force.

Figure 41.1Boxes and arrows

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Depicting Process through Boxes and Arrows Scholars describing organizational processes have made efforts to include the actions taken by individuals or organizations. Let me draw your attention to an award-winning, high impact article3 by Dutton and Dukerich on the NY Port Authority's actions in response to the increasing appearance of homeless people in the public transit facilities that the organization has responsibility for (1991). Their process diagram connects the Port Authority's Identity with a positive correlation (indicated by an arrow and a plus sign) to actions taken as part of the early response, which are then negatively correlated with the Port Authority's Image (arrow and negative sign), which is finally positively correlated with actions taken as part of the later response. There is feedback from response to identity and to image, but what actions produce the feedback is not clarified in the figure. The process is also described below the boxes and arrows providing more detail about how the identity and the image affected the actions taken and how the identity-consistent response deteriorated the image, triggering a ‘more pronounced’ identity response. Though these descriptions are graphically lined up with the boxes (including brackets under each box), they are clearly an effort to identify the actions represented by the arrows. Despite these efforts, the representation mirrors the theorizing in placing a lot of emphasis on the work that is done by the abstractions of both identity and image as independent causes of the responses. My research with Pentland on organizational routines represents yet another step in the direction of depicting the actions taken in getting from one place to another while still maintaining the fundamentals of the box and arrow charts (2005). The following figure depicting routines as mutually constituted loops of performative and ostensive aspects maintains the focus on nouns even while intending to emphasize actions by showing that the ostensive aspect of a routine (which is an invisible abstraction) is composed of things people do and say (visible performances). Though action is entailed in the ostensive aspect, the specifics of the action entailed remain invisible.

Figure 41.2Modified boxes and arrows

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What these explanations do not do is situate the action in relation to other actions and show us how they cohere. Latour has referred to this kind of theorizing as mistaking ‘what is glued for the glue’ (1986: 276). The norms, dispositions, identities, images, performative, and ostensive aspects are not actually doing anything; they are names for something else that is happening. Somehow, these actions are sticking, but our depictions do not show us how the sticking happens. But what is occurring and how can we depict it?

Alternatives to Boxes and Arrows In the following, I show three ways of depicting what is occurring using the example of observing public spaces in a qualitative methods research course. The three are actor-network theory, action nets, and narrative network analysis. Despite the difference in names, all three are methods for studying constellations (recognizable group of things) or nexuses (connection or series of connections linking two or more things). While all three of these ways of depicting what is occurring lend themselves to visual diagrams, there is no canonical way of drawing any of them. I think you will see, however, that they are all markedly different from the boxes and arrows representations. I have based the specifics in these diagrams on my own experience of teaching qualitative methods in Asia, Europe, and the United States. I make no claims about the generalizability of the specifics in these diagrams. They are purely illustrative. What I wish to draw attention to is both how these approaches make action – and therefore process – visible.

Actor-Network Theory Actor-network theory or ANT, as it is often referred to, is a sociology of associations. People exploring things Page 5 of 12

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through an ANT lens look for the connectors or associations that bind together heterogeneous elements. ANT analyses portray a flat, as opposed to a hierarchical, ontology. As a result, one thing ANT has become known for is showing that non-human things have agency. An early and influential ANT analysis of scallop farming, for instance, showed the agency of scallops and nets as well as of fishermen and data collectors (Callon, 1986). Agency does not mean that scallops and fishermen do the same things, but that they each exert influence through the connections they enable or inhibit. As summarized by Latour (2005: 107): Scallops make the fisherman do things just as nets placed in the ocean lure the scallops into attaching themselves to the nets and just as data collectors bring together fishermen and scallops in oceanography. A central question of actor-network theory is how do constellations of heterogeneous elements take on the appearance of stability and thus naturalness or inevitability. These assemblages – whether they are institutions, organizations, or technological combinations such as electric grids – are often referred to as macro-actors (Czarniawska and Hernes, 2005). A key quality of macro-actors is that they represent the many. Over time, they become regarded as acting entities and the traces of how they are formed by the many are wiped away (Hernes, 2008: 65). In analyzing our empirical observation of sending students out to observe public places in qualitative methods courses through an ANT lens, we describe the associations between observing public places and other parts of the course as well as constraints on the course. While an actor-network could be organized around human actants, the immediate question is about associations related to the assignment to observe in public spaces. In the focus I have adopted in Figure 41.3, the course is the macro-actor, and the assignment is shown as a central organizing feature of that macro-actor. The importance of this is to show that the course is not what holds the assignments together but that the course is held together through the myriad associations (of which I have only drawn a few) among actants (including goals, assignments, time frames, and ideas).

Figure 41.3Actor-network

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In the diagram, I have identified comparing forms of data gathering and analysis as two other activities that often take place in qualitative methods courses (they might be thought of as goals) and that have associations with the assignment of observing in public places. In addition, I have identified the time frame as relevant to this assignment. My experience has been that there is a relatively short time period for teaching the skill of observing and showing its significance, whether you are teaching a semester-long course or a twoday workshop. The 24/7 availability of public spaces and the life that goes on in public spaces contributes to the feasibility of the assignment and the likelihood of using this particular assignment as opposed to a more focused observation. Many actor-network scholars would draw attention to the syllabus and its role in stabilizing associations. While I agree that the syllabus plays an important role, the role it plays is to document the associations. What I want to draw attention to here are the associations. The actor-network I have identified draws attention to actants like the limited time frame and mundanity that might otherwise be left out when exploring parts of a course. Actor-networks are sometimes said to consist of mediators that ‘make others do unexpected things’ (Latour, 2005: 106, emphasis in original). It is important to note that this is not a causal argument (Latour, 2005: 214). The limited time frame available for my students to learn to observe as a way of data gathering does not determine that I will have them observe in public spaces, but it is an association that supports the assignment. Note that I could equally well have them observe a still life in the classroom, but many of the other associations that go into making my qualitative methods course would then fall away, and we would be creating something else. Thus, the actor-network also draws attention to the assignment in relation to other parts of the course – the comparison of emergent and pre-established focuses of research, the comparison of different ways of gathering data, and the connection of data gathering to data analysis. These connections, again, are not deterministic, but the multiplicity of connections certainly enhances the likelihood of repeating this assignment each time I teach the course and may have the same effect when others teach the course.

Action Nets Action nets are ways of exploring what goes into organizing and to depict the variety of collective actions that create an institutionalized pattern in a specific time and place (Czarniawska 2004, 2008; Lindberg and Czarniawska, 2006). The idea of action nets is based both in actor-network theory (referred to by Czarniawska in 2004 as the sociology of translation) and the old and new institutionalism. Action nets consist of streams of activity that might be thought of as routines or practices. For instance, an action net of university research may include activities such as teaching, advising, publishing, printing, marketing, doing fieldwork, financing research, and conferencing (Czarniawska, 2008: 19). Action nets are not bound by organizational or institutional boundaries but are likely to transcend the boundaries that may limit our understanding of what it takes to engage in a particular activity. Thus, the action net of the university researcher combines activities of the researcher that take place within the university (teaching and advising) as well as activities that take place outside of the university (publishing, printing, marketing) and activities that connect the university with other organizations (doing fieldwork, financing research, conferencing). Action nets are a way to ‘attract attention to knotting’ (Lindberg, 2002), or connecting, as a central activity in all organizing (Czarniawska, 2004: 782). The action net related to observing in public spaces (see Figure 41.4) shows many connections between various activities that take place in the university and classroom. For instance, it includes meeting at pre-scheduled days and times, assigning homework, lecturing, and discussing in small groups. It also draws attention to the importance of activities that often go unnoticed, such as course scheduling. The action net also draws attention to the people doing things in public spaces and the work of creating public spaces, both of which are necessary for observing in public spaces but often go unnoticed when we think about the assignment used in qualitative methods courses. It would be possible to extend this action net outward to include the political actions involved in making it safe to observe what people are doing Page 7 of 12

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in public spaces, something that we might otherwise refer to as the political context.

Figure 41.4Action net

Time is an important feature of action nets. Lindberg and Czarniawska distinguish action nets from networks in the following quote: ‘The difference between an action net and a network concerns time: there first have to be actors before networks can come into being. Actors come first; networks come second; actions in a network come third. In an action net perspective, however, actions come first and actors second with networks possibly but not necessarily third’ (2006: 294). In other words, actions nets reverse the relationship between identity and action. In action nets, identities are a result, not a cause. In relation to our example, this reversal of time means that the identity of students and professors in qualitative research courses is a result of their actions rather than a cause. The identity does not explain the actions; the actions create the identity.

Narrative Network Analysis Narrative network analysis is another way of depicting patterns and what goes into making up a pattern. In this case, the pattern is a routine defined as ‘repetitive, recognizable patterns of interdependent organizational actions carried out by multiple actors’ (Feldman and Pentland, 2003: 95). Pentland and Feldman developed narrative network analysis to portray both the central tendencies and the variations enacted in performing routines (Pentland and Feldman, 2007). In their 2007 article, they used patterns of technology use as their routines. Others have used narrative network analysis to aid in designing systems of accountability (Yeow and Faraj, 2008), to analyze emergent democratic processes in community planning (Quick, 2010) and to examine the use of electronic medical records in a hospital setting (Hayes, Lee, and Dourish, 2011; Mein Goh, Gao, and Agarwal, 2011). Page 8 of 12

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Narrative network analysis builds on the idea that routines are enacted narratives that involve sequences of action that move from a beginning (a task begins) through a middle to an end (the task is accomplished or abandoned). Both narratives and routines progress through a series of ‘functional events’ that move the narrative (or routine) forward. It is important to note that the word function here has no evaluative connotation. Function just means moving from one step to the next or progressing the story. Functional events connect two specific actants through a specific verb. For example, ‘the princess kisses the frog’ is a functional event in the fairy tale in which the frog turns out to have been a prince all along, an ending we would not reach unless the princess kissed the frog. (In the original Grimm brothers’ version, the princess throws the frog against a wall, confirming the basic insight of the narrative network that the actions that progress the story/routine may differ in different enactments of the story/routine.) Of course, there are many functional events in any story (or routine), and most are much more mundane than this example. The narrative network analysis related to observing in public spaces shown in Figure 41.5. draws our attention to the activity that starts with the professor making an assignment and ends with students developing or refining research questions. Note that there are dotted lines suggesting that an alternative to this terminus may be working on to the next assignment of writing interview protocols. Indeed, there may be many alternatives, and the narrative network analysis would draw attention to these. The diagram shows that there are various actions that may prepare students for the observation, and there are various ways the assignment may be constrained (they may be told where (or even what) to observe, or this may be left up to them). In this diagram, the central tendencies are in the middle, and the variations are on the sides. Some variations are dichotomous – either the students are making their own decisions about where to observe, or the professor is identifying a setting. Other variations are not. Toward the top of the diagram are four functional events that could prepare students for the assignment. Any of these could be used alone or in any combination.

Figure 41.5Narrative network

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The narrative network diagram is more narrowly focused than the actor-network theory or action net diagrams. Indeed, the narrative network analysis is almost like zooming into a small part of the action net. It would be useful for exploring the options for enacting that particular activity but would shed less light on how the activity is related to the many other activities that are an essential part of accounting for the resilience of the assignment.

Conclusion Each of these ways of exploring the regularity we observed help us explore how this regularity is enacted and the kinds of connections that support it, stabilize it, and maintain it. Each way of making visible how the regularity is enacted helps us trace actions differently and, as a result, encourages us to see the activity differently. Actor-networks emphasize stability and how stability has been achieved. Action nets emphasize effort or work. Narrative networks emphasize the interplay between stability and variability in the way the work is done. The actor-network helps us see the actors (or actants) that make the course stick together and how they affect one another – how they make each other do things. We see how the assignment is situated in relation to other features of the course and of the context of the course. The actor-network encourages us to see the connections that stabilize this particular assignment. The action net with its orientation to activities draws our attention outside the course as well as inside it. The Page 10 of 12

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time frame (in a slightly different form) is enacted as the scheduling of classes. Thus, it is not just that the course has an association to a limited time frame but there are a whole lot of actions involved in scheduling classes and communicating these schedules that someone has to do in order for my students and me to have a course and for this assignment to occur. Action nets ‘allow one to see the labor that goes on in laying down net-works’ (Latour, 2005: 132). The action net encourages us to see beyond the boundaries of the assignment or even the course to the broad set of activities that are entailed in enacting this assignment. It also draws our attention to the specific routines that make up the net. The narrative network zooms into the specifics of observing in public spaces as an activity or a routine. The focus here is on the alternative actions that could be taken by students and professors that would constitute the assignment and would connect the assignment with other activities or routines in the course. The narrative network encourages us to explore what it takes to get from beginning to end and what alternative actions are possible. None of the connections shown in the diagrams are inevitable. Indeed, each of these specific diagrams could have/would have been different had they been created by a different person or by the same person in a different period of time. For instance, I probably included the creation of public spaces in my action net, in part, because I happen to be reading a book about North Korea, a place in which the existence of public spaces where one could observe people doing things cannot be taken for granted. Nonetheless, it was the action net that provided the opportunity for showing that activity and how it is connected to our empirical observation. So I am not arguing that the methods that underlie these representations provide us with the definitive explanations of our empirical observation. I am arguing, however, that these methods are ways of seeing the situated, relational nature of the observation that tends to become invisible when we theorize in terms of abstractions. I am also suggesting that our representations are connected to our theorizing. Van Maanen has suggested that ‘our representations may well come first, allowing us to see selectively what we have described’ (Van Maanen, 2006: 134). Czarniawska has argued that the logic of representation is necessarily abstract. In this sense, she likens it to the logic of theory and distinguishes it from the logic of practice (2008). Both Van Maanen and Czarniawska are talking primarily about language as representation. But I would like to extend the point to visual representations. As Van Maanen argues, how we represent, influences what we see. And as Czarniawska argues, any way of representing is going to skew what we see toward the abstract. This is fine if we are primarily interested in naming hidden forces as if they are the cause of our actions.4 If we are interested in exploring the actions that underlie the processes of emergence and change, however, we may want to engage ways of representing that encourage us to see beyond the abstractions.

Notes 1I acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Barbara Czarniawska, who made a lasting impression when I was beginning to learn about actor- network theory by her injunction to me that ‘there are no boxes!’ (Personal communication, February 2004). 2She (and a friend) chose to observe what was going on in a coffee shop. Over the course of a couple of hours, they noticed that several instances of people using the coffee shop as a place to transfer kids from one adult's care to another's. Once observed, the drop-off practice raises many questions – is the coffee shop operating as a neutral space for estranged couples? Is the coffee shop simply conveniently located near work, school, etc.? Do the transfers take place here so that the adults can pick up coffee while they are transferring kids? If you were the owner of the coffee shop, the answers to these questions might matter …. 3This article won the AMJ Best Paper award in 1992 and has nearly 2,500 Google citations in 2015. 4See J.G. March (1966) which argues that power is sometimes just a word used for unexplained variance. Page 11 of 12

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References Callon, M. (1986). Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St. Brieux Bay. In J. Law (Ed.), Power, action and belief: A new sociology of knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Chia, R. and R. Holt (2009). Strategy without design. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Chia, R. and A. Langley (2005). Call for papers to the First Organizational Studies Summer Workshop on Theorizing Process in Organizational Research, June 12–13, 2005, Santorini, Greece. Czarniawska, B. (2004). On time, space and action nets. Organization Studies, 11(6): 773–779. Czarniawska, B. (2008). A theory of organizing. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Czarniawska, B. and T. Hernes (2005). Constructing macro-actors according to ANT. In Czarniawska, B and T. Hernes (Eds.), Actor-network theory and organizing. Liber and Copenhagen Business School Press. Dutton, J. and J. Dukerich (1991). Keeping an eye on the mirror: The role of image and identity in organizational adaptation. Academy of Management Journal, 34(3): 517–554. Emirbayer, M. (1997). Manifest for a relational sociology. The American Journal of Sociology, 103(2): 281–317. Feldman, M. S. and W. J. Orlikowski (2011). Theorizing practice and practicing theory. Organization Science, 22(5): 1240–1253. Feldman, M. S. and B. T. Pentland (2003). Reconceptualizing organizational routines as a source of flexibility and change. Administrative Science Quarterly, 48(1): 94–118. Hayes, G. R., C. P. Lee, and P. Dourish (2011). Organizational routines, innovation, and flexibility: The application of narrative networks to dynamic workflow. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 80/8: 161–177. Hernes, T. (2008). Understanding organization as process: Theory for a tangled world. London and New York: Routledge. Langley, A., C. Smallman, H. Tsoukas, and A. Van de Ven (2013). Process studies of change in organization and management: Unveiling temporality, activity and flow. Academy of Management Journal, 56(1): 1–13. Latour, B. (1986). The powers of association. J. Law (Ed.), Power, action and belief: A new sociology of knowledge? London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 264–280. Latour, B. (2004). On using ANT for studying information systems: A (somewhat) Socractic dialogue. In Avgerou, C. and C. Ciborra (Eds.), The social study of information and communication technology: Innovation, actors and contexts. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Lindberg, K. (2002). Kopplandets kraft. Omorganisering mellan organisationer. Goteborg: BAS. Lindberg, K. and B. Czarniawska (2006). Knotting the action net, or organizing between organizations. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 22: 292–306. March, J. G. (1966). The power of power. In D. Easton (Ed.), Varieties of political theory. New York: Prentice Hall. Mein Goh, J., G. (Gordon) Gao, and R. Agarwal (2011). Evolving work routines: Adaptive routinization of information technology in healthcare. Information Systems Research, 22(3): 565–585. http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/ isre.1110.0365 Mesle, R. C. (2008). Process-relational philosophy: An introduction to Alfred North Whitehead. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press. Pentland, B. T. and M. S. Feldman (2007). Narrative Networks: Patterns of Technology and Organization. Organization Science, 18/5: 781–795. Quick, K. S. (2010). Inclusive public leadership practices: Green stewardship and neighborhood planning in Grand Rapids. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Irvine. Van Maanen, J. (2006). Style as theory. Organization Science, 6(1): 133–143. Yeow, A., and S. Faraj (2008, December). Marrying work and the technical artifact within the healthcare organization: A narrative network perspective on IT innovation-mediated organizational change. Paper presented at the International Conference on Information Systems 2008 in Paris, France. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n41

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The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Truth and Process Studies

Contributors: Robin Holt Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies Chapter Title: "Truth and Process Studies" Pub. Date: 2016 Access Date: February 19, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781446297018 Online ISBN: 9781473957954 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n42 Print pages: 636-644 © 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Truth and Process Studies Robin Holt In Franz Kafka's novel Der Proceß, Joseph K finds himself accused of a nameless crime and thrown into a fluid and turbid world of groundless procedures, duplicitous advisers, heedless authorities, curious neighbours, and personal uncertainties, all of which cohere in the unsettled experience of transgression and guilt. Arguments live without warrants and decisions without legitimacy, and organization abounds, but without apparent form or purpose. This world of process is both trial and trail: K is organized into this condition by his own wandering as he moves through a trapdoor world, searching for the dénouement of a verdict which never arrives. Though often read as a coruscating attack on the preponderance of suffocating formal procedures – so as a fictional critique of bureaucracy – the travails of K reveal a life of push and pull forces; it is a novel of process. K experiences associations and resemblances between things (for example, when he tries to find others who might share his plight) but all the while these fail to resolve into anything with the fixed identity of classes and members. Instead we have a constant passing over into yet further associations which become equally unstable. It is apparently a fantastical world, but still real enough. Indeed, it might attest to our future rather well, a future of which the refugee crisis during 2015/16 was some portent. People fleeing territorial vacuums created by power plays in the Middle East found themselves being organized by distant and inaccessible authorities into conditions of vulnerability in strikingly similar ways to K – and in both instances of wandering, groundless questions of distinction and justice abound: who to blame, who is accountable, who is a victim, what is a border? How is it possible to tell truths about such a condition? Kafka's genius is in portraying the very ordinary and anxious quality of this apparently extraordinary disorientation towards truth. Where fear has a source, something that can be tackled, like a fire, anxiety stems from a sense of collapsing order without any focal source, or, more insidiously, as observed by Saint Just in the wake of the French Revolution of the 1790s, from a persistent sense that any present order is nothing more than its own future disorder. In K's story, the anxiety is cast as guilt, which heightens his culpability with the experience of processual disorientation and elicits an almost instinctual assumption that he should recover and find settlement. Guilt impels him forward on a journey towards acquittal, for which his felt innocence is prepared to pay, notably with the diminution of his chauvinistic sense of self-importance, but with every consideration of possible culpability comes deepening disorientation and exile from his bourgeois norms. He lacks perspective and power, the streets of the city lose their distinct character, becoming like a maze, and his moves in the procedural dance fall foul of the strange tempos being struck by officials, who, though they offer the possibility of correction for a small fee, yield nothing but more confusion: K's assets dwindle into the void like coins into the deep declivities of a miser's pocket.As with K, so with refugees, including the forced removal of their (often meagre) assets. They endure the formalized turmoil of newly erected border crossings, overwhelmed asylum application systems and the brazen noise of flag-waving, parish pump nationalists. Even when they become ‘neighbours', to recall another Kafka story, they can remain distant, their presence also a persistent absence. No one knows what to do; a vague sense of guilt abounds, without resolution. The anxious disorientation is shared by those in power who are themselves increasingly rootless. In between the refugees and leaders the delirium spreads and the only source of certainty is a daily recourse to platitude. Process studies researchers are alive to such fluidity and anxiety; indeed, finding themselves studying a world that is vibrant, feckless, restless, and bottomless, and where truth always struggles, they often do little to alleviate it. This has been a source of critique. At least refugees, refugee agencies, and government regulators are trying to work free, to use knowledge to better organize and settle human affairs. Many process studies researchers seem to avoid any responsibility for trying to improve the human condition. They remain content with observing uncertain and vulnerable phenomenon and conceptualizing these as: paradoxical, complex, confusing, multi-layered and endlessly re-constructed. Surely parables like K's, if they are to be taken seriously, and not as perverse asides, show what it is like to be organized without the security of enduring form, function and purpose, inducing readers to think what a world that is free from the process of being processed might look like. Surely social scientific research should offer truths whose illumination helps extricate us from ambiguity and to tidy-up what was messy? If the world is indeed a foaming place of forces, motion, and bePage 2 of 8

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coming in which certainties are hard to come by – and forced migration is just one very apparent example of such – then surely social scientific inquiry that attempts to understand the ordering of human affairs is more necessary than ever? Many social scientists concur, and respond to the challenge of understanding by isolating causal relations between variables and then testing these through rigorous rounds of verification. Yet with all its talk of becoming, evolving, and contingency, process research cannot do likewise and often seems at risk of giving up on the scientific project of identifying truths, content instead to describe our place in this world as a constant predicament that is little better than K's. This criticism, however, makes two assumptions. First, assuming inquiry is of a correct, methodologically intense kind, then realizing truth is a possibility. Yet despite the claims to being scientific, no sooner is a social variable isolated as potentially related to another than these variables begin to interfere with one another like unruly lovers. For example, by associating the effect ‘curbing immigration’ with the cause ‘stricter application criteria’ the claim sets down the possibility of gaming the entry system. Once the immigration criteria are known (education criteria, financial assets, blood ties, family dependency), applicants can work towards acquiring these qualities, more or less truthfully: the curb becomes an invitation rather than deterrent. The linear rhythm established in the ‘if … then …’ reasoning of the claim ‘curbing immigration requires strict entry criteria’ creates a space in which people can move anew. Rather than settle anything, the inquiry into the truth of a situation encourages newly configured movement that puts further pressure on the immigration system to change the criteria yet again, or abandon them entirely. Second, and more profoundly, the criticism that process research gives up on truth assumes our basic relationship with the world is a knowledgeable one of stated and enduring facts, when perhaps it is more profound than that, or at least the truths being stated are far more enigmatic than those emerging from knowledge claims. Stanley Cavell (1986) certainly thinks so, arguing that it is a condition of acknowledging what exists rather than knowing about it that defines our most basic relations with things. To know a something is already to have pulled away and cut oneself off from potentially enriching if uncanny experience. Perhaps it is better to live alongside the void, rather than fill it, and act from a sense, like Kafka's, that far from being a source of certainty: the truth is always an abyss. One must – as in a swimming pool – dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again – laughing and fighting for breath – to the now double illuminated surface of things. (Janouch, 1971: 154–155) Truth is fluid, nothing to fasten onto, and something realized through immersion into the everyday from which ocurrences certainties are cleaved using the very metaphors by which occurrence was first settled upon. For Kafka such everyday occurrence was the struggle of managing an insurance office. Managing in the routines he instituted assumed both a sense of permanence and, when thought about, something uncanny. The rules were routine, yet as the subject of inquiry appeared strange, like familiar clothes worn by a stranger. Life twists, tightens, and expands anew, there is no going back, and like the now restless surfaces of disturbed water after having made the leap, it is you as much as the refracted and refracting light that moves with it. The details, the images pursued, are all-consuming, and hardly ever welcoming; a sense of un-homeliness abounds, a feeling that can be felt by those who once felt at home, before the leap. Kafka's sense of truth is hardly a social scientific activity if by science we mean the use of control variables, ceterus paribus conditions, the strict application of methodological rules, building theory, and the inevitable pressure from funding bodies demanding accountable impact statements; Kafka's is a migratory, uprooting experience of immersive truth largely lost to social science, but one that might, with process research, return. This is not about abandoning clear knowledge claims, distinctions, or well-lit relations between things, but appreciating that these are not all there is to truth. The truth lies with the details being attended to – and in such agitating inquiry there is constant folding and re-folding of what ‘is’ the case, like the folding of water and light of the swimming pool.

Poetic Truth Page 3 of 8

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Kafka's ‘laughing and fighting’ truth carries archaic echoes, ones that in Marcel Detienne's The Master's of Truth in Ancient Greece find expression as beginnings or openings unfurling from the inspired tongues of poets. Through their schooling in recitation and tale-telling, Detienne imagines these poets in abeyance to the goddess of memory, and having remembered and spoken the stories that have always been told, they find themselves talking both of things familiar, and of things that may have been concealed, but which now appear as vividly as a harvest moon against an inky sky: but doing so by always enveloping them and their audience in the established and old; discs of light surfacing against the ageless night that set the poet and audience alike into sympathetic closeness with the world. The poets’ truths are true because they are spoken and resonate, nothing more. They fall through the poet, as music falls through air, taking irreversible effect in their expression. Free from the molestation of structured questioning and proof, they offer nothing to sceptics, whose doubt simply betokens deafness, or to verifiers, whose attempts at confirmation lose the moment entirely in a flurry of abstracting analysis. There is neither argument to pitch nor claim to assert in such truth. Its expression is larded with fate, and, being gifted in the company of often inscrutable and whimsical gods, any illumination is as momentary and elusive as it is piercing. The poets would sing of lulls in battle making way for the sacrifice of black beasts, of befuddled kings and unheard oracles, of the origins of fire, of shape-shifting deities, and of man-swallowing seamonsters, and the truth opened up in the telling of these mythic events. The events and characters are both clear and mysterious, and the truth being produced self-sufficient in its enigmatic variety. There were no checks, yardsticks, precedents, nothing to act as a balance or counter position, because there was only a telling and listening in places where facts are seen from within, without compass of the whole, and in being seen are also felt (Carson, 1999: 94). In moments of disturbance where the poet introduced surprises into the standard tale aletheia – truth – comes paired with Lethe (concealing, oblivion), and how much more enticing is truth accompanied by the prospect of its dissolution? Lethe is not an opposite, a reaction, but is sheathed by aletheia, as shadow does light (Detienne, 1996: 21–23, 81). The negative is not a negation; rather, it first draws us towards the arresting certainty of newly arranged and emphasized aspects of a long-standing story. The standard changes, it has new edges etched in the strangeness and curiosity of deviation. These can then be tempered by agreement as they settle back into being the standard, before being concealed as they are in turn skewed or supplanted; the metaphors take the story ever onwards as aletheia and lethe intertwine. The poet tells stories like that of Theseus returning home and forgetting to put up the white sail to indicate he had killed the Minotaur. The poet can talk of a sail that is ‘blacker than black', or of one ‘not white, but black', and the intensification and negation of what is a plain ‘black sail’ plays with the resonance of fact, throwing the momentum of portents and contrasts into a narrative shape of things to come that cannot be contained by a single predicate – a black sail is not just a black sail. Deviation is everywhere in the telling of a tale. Aegeus, Theseus’ anxious father, was watching from the high cliffs and hoping for a white sail. So why had Theseus forgotten? It was because of excitement at having used cunning and courage to slay the monster. Or in a twist on this explanation, it was because, having left his love Ariadne back in Crete, she who had extricated him from the maze with her thread, Theseus was distracted. Or it was natural justice because Aegeus had been implicated in the death of Androgeus, Minos’ son. Is this now a story of love, or still one of honour? Either way the black sail stays black, and is read by his waiting father correctly as an agreed signal his son had failed, and as his son failed, so then had he and the city of Athens, which would have to continue handing over youthful citizens in tribute to the Cretans, and as food for the unruly progeny of a lustful queen and a bull. Shorn of his kingly standing, Aegeus leaps into the void, his life ending in sea-naming immolation. The Aegean sea has never been blacker than in its birth. Such an intricate nest of influence and confluence is of a profoundly differently quality to the linear rhythms of cause and effect. It is one, for example, permitting poets to call the sail red, or redder than red, showing unerring sensitivity for the welling up of tragic events unleashed by Theseus’ oversight (Carson, 1999: 8). To talk truthfully about black sails is never to talk absolutely or definitively about the world, but always of it, from within, where black sails are signals that are read correctly, but given in error, and which open lives out to Page 4 of 8

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tragedy and so can be red sails. As read and red sails they can also be synecdoches for a still limping city state, or for bright graves dug into the sky where hope can be laid to rest. In being spoken of poetically the open resonance of truth is never exhausted; indeed, it begs re-presentation. The meaning is performative, a doing, not representing, where image and language become synonyms with a power to affect and be affected. Detienne (1996: 31–32) identifies a change to this efficacious sense of poetic truth occurring sometime around the writing of a Hymn by the poet Parmenides, where we find a goddess revealing the way to truth as something to be attested to, defended, investigated, a process of discovery, where the absent is filled with presence. Instead of being spoken, truth becomes something to be hunted down. This change also comes anthropologically, as the Mediterranean kingdoms and their kings dissolve into myth, or disappear completely, and we are left with systems of governance, statesmen, and factions. An explicit polis is formed, a body of citizens who accept government through their own assembly, and not just that of the gods. They are bullish – especially the now resurgent Athenians – always asking ‘why?’ and whether it might be different. Memory (stored in initiation and myth) is mixed with reasoned dialogue (the rhetorics of politics and law) and intentional action (planned trade or war). The difficulties of gaining truth change from those associated with poetically interpreting mystically grounded insight to those associated with negotiation and argument. Truth no longer begins or initiates events, but becomes the upshot, and outcome of a reasoned process. Where, with Detienne's poets, truth was never clear, but a gathering of dark and light, sweetness and bitterness, all shifting ripples, reflection and refraction, now these carefully and tragically paired antinomies give way to methodologically governed inquiry. Such self-sufficiency is the birth of logic and science, and eventually the commitment to a truth that in its essential and clear nature can be translated across time and space, without change, free to move from one audience to another, from one practice to another, from one place to another, untroubled. Truth is severed from its being issued and heard; it becomes pursued and, once caught, is verified, until set hard, without the need for being spoken for. There is in some ways a liberating effect here. Truth is out there, a quarry we hunt amid the wild undergrowth, or elusive plants we gather. In searching and finding the ground is cleared, and we continue pushing outwards, leaving clearings we then occupy with habit. At the outset of such inquiry, we encounter a messy world, what the poet Ovid called ‘a shapeless, unwrought mass of inert bulk/and nothing more, with the discordant seeds/ of disconnected elements all heaped/ together in anarchic disarray’ (2004: 15). Though starting in such disarray, inquiry finds the world being gradually reshaped by humans, they identify and classify, and so control it by virtue of having set it up to be controlled. We become involved in some way, no longer a gathering of inspired speakers and listeners but implicated in the search. The base human condition is now one of having ‘fallen'. We no longer remember the divine, only memorialize it, and so, being alone, we organize ourselves towards truth. Organization (from organon, tool) touches on what we are (beings in possession of organs that give us life), and what we might become (beings restlessly seeking to mechanically improve that which is given to us with the gift of mechanics). Whilst enjoying the liberating effect of this inquiry, Detienne warns us of its canalizing effect. Empirical inquiry into truth encourages us to use our senses, most notably our eyes where truth is seen; as our eyes see we discover they might see further with the addition of devices like glass lens, so we come to rely on tools, and then become indistinct from them. The glass lens extends our senses in range and sensitivity, knowing more of the world than we otherwise would, but it also brackets off the senses, no just the edges of sight, but an awareness that sight is related to other senses, and can be experienced collectively. We forget this, and get carried away with the sense that properly organized inquiry (the rise of method) allows us to move beyond our current condition towards something clear and permanent.

Truth and Inquiry It is Rene Descartes who best exemplifies this association of inquiry, disciplinary method and truth, especially the idea of truth realized through prosthetic enhancement to empirical inquiry: how the human body is a site Page 5 of 8

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in which natural and mechanical organon come together in ways that might better dispose the human being towards settled and even pure organization. In being placed over the eye, Descartes finds a telescope enhances our condition by revealing more closely the movements of the world, and of ourselves within the world (Gauvin, 2006). It is, like many scientific instruments, a tool of perfectibility, and receives its purest expression in knowledge of simple lines extending from, and returning to, points of origin. With such instruments, and the procedures, and regularities that go along with them, the knowledge-producing body – the organon – becomes an orderly soul; exactness is next to godliness. The disciplinary rigour by which we approach and appreciate the world organizes us into becoming that thinking, doubting, being thing of which we can be most certain. We can never finally state truth, but we can suppose it, much like, argues Descartes by analogy, our experience of a valley allows us to suppose the idea of a mountain. The coming together of mechanical and natural organon in science show us that we are finite, mortal, and partial, but always striving to better these conditions, and so just as valleys suppose mountains, our imperfections suppose perfection. David Hume objected to Descartes’ sense of perfection on the grounds that it was both too wordy and unworldly. We can conceive how perfection might exist, fine, but we can also conceive it not existing, and one conception cannot trump the other without empirical demonstration. As Descartes himself admitted, the mechanical and natural organon never quite gets there, no matter how long the telescope or magnifying the microscope. For Descartes, though, we should not be sceptical, but keep striving, and it is his sense of the disciplined and disciplining organon rather than Humes’ scepticism that seems to have stayed with the practice of science, and then social science. Realising more perfect states is an aspiration that tethers inquiry in truth, whether in studying nature, or in the study of organizational life and how we organize. The intimacy between science and human organization articulated by Descartes’ urging us towards a realizing a purer soul still echoes in our organized settings where, under the aegis of management, people are being urged towards efficiency and effectiveness, without ever being deemed efficient or effective. We run asymptotically to them, much as for Descartes our soul would always run asymptotically towards God, and like K does to his own crime. Thus, organizationally, we seem consigned to processes of improvement, no matter how incremental, knowing whatever we do it is not good enough. In the same way, in passing through the trial, K was looking for clarity, knowing it would never come. Process research asks whether we have allied ourselves too long with this hunt for truth as an ending, rather than a beginning. Hume's questioning of Descartes was spurred by his sceptical inclination to work with approximations, acknowledging how experience is continually throwing certainties awry. Putting words back in their place, back into the world, we have to admit that our way of relating to the world through truth is often less one of gradual perfectibility than spontaneous attraction – we are pulled this way then that without apparent reason, and often find ourselves following desire, or led astray by curiosity, or just plain indifferent, feelings over which we have but feint influence. The eyes are not just organs to be improved upon by the linear addition of telescopes, they are also windows to the soul, and gazing into them can plunge us into all manner of vivid ferment in which pressures, tastes, sounds, smells, and inclinations are gathered. Descartes’ rectilinear world of a soul at the centre of an ordered space extending outward into vanishing points gives way to much more contested experiences of human subjectivity. The edges of such a subject are far from clear, even literally: the skin tenses with the cold, blushes with embarrassment, tingles with sensual touch, or the muscles and mind can tense with anxiety, still with boredom, become agitated by memory; the internal organs host other species and process the bodies of other creatures, they give out with disease. Coupled to these patterns of action, sensation, memory, and thought, the body coheres as a continuity in space, time, and appearance, a subject whose subjectivity bends and falls in with wider forces, bodily and nervously sensing the motion of the world to which it ineluctably belongs, learning and resisting the regulatory forces by which it is impelled, and the imitative forces by which it is encouraged, all this, amid others doing similarly. The commerce of the world does not simply allow (restrictively) an individual self to persist according to well-defined edges. Rather, the individual self is invented as the small gathering of passion, thought, and flesh moulded and stretched into something less partial, more clubbable, encompassing a great breadth of social sensitivity Page 6 of 8

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by which collective placing it is recognized as something divided from the whole (Deleuze, 1969/1990). This takes us back to Ovid's world of metamorphosis, the poet's world, where life lives as continual forming that wells up and falls away, including our own self or soul, always eluding the perfecting attentions of an essential, definitive truth. The soul or self is always a fragment, and it is in encountering what is absent that thought excites itself with speculation and action with activity, living with the provocations of negativity, in the spirit of Henri Bergson for whom the speculation of inquiry was ‘making use of the void to think the full’ (quoted in Carson, 1999: 103–104), which is also Hume's stretching of the passions so that they reach into stable social sentiment (see Deleuze, 2001: 46–47). Truth becomes multiple, formed from a mixture of negotiated utility, guilt, preference, indignation, excitement, assertion, and discipline. We do not organize just to pursue truth, but then use truth to organize. In the scientific practice of laboratories, Hans Rheinberger (1997: 28) calls this the instituting of an epistemic object: an elusive object of interest towards which already existing technical objects (machines, theories, compounds) are organized in experimental systems. There is an unending dialectic between epistemic and technical objects, truths inquiring after truth so to speak, in which the object of inquiry, while being material, is configured by a host of textures, evaluations, and rhythms. Being born into truth meaning is everywhere, it cannot be avoided, performance is always coming in and fact is reunited with its etymological roots in fabulation.

Truth and Process In his diaries, Kafka recalls looking out of the city of Prague and imagining how much it weighed. We might remark on the spread of a city, the growing loftiness of its buildings and the shadows they cast on older structures, on the motion and mobility of its citizens. Not typically, though, its weight, unless one is a structural engineer working upon the problem of securing high buildings. Yet with Kafka's description weight acts poetically, it is the equivalent of calling Theseus’ sail ‘red’ and not ‘black', the metaphorical stretching opens itself up to the analysis and understanding of experience otherwise concealed. Kafka's managerial work for an insurance company is apparently bureaucratic, its procedures lying heavy on the darkly suited shoulders of its employees, and its reliability and solidity resting assuredly in the minds of its customers, for whom the future is given weighting as an array of packaged risk, for which Kafka, the assessor of risk, was responsible. The work of such organization extends the reach of commodification – suddenly lives and their prospects can be packaged and protected by fee-generating services, there is no bare life. With the growing reputation of these firms and the increasing frequency of such trade, the city starts to expand, attracting in turn regulation and further speculation, as in specifying rules more frequently and tightly, the regulators serve to increase the quantity of actions the rules do not cover. As the city expands, it is at any moment larger than it was, and smaller than it is becoming, always eluding the present, refusing the easy distinction between before and after, as well as the steady identifying locus of an Idea, a model or its copy (Deleuze, 1969/1990: 1–3). We imagine its weight (which for Kafka, (1948/1976: 24) is a measure of the past), and thinking hard about this stretching of our common sense, come to realize that such a measure can work for a city, but perhaps it is not easily reconciled with the image we have of an expanding city (size being a measure of the future), and Kafka shows us how to stick with the images. The insurance products in which Kafka dealt grow in complexity, become denser and yet more fluid as technology takes them afar, distant from either resting place or point of origin. Buildings are insured, and so are pianist's hands, the journeys undertaken by ships, and loans, and these insurance agreements are re-insured, bundled, and sold on as new more innovative instruments. Here the growth of the city is no longer configured in weight, but in rapidity and distance: how quickly can an instrument be used to move debt on to become another's liability, and how far away? There is little of the traditional sense of the material instrument about these new structures: their sharpness is one of indifference to the human lives they package, their sheen is borrowed from the hyperbole of brokers’ presentations, their utility concerns the prospect of generating abnormal profit. The measure is now light, not weight. Kafka's truth revels in an analysis of these financial ‘things’ such as risk and insurance, using the metaphor weight. Now, with the preponderance of viral speech in which even the binary off or on, black or white, is Page 7 of 8

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being made contingent by quantum computing, different metaphors are needed. Process studies has to concern itself with how to wrestle such things as these financial instruments into conditions of truth when they have no more weight than faeries and no more responsibility than sprites. How to follow their effects when they seem as wide and baleful as a global Auto da Fe whose cold fires have gone underground to erupt god knows where, because accountability has simply been lost and coding standards are being uprooted? There is a vast circulating ecology of influence here into which researchers leap, and then come up, with the double illumination of being implicated entirely in the images they pursue. The same goes for studying the refugee crisis where truth is similarly elusive and different metaphors needed. John Berger, for example (1984/2005: 64), writes how his time with refugees has yielded inquiry not simply into the political and economic conditions by which disorganization arose, but also into the nature of home itself. How, he asks, while no longer having a centre to the world, a rooted place called home, do those who wander as unwanted aliens still find it in them to build homes? His answer is telling: To the underprivileged, home is represented, not by a house, but by a practice, or set of practices. Everyone has his own. These practices, chosen and not imposed, offer in their repetition, transient as they may be in themselves, more permanence, more shelter than any lodging. Home is no longer a dwelling but the untold story of a life being lived. Kafka also tells such a story, but here it is one of failure to create a home, one that starts with a form of smug settlement and ends with failure and anxiety because no longer can K feel he has a stake in the objects, opinions, memories, actions, and thoughts being thrown up in the process of his trial. He realizes he no longer belongs, but he is not an alien, and so is left in a strange limbo of unhomeliness; an insider, without anything to be inside. Perhaps such unhomeliness is how some feel when encountering settled refugees in ‘their’ towns? This is the insight of Kafka's poetic and hence processual sense of truth, the coming together of knower and known, of subject and object, so that truth becomes our element in life, an immersion, from which we look to begin, and begin again, given truth is always in some way a holding open to what is absent as though it might be present, to what is virtual as though it might be actual. It is not comforting, and in Kafka's hands thoroughly disturbing, yet its virtue as a beginning and not an ending is in extending itself into the qualities of worldly material, form, and purpose in ways that implicate its advocates as beings leading a life, nothing more. No matter how complex, structured, habituated, or weird are the conditions of its expression, truth remains the possession of its organizing advocates and audiences, and in being possessed also possesses them.

References Berger, J. (1984/2005). And our faces, my heart, brief as photos. London: Bloomsbury. Carson, A. (1999). Economy of the Unlost. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cavell, S. (1986) The Uncanniness of the Ordinary. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. April 3rd and 4th. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Deleuze, G. (2001). Pure Immanence. New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, G. (1969/1990). The Logic of Sense. Translated Mark Lester. London: Athlone Press. Detienne, M. (1996). The Masters of Truth in Ancient Greece. New York: Zone Books. Gauvin, J.-F. (2006). ‘Artisans, Machines and Descarte's Organon'. History of Science, 44: 187–215. Janouch, G. (1971). Conversations with Kafka. Translation S Fischer. New York: New Directions Publishing. Kafka, F. (1925/1998). The Trial. Translated by Breon Mitchell. New York: Schocken Books. Kafka, F. (1948/1976). The Diaries: 1910–1913. Translated by Joseph Kresh. New York: Schocken Books. Ovid (2004). Metamorphosis. Translated by Charles Martin. New York: Norton. Rheinberger, H. (1997). Towards a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesising Problems in the Test Tube. Stanford: Stanford University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473957954.n42 Page 8 of 8

The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies

Index academic-practitioner collaborative research, 286-302 a-temporal step, 288 moving from static descriptions to more dynamic ones, 289 multiple point perspective, 289 mus ical score step, 290 single point perspective step, 289 temporal processes, and, 288 Twinkle Twinkle, 296 action nets, 630-1 actor-network theory, 160-73, 628- 30 applicati on, 168- 9 beginnings, 160-2 Callon, Michel, 164-5 critiques, 168- 9 Latour, Bruno and, 162-4 Law, John, 165-8 management and organization studies, and, 169- 70 Mot, Annemarie, 165- 8 reassembling the social 162-4 semiotic materiality, 165- 8 acutely discriminative sense, 73-4 adaptation, 205-8, 2 10-11 adaptive systems, 128, 132-3 agency problem of knowing subject, 472- 3 agency and change, 375-6 agents complexity theory, and, 134 analysing process data, 237- 53 data requirements, 239-40 doing and becoming perspective, 238-40 emerging pattern, 243-6 fi nding 'aha' moment, 248 implications, 249- 50 patterns in the moment, 246-9 strong process approach, 237-53 studying everyday activities as they happen, 246-9 analysing scripted pattern, 241-3 analytical foc us, 195 antithesis, 9 1, 95, 258, 586, 603 Art of Fugue, 291-4 artifacts, 330- 1 asynchrony, 454-6 bankers' bodies, 230 before-the-fact orientational understandings, 7 1-2

beginning inquiries from within our bewilderments, 78- 9 Bergson, Henri, 43- 55 heterogeneity, 44- 7 homogeneity, 44-7 intelligence and creativity, 5 1-3 invitation, 53-4 virtual and actual, 47- 51 between is and and, 62-4 Blumer, Herbert, symbolic interactionism, and, 148- 50 boxes and arrows, 625- 34 alternatives to, 628-32 depicting process through, 627- 8 modified, 628 bureaucracy ethnomethodology, and, 176 Callon, Michel actor-network theory, 164-5 Canada chemical risk assessment, 476 case studies, 2 13, 304, 309, 3 11 , 392, 497, 504 CASs, 132- 3 cause and effect delays between, 137 CCO approach hi story of, 514- 15 change and pure becoming, 67- 9 changes distributed according to power laws, 129 chemical risk assessment Canada, 476 CJP action events, 578 collective structures, emergence of, 129 coming of process, 617- 19 communication, 5 13- 28 Communication as Constitutive of Organization (CCO), 5 13-28 see also CCO approach assumptions, 5 15 concepts, 5 15 exemplary works, 522 ideas, 5 15 communication flow, 5 15- 16 community-wide synchrony, 266-7 complex adaptive process, 456-7 complex re lational process, 457- 8 complex system changes distributed according to power laws, 129 collective structures, emergence of, 129

646

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PROCESS ORGANIZATION STUDIES

essential markers of systems whose processes arise from, 129-30 following simple rules constructing complex structures, 130 logic of, 130-2 numerous interacting components partly connected, 129 organization away from equilibrium, 129 path dependencies sensitive to initial conditions, 130 self-organization, and, 129 system diversity increasing, 130 complex temporal process, 458 complexity and organizational evolution 2 11-13 complexity perspectives on innovation, 459 complexity theory, 127-43 agents, 134 agents imitating one another, 137-8 agents' schemata, 134-5 delays between cause and effect, 137 development of process theory explanatio ns, 133-4 fluctuations injecting energy into system, 134 future directions, 139-41 gaps, 139-41 interconnected elements of system, 135 mindsets for complex processes, 139 organization of agents, 135-6 payoff functions for each agent, 136-7 process theory, and, 127-8 reasons for turning to, 128-9 research methods for building models of, 139-40 testing process theory explanation, 138- 9 theories and constructs, 139 concepts and the image of thought, 57-9 configurational approach, 121 contradi ctions, 87- 109 contradi ctions as relational systems, I 02 contradictions, development and social change, 93-6 contradictions, problem solving and performance, 96-8 conversation analysis, 194 critical di sclosure analysis, 196-7 cycles of divergence and convergence, 574-90 case illustrations, 577- 82 change process models, 585- 6 creative search, 582-3 cyclical model, 576-7 individual and organizational learning, 583-4 technological evolution, 584-5 theories of change and innovation, and, 582-6 cyclic processes of divergence and convergence, 575 Darwinism, 205- 19 generalized, 209-10 prominent confusions, 206-7 selection and adaptation, 210-l l

data requirements, 239-40 Deleuze, Gilles between is and and, 62-4 change and pure becoming, 67- 9 concepts and the image of thought, 57-9 empiricism and process, 59-62 individuation and events, 64-7 process philosophy, and, 56-70 Dewey, John, 7 1- 84 beginning inquiries from within our bewilderments, 78-9 diachrony, 454-6 dialectic approach 12 1-2 dialectics, 87-109 dialectics as model of change, 102 dialectics tradition, 93-6 summary of key ideas, 96 discourse theory, 190-203 hybrid approaches, 199 nature of, 190 process studies, and, 199 processual orientations, 194-20 I discursive power, 472-5 distal and proximal accounts, 621- 2 doing and becoming perspective, 238-40 embedding process, 616-24 embeddedness of meaning, 192-4 emerging pattern 243-6 empiricisim and process, 59-62 enactment, 517, 530, 537, 539, 559, 560-2 entitative, 610 entity, 6 10 entrepreneurship, 432-50 future directions, 446-8 literature review, 435-46 philosophically eclectic articles, 437-45 philosophically pure articles, 437 process of imagination, 445-6 selected research organized by Pepper's Worldviews, 436 selected theoretical research, 438-44 entropy, 267 epistemo logy, ~ 164, 340, 406, 645 equilibrium, 407, 434-5, 583-5 ethnography, 223-36 banker's bodies, 230 contribution to studying organizational processes, 229 examples, 229-32 fieldwork, 226-9 local government storytellers in action, 230-2 meaning, 223-4 research practice, 232- 3 sensework, 226-9 studying processes, 225-6 textwork, 226-9

INDEX

verbs and nouns, 225-6 ethnography and organizational processes, 223-36 ethnomethodology, 174-89 bureaucracy, and, 176 component parts, 174- 5 critique of funclionist sociology, 177 example, 175 facts in flight, study of, 179- 82 insights into organizations in process, 182- 5 knowledgeability, and, 178 leadership and decision making at work, 184-5 markets and marketing at work, 185 nature of, 174-6 organization-in-action, and, 176-8 patterns, 175-6 re-specifying organizational structure and culture, 179- 82 technology at work, 182- 3 texts at work, 183-4 evolution meaning, 204-5 evolutionary theory, 204-19 complexity and organizational evolution, 2 11- 13 inertia, 213- 14 prominent confusions, 206-7 replication, 2 13- 14 replicator-interactor distinction, 207- 9 routines, 213- 14 strategy, 2 13- 14 example event descriptions, 261 facts in flight study of, 179- 82 fieldwork, 226-9 first-order Markov Transition Matrix, 264 first-order strategy discourse, 200 following simple rules constructing complex structures, and, 130 force, 423-5 freedom, 37- 8 functionist sociology enthnomethodology, and, 177 genealogic approach, 120-1 heroic agency practice, and, 116-17 heterogeneity, 44-7 history in process organization studies, 303- 20 causative approaches, 309 consequentialist approaches, 307- 8 core of historical methodology, 313- 14 extant literature, 304-9 foc using on past processes, 309-10 four basic approaches, 305 going beyond the good story, 314-15 hermeneutics, 3 13- 14

647

identifying alternative process outcomes, 3 11- 12 learning from complete processes with known outcomes, 3 10- 11 methodology, 304-6 narrative approaches, 306 nature o f historical sources, 312- 13 ontology, 304-6 reasons for, 309- 12 research strategies, 3 12- 15 structuralist approaches, 306-7 theorization, 314-15 triangulation, 3 13- 14 validation, 3 14- 15 homogeneity, 44-7 human pattern recognition, 256 imaging organization as process, 6 10-12 implications of process thinking, 426-8 embeddedness, 427-8 organizing as process of place-making, 427 research on scaling up sustainable practices, 426-7 improvisation processes, 559-73 absence of shared common purpose, and, 563-5 common purpose, and, 561- 2 definition, 559- 61 four modes of improvisation, 561- 2 gaps and frontiers, 566-7 gaps in research on interactions between levels, forms and other processes, 568- 9 gaps within four modes, 567-8 interactions between levels of improvisation and other processes, 565-6 key assumptions, 559-6 1 macro-improvisation as strategy, 562- 3 macro-improvisation as struggle for strategic domination, 564-5 micro-improvisation as political ingenuity, 563-4 inconsistency and consistency combined, 102 individual action practice, and, 116-17 inertia, 2 13- 14 inhabited institutions, I54 instantiation of metaphysical entities practices, and 11 7- 18 individuation and events, 64-7 innovation as process, 45 1-65 assumptions underlying synoptic and performative view, 456 innovation j ourney ups and downs during, 460 institution early conceptualizations, 373-4 institutional entrepreneurship, 380-1 institutional logics, 379- 80 institutional outcomes, 200 institutional theory, 391-4 key concepts, 377- 82

648

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PROCESS ORGANIZATION STUDIES

institutional work, 381- 2 institutionalization early institutionalizations, 374-5 institutions as process, 372- 86 intelligence and creativity, 51-3 interaction, ~ 11. 145-6, 148-55 intuition, 53-4 James, William, 71-84 acutely discriminative sense, and, 73-4 pre-cognitive experiences, 75-7 pre-conceptual experiences, 75-7 transitional feelingful experiences, 75-7 what is in us, 74-5 what we are in, 74-5 knowledgeability ethnomethodology, and, 178 known objects, 466-80 knowing subjects, 466-80 Lake Erie, 418 Lamarckism, 206-8 language, 30-1 language of gestures, 79- 8 1 Latour, Bruno actor-network theory, 162-4 Law, John actor-network theory, 165- 8 leadership defining, 498-9 leadership and decision making at work, 184-5 leadership process, 497-5 12 contradiction, 505-6 doing relationship work, 501-2 doing strategic leadership, 502 leadership case histories, 502-3 leadership dialectics, 504-5 mobilizing collective to act, 500-1 paradox, 505-6 possible futures for research, 506-7 strategic change, 503-4 talk-in-interaction, 499- 500 tension, 505- 6 Legacy Jig 294 local government storytellers in action, 230-2 management and organization studies actor-network theory, and, 169-70 making process visible, 625- 34 managerial cognition, 200 managerial practice, 200 material artifacts, 529-43 materiality, 529-43 process metaphysics perspective, 531- 2 process of, 537- 8

studies of technology development and use, and,533 Mead, George Herbert, 71- 84 language of gestures, 79- 81 process philosopher 145-8 worlds of meaning, 79-8 1 meaning embeddedness, 192 mediatization narrative, and, 28 1 memory, 482, 507, 561, 566-8 metaconversation, 522-3 meomerkalli reindeer earmarks Sami culture, 193 metaphor, 607-15 implications for process researchers, 612- 13 theoretical language, in, 608- LO metaphor-metonymy dynamics, 609 metonymy, 607-15 mindfulness, 340-55 collective, 346-8 future research, 348-50 individual, 344-6 simplicity, and, 344 mindsets for complex processes, 139 Mol, Annemarie actor-network theory, 165- 8 multimodality and materiality, 280-1 music, 286-302 music of collaboration, 291-300 musical score, 290-1 duration, 290-1 e lements of, 290-1 polyphony, 29 1 rate, 291 sequence, 290 shape, 291 temporal punctuation, 290 mutation, 52, 210, 435 narrative network analysis, 631 narratives, 27 1-85 agency, 277- 8 alternative constructions and deconstructions, 276-7 construction, 274-6 deconstruction, 276-7 future research, 278-8 1 intertextuality, 279- 80 key role of, 271 means for organizational process descriptions, as, 274 mediatization, and, 28 1 organization and management research, in, 272-3 part of organizational ontology, as 277-8 perspectives on process organization studies, 273 processuality, and, 27 1- 85 representation, 274

INDEX

social constructions, as, 274---6 temporality, 279 negotiated order social order as, 150-3 novelty, 335, 343, 349, 435 numerous interacting components partly connected, 129 ontology 164, 191 , 209, 277- 8 ontological hardening, 409 openness, 422- 3 organization and management studies research strategies for 118-22 organization design, 544-58 changing routine, and 548-9 conflicting desired outcomes, and, 550-1 coordination, 546-7 different desired outcomes impacting, 555-Q elimination of uncertainty, and, 547- 8 gone wrong, 549- 50 initial, 545-6 insights for processes, 554 learning, and, 553- 5 professional conflict over, 552- 3 replacing, 551- 2 role of people in, 556-7 organizational change, 327- 30 organizational communication as process, 513-28 appropriation, 523-4 attribution, 523-4 authority, 519 conversations, 516-18 spacing, 523 texts, 5 16-18 textual agency, 518- 19 timing, 523 organizational contradictions, 87- 8 illustrative studies, 90-1 organizational culture and identity, 356- 71 becoming view, 359, 361- 2, 364-5 evolutionary view, 358, 359-QO, 362- 3 model of culture-identity dynamics, 365-6 periodic view, 358- 9, 360-1, 363-4 tangled becoming, 366 temporal connections, 366 temporal views, 357-65 organizational discourse studies 19 1- 2 organizational fields, 378- 9 organizational learning, 481-96 dimensions of process types, 485 gapsidentified,489- 9 1 implications, 491-3 key process frameworks, 485-7 opportunities, 49 J-3 organizing dimensions, 484 process frameworks, 484

reasons for, 487 types, 484 when taking place, 488-9 where taking place, 487- 8 who is learning, 482-4 organizational routines, 323- 39 change in,327-30 creativity, and, 335 early work on, 324- 5 embeddedness, 333-4 emergence of, 331- 2 learning, and, 33 J method for studying, 335 methodology of literature review, 326-7 multiplicity, 334 nature of, 332 process perspective, 323- 39, 327- 32 process view, 325-6 routine dynamics, 333 spatiality, 334-5 study from process perspective, 332- 3 temporality, 334-5 ways forward 333-5 organization-in-action ethnomethodology, and, 176-8 organizational structure and culture re-specifying, 179- 82 organizational studies, 191- 2 organizations and organizing, 154---6 organiza tions in process ethnomethodological insights, 182- 5 organizing away from equilibrium, 129 paradox and dialectics, 98-10 I contradictions, 99-100 interventions, 101 organizations, I00-1 process theorizing, I00 thinking habits, 101 paradox tradition, 96-8 paradoxes, 87- 109 past-present-future rethinking relationship, 405-6 path dependencies sensitive to initial conditions, 130 patterns in the moment, 246-9 Pepper's typology, 433-5 root metaphors, 434-5 theoretical binaries, 434 performative process, 472-5 phenomenology, 175 phases lock, 267 poetic truth, 637-40 polyphony, 5 19-22 potentiality, 425-{) power different approaches to, 471

649

650

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PROCESS ORGANIZATION STUDIES

study in organizations, 469-7 1 power and process, 466--80 identification of other voices, 477- 8 network of subject positions merging from discursive landscape, 477 recursive production of practice, subject and object, 478 unfolding nature of discursive landscape, 4 77 practice, 110--26 heroic agency, and, I 16-- 17 individual action, and, 11 6--17 instantiation of metaphysical entities, and, 117-18 meaning, 111- 14 more than what people do, fil practice approach, 110--26 scope, 114-18 practice-based perspective, ill practice theory, £1., I I 0--26 pragmatism, 88, 92, lQb ~ ~ 230, 439, 5 14, 5 15 praxeology of organizational and management studies, 11 0--26 pre-cognitive experiences, 75-7 pre-conceptual experiences 75-7 prehension, ~ 524 process defining, 498-9 meaning, 3-7, 190--1, 287-8 strong, 237- 53 weak, 6LO process appl ications, 13-18 process data stuff of sequence analysis, 259 process in discourse, 619- 20 process literature classification, 468 process metaphysics, 529-43 process methodology, I0--13 process of innovation, 45 1-65 innovation as process, and, 458-61 process of technology use, 535-7 process organization studies, 127-43 process perspectives, l2_ process philosopher Mead, George Herbet, 145- 8 process-philosophical worldview, 593-600 dynamic capabilities, 596--9 dynamic capabilities as habituated predisposition, 597-9 dy namic capabilities: contested view, 597 firm competitiveness, 596--9 practices, 594-6 predispositions, 594-6 purposiveness, 594-6 process philosophy Gilles Deleuze, and, 56--70 process research four types, 2

process researching, 1- 26 process studies of organizations, 467-9 process theories reference point for sequential analysis, 257- 9 process theorizing, 1-26 process theory complexity theory, and, 127-8 testing explanations, 138-9 process thinkers sustai nability issue, 4 18- 26 process thinking, 1-26 process-time conceptual challenges, 407-8 processes four generative mechanisms, 258 processual orientation d iscourse theory, and, 194-20 I processuality narratives, and, 271-85 Qnetics action events, 579 random, chaotic and periodic dimensions in innovation journey, 581 reassembling the social, 162-4 renection, IB 537 renexivity, ill relational power, 36--7 reliability, high, 500 rep!ication, 2 13-14 replicator-interactor distinction, 207-9 research strategies for organization and management studies, I 18-22 configurational approach, Jl!. dialectic approach, 12 1- 3 genealogic approach, 120--1 situational approach, I 19-20 restoring mystery, I0 1-2 rhetoric 198-9 routines, 2 13- 14 routines papers top fi ve journals publi shing, 327 Sarni culture meomerkalli reindeer earmarks, i l l scripted pattern, 24 1-3 self-organisation evident, whether, 129 selection in evolution, 463 semiotic materiality, J 65-8 sensemaking, 340--55 future research, 348- 50 review of, 341- 3 sensework, 226--9 sequence ABCABABCA subsequences for, 263 sequence characteristics, 267 sequence companion, 265---{)

INDEX

sequence data, 259 theoretically driven approaches, 262 sequence identification, 26 1- 2 methods for, 262 sequence missing, 262 sequences key to unlock processes, 255-6 methods of identifying relationships among, 265 relationships among two or more, 266-7 similarity to hypothetical sequence, 268 sequential analysis of processes, 254-70 formal approaches, 256-7 sequential data analyzing, 26 1-8 signs, 192-4 Silver, Spence, 45 1- 2 simplexity, 340-55 situational approach, 119-20 skiing personal action, as, ill social practice, as, ill snapshot epistemology, 406-7 social organization current trends, 153-6 future potential, 153- 6 social order negotiated order, as, 150-3 social organization symbolic interactionism, and, 150-3 sociomateriality variants of, 539 speech act theory, 195- 6 stability and change, 376-7 stabi lization problem of known object, 473-5 stages of insider/outsider research, 287 stochastic modeling, 263-4 strategy as practice, 387-40 I activity, and, 394-5 process and institution, 395- 8 strong process, 237- 53 structurational perspective, 197- 8 studies of process and power, 467- 7 1 study of strategic change in global telecommunications company, 474 studying everyday activities as they happen, 246-9 studying processes, 225-6 approaches to studying, 240-9 subjectivity, 31-4 subjectivity, process and relationality, 34-6 sustainability as process, 417-3 1 force, 423- 5 symbolic interactionism, 144-59 Blumer, Herbert and, 148-50 current trends, 153-6 future potential, 153-6 inhabited institutions, 154

651

nature of, 144 organizations and organizing, 154-6 social organization, and, 150-3 swastika, 192 symbols, 192-4 synthesis, 94-5, 98, 99-10 1, 452-4, 456, 505, 574, 585 system diversity increasing, 130 TAP action events, 579 technology at work, 182-3 technology development, 533- 5 temporal assumptions, ill temporal disjunctures, 4 10-12 strategy and innovation, in, 411-12 sustainable development, in, :!_!_!_ temporal lens of organizational participant, 408- 12 temporal lens of the researcher, 404-8 temporal perspective movement to, 288- 90 temporal processes, 288 temporal structures clashing, 409 types, 409- 10 temporal trajectory, 601- 6 temporality, 4 18- 2 1 tensions, 87-109 texts at work, 183-4 textwork, 226-9 theorizing process, 7-10 theory of practice, 122-4 time and temporality, 403-4 time, temporality and process studies, 402- 16 timeless forms, 72- 3 timely meanings, 72-3 Toledo, Ohio, i l l traces, nature of, 334 transitional feel ingful experiences, 75- 7 truth and inquiry, 640-1 truth and process, 641- 3 truth and process studies, 635-43 turbulence, 267 turning towards activity, 388-9 1 typology building, 265-6 Usher, A.P. process of cumulative synthesis, 453 steps of model, 452- 3 values, 38- 9 varieties of organizational contradictions, 89- 93 ventriloquism, 5 19- 22 verbs and nouns, 225-6 virtual and actual, 47- 5 1 whole sequence analysis, 264-5 wholeness, 421- 2

652

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PROCESS ORGANIZATION STUDIES

what is in us, 74-5 what we are in, 74-5 Whitehead, Alfred North, 29-42 Whitehead's process relational philosophy, 29-42 freedom, 37-8 language, 30-1

relational power, 36--7 subjectivity, 3 1-4 subjectivity, process and relationality, 34-6 values, 38-9 worlds of meaning, 79- 8 1