First International Symposium on Process Organization Studies
Theme: Sensemaking and Organizing
11-13 June 2009, Pissouri, Cyprus
Conveners:
Tor Hernes, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark and Norwegian School of Management, Norway, tor.hernes@bi.no
Sally Maitlis, Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Canada, maitlis@sauder.ubc.ca
Haridimos Tsoukas, ALBA Graduate Business School, Greece & University of Warwick, UK, pros@alba.edu.gr
Keynote Speakers:
Keith Ansell Pearson, Professor of Philosophy, University of Warwick, UK, author of Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life
Kenneth J. Gergen, Mustin Professor of Psychology, Swarthmore College, USA, author of Relational Being: Beyond the Individual and the Community
Kathleen Sutcliffe, Gilbert and Ruth Whitaker Professor of Business Administration and Professor of Management and Organizations, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, USA, co-author of Managing the Unexpected
Rationale
"What really exists is not things made but things in the making. Once made, they are dead, and an infinite number of alternative conceptual decompositions can be used in defining them. But put yourself in the making by a stroke of intuitive sympathy with the thing and, the whole range of possible decompositions coming into your possession, you are no longer troubled with the question which of them is the more absolutely true. Reality falls in passing into conceptual analysis; it mounts in living its own undivided life - it buds and bourgeons, changes and creates" (emphases in the original).
William James, A Pluralistic Universe (1909)
"We are observing the birth of a science that is no longer limited to idealized and simplified situations but reflects the complexity of the real world, a science that views us and our creativity as part of a fundamental trend present at all levels of nature"
Ilya Prigogine, The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature (1997)
Process Organization Studies (PROS) is a way of studying organizations that unfolds from process metaphysics – namely, the worldview that sees processes, rather than substances, as the basic forms of the universe. A process orientation prioritizes activity over product, change over persistence, novelty over continuity, expression over determination. Becoming, change, flux as well as creativity, disruption, and indeterminism are the main themes of a process worldview.
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 processes involved in - the sequences of activities and transactions that take place and contribute to - their constitution. As process philosopher Nicholas Rescher 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. It rests on a anti-dualist and relational ontology, namely the recognition that everything that is has no existence apart from its relation to other things, and, therefore, long established 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 overcome. Focusing on inter-actions is preferred to analyzing self-standing actions.
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, as well as to reality comprising experiences. Unlike substances, which do not include one another but are seen as nested, standing under one another – sub-stantia -, experiences include other experiences and grow out of the integration of bodily and mental events into something new. Cognition and symbolic interaction are understood to be embedded into ways of life and arising from embodied interactions with the world, mediated by artifacts. Temporality is a constitutive feature of human experience, and processes unfold in time. Human phenomena cannot be properly understood if time is abstracted away.
Process thinking is intimately connected with what philosopher Stephen Toulmin calls an "ecological style" of thinking. The latter seeks to embrace complexity by reinstating the importance of the particular, the local, and the timely; it is sensitive to context, interactivity, experience, and time; and it acknowledges non-linearity, emergence, and recursivity.
Although not necessarily consolidated under a process-metaphysical label, several strands in organization studies have adopted a more or less process-oriented perspective over the years. Karl Weick's persistent emphasis on organizing and the important role of sensemaking in it is perhaps the best known process approach that has inspired several organizational researchers. Henry Mintzberg's, James March's, Andrew Pettigrew's, and Andrew Van de Ven's early work on the making of strategy, decision making, organizational change, and innovation respectively also shows an awareness of the importance of process-related issues. Current studies that take an explicitly performative (or enactivist, or relational) view of organizations focusing on, for example, routines, trust, innovation and change, strategizing, naturalistic decision making, learning and knowing, communication, sensemaking, and the enactment of technological change in organizations have similarly adopted, to varying degrees, a process vocabulary, and have further refined a process sensibility. Indeed, the growing use of the gerund (-ing) indicates the desire to move towards dynamic ways of understanding organizational phenomena, especially in a fast-moving, inter-connected, globalized world.
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, self-organization, technology, etc, which have often been studied as "substances" (or self-standing "events"), from a process 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 orientation to the study of organizational phenomena that treats them not as faits accomplis but as (re)created through interacting agents embedded in discursive practices, whose actions are mediated by institutional, linguistic and objectual artifacts.
Purpose, Venue, and Organization
The aim of this Symposium is to consolidate, integrate, and further develop ongoing efforts to advance a sophisticated process perspective on organization studies. It is important for the vigorous intellectual development of the field and its relevance to the world of practice that the implications and resonance of the process worldview for organization studies be appreciated and sustained, rather than just dallied with as an engaging side-line in the prevailing analytic language game. We live in a world of processes although we often try to comprehend it in the vocabulary of substances. Aligning our conceptual vocabulary with our organizational experience is an important aim of the Symposium. In short, the objective is to facilitate high-quality, rigorous scholarship that explicitly seeks to advance a process worldview.
The Symposium is an annual event organized by the new annual volume Perspectives on Process Organization Studies (Editor: Haridimos Tsoukas), to be published by Oxford University Press (subject to contract), and it takes place in a Mediterranean island, in early summer each year. About 50 papers will be accepted each time, following a review of submitted abstracts by the conveners. Authors of accepted papers will have the opportunity to interact in depth and share insights in a stimulating, relaxing, and scenic environment.
The First Symposium will take place at Columbia Beach Resort, Pissouri, Cyprus (http://www.columbia-hotels.com/english/index-zypern.html), on 11-13 June 2009. Cyprus (http://www.visitcyprus.org.cy) is renowned for its splendid weather, the alluring beaches and its fragrant mountain peaks. The Symposium venue, comfortable, beautiful, and situated by the sea, will provide an ideal setting for participants to relax and engage in authentic and creative dialogues.
The Symposium is organized in two tracks.
· One is the General Track, which includes papers that explore a variety of organizational phenomena from a process perspective.
· The second is the Thematic Track, which includes papers addressing the particular theme of the Symposium every year. For 2009 the Theme is Sensemaking and Organizing. Sensemaking – the process of social construction in which individuals and groups attempt to explain surprising or confusing events – has become a critically important topic in the study of organizations. Research has examined sensemaking at the individual, group, organizational, and inter-organizational levels, and explored its processes and effects in contexts as wide ranging as corporate mergers and acquisitions, wildland firefighters, and orchestras. Central to all of this work, and inherent to the concept of sensemaking, is an understanding of organizing as "the experience of being thrown into an ongoing, unknowable, unpredictable streaming of experience in search of answers to the question, "what's the story?"" (Weick, Sutcliffe & Obstfeld, 2005: 410). In this Thematic Track, we encourage empirical or conceptual submissions that address the relationship between sensemaking and organizing, and particularly those that push our understanding of these concepts and this relationship into new or underdeveloped areas.
Submissions may address, but need not be confined to, issues such as: The relationships between sensemaking and various micro-organizational behaviors, e.g., leadership, motivation, etc; distributed sensemaking in teams and organizations; how emotion influences sensemaking, and how sensemaking generates emotion; the micro-processes of collective sensemaking in teams; the relationships between sensemaking and various macro-organizational concepts, e.g., institutions, networks, etc; sensemaking and collective action in organizations; the relationship between individual and collective sensemaking; sensemaking and critical theory, including analyses of power in sensemaking.
Following a rigorous review process, a selection of papers will appear in the first volume of Perspectives on Process Organization Studies in 2010.
Submissions
Interested participants must submit to Haridimos Tsoukas (pros@alba.edu.gr) an abstract of no more than 1000 words for their proposed contribution by January 31st, 2009. The submission must be made via email and it must be a Word attachment. It should contain authors' names, institutional affiliations, email and postal addresses, and indicate the track for which the submission is made (General or Thematic), while the subject matter line of the email should indicate "Process Symposium". Authors will be notified of acceptance or otherwise by February 28th, 2009. Full papers will be submitted by May 15th, 2009.