The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies

Ann Langley,Haridimos Tsoukas

• Editorial: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473959194
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Commerce
• Categoría: Développement organisationnel

The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies provides a comprehensive and timely overview of the field. This volume offers a compendium of perspectives on process thinking, process organizational theory, process research methodology and empirical applications. The emphasis is on a combination of pedagogical contributions and in-depth reviews of current thinking and research in each of the selected areas, combined with the development of agendas for future research.

The Handbook is divided into five sections:

• Part One: Process Philosophy
• Part Two: Process Theory
• Part Three: Process Methodology
• Part Four: Process Applications
• Part Five: Process Perspectives

1 Introduction: Process Thinking, Process Theorizing and Process Researching

Ann Langley and Haridimos 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 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 diversit...