Doing Process Research in Organizations: Noticing Differently

This book takes up the challenge that process philosophy and process ontology pose to conventional, entity-based empirical research, even daring to question the relevance of ’methodology’ in contemporary process organization studies. A process ontology demands reimagining and ongoing reinvention of how researchers inquire into and engage with the movements and moments of a morphing world. This in turn requires us to notice differently in our empirical engagements.

Contributors to this book share a commitment to research that is more-than-representational in its concern to notice and act-with the latencies and diversities of living experience. Drawing inspiration from process philosophies, posthuman subjectivities, post qualitative inquiry, art, poetics, cinematics, and aesthetics, the chapters actively manifest the doing, reading, and writing of process research by attuning to occasions, moments, atmospheres, affects, agencements, with-ness, difference, and multiplicity. In bringing these ideas alive, the authors engage with their own empirical unfoldings by means of communing, corresponding, caring, performative writing, depersonalization, subject proliferation, mindfulness, relating, slow seeing, rhythmanalysis, listening, chromatic empiricism, and diffraction. Each chapter offers a unique worlding constituted in the particular elements it brings together, affording a style of reading that is oriented towards sensing rather than knowing or mastery. The chapters can be read in any order, alone or with and through each other. Collectively they evoke a mycelial web of resonance travelling across, between, and beyond the contents of this book.

Barbara Simpson, Professor of Leadership and Organisational Dynamics, University of Strathclyde, Line Revsbæk, Associate Professor of Organizational Processes, Aalborg University

From an early career as a physics-trained geothermal hydrologist and environmental scientist, Barbara Simpson, a New Zealander by birth, turned to organization studies and moved to Scotland to pursue her interests in what makes organizations work. She was drawn to the practical philosophies of American Pragmatists, especially Mead, and has used these as a springboard into thinking more dynamically about organizations and their processes. Dissatisfied with the surprisingly static nature of much process theory she has, in recent years, been pursuing process ontology as a potentially rich, though undeniably challenging, way to extend her appreciation of practising in organizational contexts. She is Professor of Leadership and Organisational Dynamics at the University of Strathclyde.

Line Revsbæk is Associate Professor of Organizational Processes in the Department of Culture and Learning at Aalborg University, Denmark. Building on her background as an organizational psychologist, she is concerned to innovate participatory and change-oriented research practices. Her research interests are innovation and learning dynamics in organizations. She works from process philosophy, particularly Pragmatism and the philosophy of George Herbert Mead, to suggest process ontological practices such as those offered in ’Analyzing in the Present’ (co-authored with Lene Tanggaard, Qualitative Inquiry) and working from ’Resonant experience in emergent events of analysis’ (Qualitative Studies).