p.692 Woolgar starts by noting that much of scientific research often begins with the production of documents speculating on notions about how the world around us might be. This is then used to project the existence of a particular object which then forms the legitimate focus of investigative work. At this stage, the speculated object begins to take on a life of its own and is increasingly perceived as being separate and independent of our notions of it. Next, an inversion of relationship occurs in which the impression is given that it is in fact the existence of the object which stimulated our attention towards it. Finally, researchers become so accustomed to talking in these inverted terms that the initial three stages of conceiving and reifying the object are 'forgotten' or strongly denied. A fallacy is thus created in which researchers unquestionably take their objects of analysis to be independently existing 'out there'.

p.693 'The mind in apprehending... experiences sensations which, properly speaking, are qualities of the mind alone...' (Whitehead 1985: 68)

p.693-694 Reality, for Whitehead, is perpetually in the process of becoming and perishing and as such it cannot simply be understood to be composed of discrete, static and isolatable entities with distinctive properties that can be straightforwardly represented by linguistic terms and systematically classified and compared in an objective manner.

p.695-696 The dynamic and precariously balance[d] nature of social reality frequently escapes our attention because of deeply ingrained habits of thought which surreptitiously work to elevate notions of permanence, stability and endurance over transience, flux and transformation. The human world that we find so immediately necessary and familiar is thereby invariably constituted in predominantly static terms through an organizing logic based on the principles of division, distinction and difference... However, the alternative belief that 'all things flow' and is in a continuous process of becoming, transforming and perishing remains one of the most enduring, albeit vague, generalizations which the unsystematized and barely analyzed institution of mankind has produced.

p.696 The actual world is fundamentally in a process of becoming so that every phenomena of which we are aware... each exist only as a stabilized moment in an interminable process of becoming. There are no fixed entities, no ultimate terms, no essences. In short, transition is the ultimate fact.

p.696-697 a process-based becoming ontology generates a radically different set of theoretical priorities. First, activity and movement are privileged over substance and entities... Second, instead of thinking in terms of outcomes and end-states, primacy is accorded to the process of becoming... Third, for process theorists, what is essential to nature is change not stability... Thinking is the quintessential organizing activity which renders static what is essentially a dynamic and undifferentiated sensual experience. Finally, process theorists are committed to the Whiteheadean principle of immanence. By this is meant that each organizational outcome or 'effect' always already incorporates and hence implicates the 'weight' or 'traces' of its genealogical past... It is this resurrecting of the primacy of movement and process over static entities and permanence states, which provides the philosophical basis for redefining organizational analysis as the reflexive analysis of the dominant modes of thought in contemporary social life.

p.698 It is only by arbitrarily drawing boundaries around our sensory experiences that we are able to begin to ascribe meaning to phenomena.

p.699 Organizing operates as a necessary economizing principle in our day-to-day apprehension of our phenomenal experiences. It is an ongoing reality constituting and reality maintaining activity which enables us to act purposefully amidst a cacophony of competing, and attention-seeking inputs. Economy of effort is thus the ultimate aim of human organizing... organization works, first and foremost, to construct legitimate objects of knowledge for a knowing subject

p.700 the object is that which objects

p.700 attention is redirected towards an examination of how complex interlocking micropractices of organizing, ordering and representing work as event-structuring 'happenings' that cumulatively contribute to create and sustain a relatively stabilized but precariously balanced version of social reality... Instead of an organization theory concerned with organized states, this generalized economy of organization takes it upon itself to elaborate the emergence, endurance and sustenance of such organized states.
Organizing is fundamentally an economic advantage-gaining activity involving the 'transformation, use and exchange of matter and energy' (Cooper 1987: 406)