OT - Organization Theory
p.114 Organization is fundamentally an ongoing aggregative world-making activity not a solid and static thing.
p.118 Six key meta-theoretical assumptions, with varying accentuation, underpin the epistemological project of modern OT. These are objectivity, self-identity, individual intentionality, local causality, homeostatic change, and linguistic adequacy.
p.123 The idea that organizing could be more productively thought of as a generic existential strategy for subjugating the immanent forces of change: that organization is really a loosely coordinated but precarious 'world-making' attempt to regularize human exchanges and to develop a predictable pattern of interactions for the purposes of minimizing effort; that language is the quintessential organizing technology that enables us to selectively abstract from the otherwise intractable flux of raw experience; that management is more about the taming of chance, uncertainty, and ambiguity than about choice... all these escape the traditional organization theorist.
p.124 The term 'postmodern' made its first appearance in the title of a book, Postmodernism and Other Essays written by Bernard Iddings Bell as early as 1926. It was subsequently picked up and used by Arnold Toynbee in 1939 in volume v of his massive tome A Study of History where he used the term 'post-modern' to describe the end of the modern era beginning from about the third quarter of the nineteenth century.
p.125 The postmodern, however, may be most productively invoked as an alternative style of thought - a new way of thinking - which attempts to more adequately comprehend and deconstruct the almost-inexorable complexification of science and modern society with all its attendant social and societal ramifications.
p.126 According to this metaphysics of presence, reality is readily amenable to symbolic representation and can be made to present itself to us in all its immediacy through linguistic representations.
p.128 postmodern analyses seek to emphasize the Heraclitean primacy accorded to process, indeterminacy, flux, interpenetration, formlessness, and incessant change.
p.128 As Tim Ingold, paraphrasing Ortega y Gasset [JLJ - "I am I and my circumstance", "I live therefore I think", reason should not focus on what is (static) but what becomes (dynamic), there is a continual dialectical interaction between the person and his or her circumstances and, as a result, life is a drama that exists between necessity and freedom], puts it well: 'We are not things but dramas; we have no nature, only history; we are not, though we live' (Ingold 1986: 117, emphasis original). Such a becoming orientation rejects what Rescher (1996) calls the process reducibility thesis whereby processes are often assumed to be processes of primary 'things'. Instead, it insists that 'things', social entities, generative mechanisms etc., are no more than 'stability waves in a sea of process' (Rescher 1996: 53).
p.128 For process ontology the basic unit of reality is not an atom or thing but an 'event-cluster' forming a relatively stable pattern of relations. Correspondingly, postmodern science, which is based upon this processual mode of thought, eschews atomist thinking in favour of a flowing undifferentiated wholeness
p.128-129 For postmodernists, theories are viewed more pragmatically as selective and useful instruments or devices that help us to negotiate our way through the world (Rorty 1991). They are eminently useful even if they do not necessarily tell us how that world really is. In other words, theories may be workable, but may not be timelessly true.
p.129 This realization of the intrinsic inadequacy of language leads postmodernists to a third preoccupation: the attempt to explore and sensitively articulate tacit and subtle nuances of the gestalt processes of comprehension... a kind of unconscious scanning that produces knowing that is inherently unreachable through the modern scientific approach with its emphasis on visibility and presence and its overwhelming reliance in precise and rigid terms, concepts, and categories. This 'full' emptiness of the unconsciousness scanning process occurs in nearly all forms of creative works.
p.129 postmodernism attempts to modify the conceptual asymmetry that surreptitiously privileges consciousness and intentionality over the unconscious scanning process.
p.130 Postmodern analyses... emphasize the vaguely intuited, heterogeneous, multiple, and alinear character of real-world happenings. It draws attention to the fact that events in the real world, as we experience it, do not unfold in a conscious, homogeneous, linear, and predictable manner (Deleuze and Guattari 1988). Instead they 'leak in insensibly' (James 1909/1996: 339).
p.130 action is a resultant effect of the ongoing tension and contestation between an immanent tendency towards repetition and a centrifugal drive towards novelty and otherness. Every existential action, in this postmodern sense is an experimental action reaching out into the not-yet-known. Outcomes are a particular unfolding of innate potentialities yet the manner of their specific manifestations remains essentially indeterminate. Surprise and the unexpected are the real order of things... postmodernism advocates a more tentative and modest attitude towards the status of our current forms of knowledge.
p.130 instead of thinking in terms of tightly coupled causal explanations that attempt to deterministically link observed phenomena with underlying tendencies, postmodernism privileges the ideas of reminiscence, resonance, recursion, and resemblance as more adequate expressions for describing 'loosely coupled' and non-locally defined web of event-clusters constituting real-world happenings (Foucault 1970, 1979)... and more towards thinking in terms of the language of complexity science.
p.130-131 Postmodern analyses, thus, seek to disabuse us of the stubbornly held idea that reality, including especially our sense of self, is invariably objective, stable, orderly, and 'systemic' and hence predictable in character.
p.131 As Michel Foucault puts it very succinctly:
it is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations - or conversely, the complete reversals - the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us; it is to discover that truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents. (Foucault 1984: 81)
p.131 order and organization... are the outcome of our existential 'Will to Order'... the seeming stability and solidity of such a socially constructed world is always precarious and continuously threatened by the restlessness of an inexorable change and the surprise that it brings with it.
p.131-132 Beneath the seeming stability of our organized social life lie the restless and nomadic forces of change... What is called 'organizations', therefore, is nothing more than islands of relatively stabilized relational orders in a sea of ceaseless change. Organization and change are intrinsically opposing, not complementary, forces. Moreover, change does not take place in a linear manner. Instead real change is quintessentially 'rhizomic' in character taking place through variations, restless expansion, opportunistic conquests, sudden captures, and offshoots... Real change... is subtle, agglomerative, and often subterranean in nature.
On the other hand, organization is a constructive counter-movement aimed at fixing, ordering, routinizing, and regularizing changes through human interactions so that a degree of predictability and productivity in social exchange is attainable.
p.134 In keeping with the recognition of an immanent and enfolded notion of reality, postmodern OT finds resonance with the contemporary preoccupations of Complexity Science in their search for more adequate causal explanations that do not overly rely on the kind of localized and tightly coupled causality proffered by classical science... Elsewhere (Chia 1998), I have attempted to show how such a complexity awareness could be expanded to approach the core concerns of postmodernism.
p.135 What is advocated in postmodern OT, therefore, is the radical abandonment of 'the organization' as a legitimate object of knowledge and its substitution by organization as a generic process of 'world-making'. In this regard, both complexity science and studies of unconscious desire and knowing must be applied... to all forms of social order
p.135 for Marx it was the 'internal dialectic' that provided the driving force for transformations in the socio-economic order.
p.136 Conclusion: Organization as 'World-Making'
...organization works to construct legitimate objects of knowledge for a knowing subject... Through this process of organization, objects of knowledge acquire distinctive identities that allow us to treat them as existing independently of our perceptions. In this fundamental sense organization is a world-making activity. It is a ceaseless process of reality construction and maintenance that enables us to carve out our otherwise amorphous lifeworlds into manageable parts so that we can act purposefully and productively amidst a flood of competing and attention-seeking stimuli. The narrowing of focus, simplification, and the consequent economizing of efforts in action are thus the ultimate aim of the impulse to organize. Through organization, the various aspects of our lived experiences... acquire a familiar and seemingly unproblematic identity.
p.136-137 Organization theory, according to this expanded postmodern understanding, thus, becomes one of critically examining the oftentimes subterranean societal and institutional strategies that help shape our habits of thought, our sense of self-identity, our perceptions and expectations of social life as well as our values, beliefs, and aspirations.
