Understanding Organization as Process: Theory for a Tangled World, Vol. 2 Book

Preface and acknowledgements     xiii
Introduction     xiv
Organization in a tangled world     1
Looking for the organization     1
The 'in-here' and the 'out-there'     2
A correlational view and some problems     7
A relational view     12
A question of locus of selection     16
Becoming in the place of change     17
Process views of organization     19
Early and recent debates     19
The very early thinkers     24
Enter the twentieth century science and philosophy     26
Back to organization studies     28
Entification     30
Alfred North Whitehead on process     32
Introduction     32
Ultimate process versus ultimate fact     34
An atomistic view     37
The power of becoming     40
Potentiality and actuality     41
Events     44
Formation of meaning and the changing subject     49
Events and entities     52
Organization between concrete experience and abstraction     53
Extracting foci from Whitehead     55
Bruno Latour: relativizing the social, and the becoming ofnetworks     59
Introduction     59
Experimentation as organization and vice versa     63
Actor-networks and their theory     65
The fallacy of levels of analysis     68
Translation, inscription and stabilization     70
Enrolment - the outward dynamics of networks     73
Connectivity     75
On Latour, Whitehead and organization     76
Niklas Luhmann on autopoiesis and recursiveness in social systems     78
Introduction     78
Background and principles     79
Autopoiesis     82
Time and structure     85
Events, contingencies and horizons     87
From meaning to expectations and beyond     88
Complexity, autopoiesis and identity     91
On the absence of the subject     93
On Luhmann, Whitehead and organization     94
James March on decision processes and organization: a logic of streams     96
Introduction     96
How organizations become: decisions connecting decisions     99
Signals and symbols     103
The inefficient yet indispensable histories: search processes and learning     106
The power of routines and the subtleness of change      110
On March, Whitehead and organization     112
Karl Weick on organizing and sensemaking     114
From entities to process     114
The power of language     116
Verbs: the intersubjective side of processes     118
Nouns: the tentative fixing of patterns     120
Organizing between nouns and verbs     122
The question of extension of timespaces     124
On Weick, Whitehead and organization     125
A scheme for process-based organizational analysis     128
Introduction     128
The primacy of connecting     129
Organization as reiteration and novelty     132
The essence of plot     134
The potentiality-actuality dimension     136
The Grameen Bank: a tangled story     137
Some implications for organizational analysis     142
A different way of studying things     142
Understanding rather than measurement     143
Capta rather than data - selection rather than finding     145
Labels and muddles     147
Notes     151
Bibliography     155
Author index     166
Subject index     169