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The received view of organizations is that they are tools used to achieve collective goals. This chapter presents the possibility that, like all tools that become cumbersome, obsolete, or simply inadequate, organizations can hinder organizing. Like tools, they do have a solid existence that cannot be ignored. And just like tools, they can be put to unexpected uses: they can become an obstacle to the achievement of collective goals. A return to the generic meaning of the term “organization” as a synonym of constructed order may reveal intricacies of organizing that have been obscured by the presently ruling conceptualization.

Process is an ambivalent term. Its use in organizational research and theorizing is widespread. Yet, there are important subtle differences in how the term is understood. Process may be construed either as an epiphenomenon of substantial organizational entities or as a primary condition of reality from which the phenomenon of organization spontaneously emerges. Each perspective gives rise to a different theoretical focus and agenda for the field of organization studies. In this chapter, I explore new avenues for understanding process and organization. I show that the idea of ultimate reality as formless, undifferentiated, and ceaselessly changing has been a basic intuition of the ancient Oriental world since time immemorial; one that remains widespread and influential in shaping contemporary Eastern mentalities and dispositions. I further show how this Oriental metaphysical attitude towards process, flux, and self‐transformation enables us to better appreciate the phenomenon of social organization as essentially the cumulative effect of a stabilizing, simple‐locating, and identity‐creating human impulse. From a process organization perspective then, organization studies ought to be more concerned with analyzing the dominant organizational mentalities involved in structuring social reality than with the analysis of “organizations.”

The introductory chapter elaborates on the relevance of a process perspective to studies of identity, and presents the eleven individual chapters included in this volume, which focuses specifically on the concept of “identity” in and around organizations. The constructing of identities—those processes through which actors in and around organizations claim, accept, negotiate, affirm, stabilize, maintain, reproduce, challenge, disrupt, destabilize, repair, or otherwise relate to their sense of selves and others—has become a critically important topic in the study of organizations. Part I of the volume presents seven chapters dealing explicitly with this theme, while Part II offers four complementary contributions that address broader issues in process organization studies.

A contextual rationality recognizes that rational action does not need to be fully aware of the reasons for action, nor does it have to be fully informed of the causal efficacy of action for it to constitute a rational thing to do. Both elements may be left to the ‘context’ in which the action takes place to gain their significance as rational action. This chapter outlines how contextual rationality has been handled in organization studies and illustrates how context is integral to the functioning of rationality.

This chapter examines the opportunities and challenges presented by the incorporation of historical research and reasoning into management and organizational studies, and argues that the value of history lies in its ability to offer unique perspectives on management, organizations, and markets, rather than in providing a longitudinal version of social scientific explanations. Researchers interested in the use of history will need to recognize its distinct epistemic assumptions and its employment of a retrospective viewpoint to understand organizational behavior and cognition, and to understand the particular methodological approaches the historical perspective entails. The chapter introduces these issues and examines them against the backdrop of growing interest in the use of historical evidence and reasoning to study organizations. It introduces the essays contained in the collected volume Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods and frames them in relationship to the broad topic of historical methods in organizational research.

This chapter examines how the relationship between history and what is now known as organization studies has unfolded over the past 100 years. Our central argument is that the significance of history has been shaped largely by the evolution of the broader field of business education and research, though with some geographic variation. Thus, the fairly strong early link with history weakened significantly after the 1950s due to the post-war shift towards scientization in US business schools and the ensuing specialization and fragmentation into sub-fields, which not only resulted in a separate disciplinary identity for organization studies but also marginalized business and management history within business education and research. The chapter traces these changes chronologically, addressing, at the end, the recent revival of interest in history and the intellectual context paving the way for a rapprochement, as well as different directions for furthering the relationship between history and organization studies.

This chapter explores the evolving relationship between organization studies and history, specifically business and management history during the first decade of the 21st century. The front end provides a descriptive investigation on the status of historical research in the management field and the nature of interdisciplinary discourse in related fields such as sociology and economics. The second part explores possible reasons behind the limited expansion of interdisciplinary work by bringing various arguments about the nature of explanation, description, and causal arguments developed in different disciplines. A strong integration between these cultures of inquiry requires not only understanding but also appreciating the epistemological and ontological foundations of the other side in order to make such integration possible. The concluding section provides a short catalogue of alternatives for a more productive cooperation between these two fields and suggests that a more fruitful solution is to focus on transdisciplinary rather that interdisciplinary research.

Organization studies and business history are situated in the wider historical context of the cultural turn in society in the late 20th century and the culture wars that broke out over multiculturalism. The prospects for a rapprochement between business history and organization studies brokered by cultural theory are considered. The focus is on the problematic issues of narrative and identity and the implications for conducting historical research in organization studies. The chapter is divided into four parts. The first gives an outline of the cultural, or culturalist turn in history, and its implications for business history. The second part then considers the prospects for a culturally informed ‘historic turn’ or historical reorientation in organization studies. The third part identifies examples of what could be called deconstructionist history in organization studies. The final part then considers the prospects for a self-conscious return to narrative history, informed by cultural and organization theory.

This chapter introduces business historical methods to organizational scholars by comparing them to qualitative methods in organization studies. After describing the split between qualitative and quantitative methods in organizational and historical studies, the chapter discusses similarities and differences in data sampling and access, explicitness of methods, temporality, varieties of and preferences for data types, and genres of publication. It ends with recommendations for how historical scholars can make their research more visible in management journals: incorporate oral interviews and retrospective analyses to triangulate with the contemporaneous documentary record, leverage the view from the future allowed by historical research, shift more emphasis to article writing while also working to convince management scholars of the value of scholarly books, and adapt the historical article genre to better fit with that followed in organizational journals, including making methods more explicit.

This concluding chapter provides a synthetic review of the research program on biology and organizational behavior laid out in the book. Taking a broad view, the chapter suggests that the book reflects two main themes that contain unique and somewhat separate sets of issues for organization studies, a first theme that focuses primarily on the organic basis of behavior including genes, and a second theme that explicitly brings evolution and evolutionary processes into the picture. Although these two themes can be discussed in relative isolation because they each raise important unique issues and challenges to behavioral researchers, the chapter also considers the two themes jointly and simultaneously. Doing so is important because the promise of combining the two approaches makes this “biological foundations” project unique and potentially path-breaking. But the combination also makes the project extremely challenging and perhaps daunting for reasons articulated in the chapter.

This chapter discusses the findings of the study through the lens of the academic literature on management and organization. Initially the authors revisit the questions that form the basis of this research and examine the relative inaccessibility of the culture concept and the challenges this brings for ethnographic researchers. They then examine the nature of the relationship between culture, identity, and image as supported by the results of this investigation and frame the analysis within a broader contextual discussion of hospice history and tradition. Finally they offer further reflections on organization culture as variously an integrating, differentiating, and ambiguous phenomenon, and on the image of the hospice as seen through the eyes of significant ‘others’ in its institutional environment, and notably other healthcare professionals.

This chapter introduces the main question the book addresses, namely how to explain the rise in innovation’s popularity together with the mounting suspicion that innovation has become a catch-all phrase that is devoid of meaning. It situates the rise of business innovation in the context of post-Fordist flexible accumulation and argues that the study of business innovation provides an opportunity to contribute to critical studies of capitalism as a future-producing and future-oriented social configuration with respect to three main concerns in such studies: commodity fetishism, “unmet” consumer needs, and the production of the future. The chapter’s first half presents the book’s main argument, the ethnographic setting and fieldwork, and the outline of chapters. Its second half provides a detailed analysis of one historical context that explains the emergence of business innovation as a key dimension of the contemporary business world. It argues that throughout the twentieth century organizational and management theorists gradually began to conceptualize organizations as entities whose logic encompasses uncertainty as a natural component that provides a crucial resource for their survival, and that a number of organizational theorists consequently turned to the creative arts in general, and jazz music in particular, in search for adequate organizational models.

In Chapter 5, I examine rights claims that are expressed and pursued outside courtrooms through a case study of a leading community organization, Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth in San Francisco, that has long advocated for children’s rights in the education arena. The purpose of this case study is two-fold: to demonstrate how the rights claims I have argued for can be powerful tools in democratic politics in the US, and to suggest ways in which deliberative theory needs to be revised in light of the inequalities that advocates face as they employ rights claims. I consider what type of citizenship and view of politics Coleman’s efforts endorse, and how it uses rights discourse to advance its education reform goals. I also consider how deliberative ideals may need to be relaxed to make room for rights-based advocacy in non-ideal conditions.

Edith Penrose (1914–96) was a pioneering and original scholar whose best-known work, The Theory of the Growth of the Firm written over sixty years ago, has had enduring influence and is now regarded as a “classic” in strategy, management, and organization studies. With the benefit of extensive secondary literature and a recent biography this chapter explores the relationship between her life and work, the people and events that shaped her work, and the importance of history, time, and process in her thinking. The chapter also considers how studying the classics can inform our understanding of the history and evolution of organization studies.