Oxford Handbook of Process Philosophy and Organization Studies

709 Pages·2014·7.648 MB·English

by  Jenny Helin, Tor Hernes, Daniel Hjorth, Robin Holt

Process is How Process Does
Oxford Handbooks Online
Process is How Process Does  
Jenny Helin, Tor Hernes, Daniel Hjorth, and Robin Holt
The Oxford Handbook of Process Philosophy and Organization Studies
Edited by Jenny Helin, Tor Hernes, Daniel Hjorth, and Robin Holt
Print Publication Date: May 2014
Subject: Business and Management, Organizational Theory and Behaviour, History
Online Publication Date: Oct 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199669356.013.0001
Abstract and Keywords
Process philosophy originally referred to a small group of philosophers including Henri
Bergson, William James, and Alfred North Whitehead as well as Heraclitus. These
thinkers view the world processually, working from within things and reversing the
relationship between ideas and life. This Handbook explores process philosophy’s
relationships to organisation studies by focusing on five aspects: temporality, wholeness,
openness and the open self, force, and potentiality. Each article considers the life and
work of a specific philosopher, such as Jacques Derrida, Charles Sanders Peirce, George
Herbert Mead, Mikhail Bakhtin, Hannah Arendt, and Jacquese Lacan, and how their work
could potentially be used to think processually in organization and management studies.
Keywords: process philosophy, philosophers, organisation studies, temporality, wholeness, openness, open self,
force, potentiality, management studies
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1.1 Sur le Motif
Paul Cézanne is painting Mount Sainte-Victoire, just to the east of his home in Aix in
1887. The closer he looks the less separated things become; the longer he is present the
more querulous becomes the tree that edges the frame and the more hesitant the linear
weave of walls and fields that pulls the frame into perspective. He has painted the
mountain many times, each time anew, often leaving his canvasses in situ for weeks. He is
not reproducing the mountain, but trying to reveal it, and in doing so increasingly
contesting his own status as a separate, observing agent, looking anew, allowing Nature
to come at him sur le motif. He is going after the nature of substance, of what ‘is’, but
rather than outlines he is using modulations of tone that allow things to glow. Apparently
fixed, isolated objects begin to burst through their edges, colours flow within one another
as greens are pulled into more distant purples and pinks, which themselves are pulled
back into occasional foreground details, hesitant to comply with the form-giving order to
recede. In places he leaves the canvas bare, or stripped back, and these absences become
as present as the carefully painted rock forms that rise and then fall into the Aur valley
like a pendant human body. The mountain lies exposed to a distant sky and yet is brought
right forward by the enveloping foreground play of leaves and branches whose bending,
arching lines echo its purple ridge. An empty railway viaduct appears mid-distance, the
headlong railroad of progress, the suggestion of yet further movement to come from
within the trees and heat, the prospect of a mistral in linear steam.
Look at this painting, and no sooner do you rest on something than the eye is taken away
anew, and more attentive you become to apparent order the less fixed is any individual
element. Ehrenzweig (1967) calls the affect ‘eye wander’, the image feels right, (p. 2) not
in detail, or likeness, but as an entire world inviting the viewer to come into the frame
and be amid things. The haltering perspective of the image works in reverse to normal, it
reaches out rather than closes off using a kind of reverse vanishing point whose pushing
outwards implicates everything it touches. The image orchestrates tone, vibrancy, and
substance into a coherent, arresting whole, and yet also upsets entirely the conceits of
any neat organization of the world by allowing movement and insubstantiality equal voice
amid a democracy of presence. Things are apparent, and then loosen. Cézanne’s
mountain is not ‘a’ mountain, but geology underway; it is both in the distance and before
us, the colour of earth found in the colours of sunset; his building is not ‘a’ building but a
generational residue of human toil and possession given architectural form and animated
by feelings—perhaps envy, perhaps contentment; his leaf is not ‘a’ leaf but a seasonal
placement of mute, breeze-blown life indifferent to the other lives it might shade and
touch. There are patches everywhere, each gaining or losing form because of their being
placed in communion with other patches, the whole an irreducible and irreconcilable
rendition of a persistent concealing and revealing, showing us viewers as directly as is
possible what it means for anything to be: an inexhaustible coming to presence of the
world. In the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1948/1964: 13), Cézanne wanted to show
the sciences—human and natural—the primal condition of all nature by which any
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Process is How Process Does
disciplinary perspective was made possible: ‘[H]e did not want to separate the stable
things which we see and the shifting way in which they appear; he wanted to depict
matter as it takes on form, the birth of order through spontaneous organization.’
Invited by such painting, we can step away from the image so as to describe, more in the
language of the social science and humanities scholar, what Cézanne does. He does many
things, but if we concentrate on this painting as a performance of process, in what sense
is Cézanne helpful? The painting maintains its capacity to multiply and do many things for
different viewers. There is no true painting, one that would correctly express the
intentions of the painter, nor one that would generalize successfully a few rules about
how it signifies a message or generates affect. However, there are several paintings that
are true. As such a multiplicity the image resists becoming locked into the fixity of
thingness, as it keeps open the endless capacity of seeing variation. The image conveys
things without its being fixed into a whole-with-parts, and without the possibility of its
being deconstructed into mute, causally implicated matter on the one hand, or
metaphysically resonant meaning on the other. It is experienced as what Henri Bergson
would call an intensive manifold, intuitively, and entire. Neither the painter nor the
mountain act upon the world; both are implicated with one another, pulled along and
mixed within the fluidity of fact. As such it is an expression of the world understood
processually. Cézanne’s biographer Alex Danchev suggests ‘[A]t the core of the
Cézannian revolution is a decisive shift in the emphasis of observation, from the
description of the thing apprehended to the process of apprehension itself’ (2013: 338). It
is such a decisive shift that also marks out the writers in this Handbook—process
philosophers—for whom, in many different and vivid ways, there is little distinction to be
had between experiencing, apprehending, understanding, and representing the ordering
of things.
(p. 3) Process philosophy was originally a moniker for a small collection of philosophers
including Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson, and William James, and then extending
back to Heraclitus. Yet it can be expanded to cover others interested in understanding
and showing how the world is a world of organizing, how things swell, how life—including
human lives—never reaches the settlement we presume or hope it might. In
understanding the world processually, these writers work from within things, staying with
them, suspicious of abstracting too far into hierarchies of being; they stick with things
and the experience of things, rather than reaching into a more certain, stable, and
invariant world of ideas. In this they reverse the usual relationship between ideas and
life: instead of finding life wanting when set against immobile truths, values and ideals,
they question the role of such divisions we are wont to impose on our understanding of
life. Taking the world entire as they do, they do not draw such ready oppositional lines
between the whole and the part, the pure and the tawdry, the essential and the apparent,
all of which impute another, more perfect world.
Process thinking sticks with one world, this world, demanding what William James (1907:
55) calls ‘an attitude of orientation—of looking away from first things, principles,
categories supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences,
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facts’. These last things are all there ‘is’, and we are implicated in them entirely. Cézanne
stays with last things, and it is both the ‘things’ (the actively indeterminate, reserve of
surprises) and the ‘staying’ (belonging to in duration) that matters. The moment things
are teased out of their ‘thingness’ is also when they leap into language and are on the
route to some form of determination. So, staying with them is also to dwell in the
indeterminate multiplicity that their potential becomings hold; being and becoming are
entwined. Martin Heidegger, in his comments on Cézanne, describes this entwinement
using the term presence. Cézanne’s paintings are so good because they show both
presence and what more cryptically Heidegger calls ‘making present’. We viewers of
paintings like Mont Sainte-Victoire typically see things present in their being: the empty,
perhaps baleful railway viaduct, the smell of pines mingling with that of grass, the
settlement of stone and earth. Yet attend to the painting and we might also see the
making present: the horizon of disclosure by which all beings are revealed and concealed
(Young, 2001: 156–7). Making present is particular to human forms of life (art, science)
by which we experience and socially codify things, and yet which can only be experienced
in the presence of things themselves. Cézanne’s image of Mont Sainte-Victoire redounds
with such awareness; the picture is no longer a representation, but an originating region
where, from nothing, something emerges, and other things fall away into nothing. This is
what Merleau-Ponty meant when he described it as showing the ‘birth of order through
spontaneous organization’. We glimpse what William James and Nishida called pure
experience, a world unmediated by socially settled distinctions between object and
subject. We begin to view the painting and right away we are met with a fragmentation of
vision, the coming together of opposites (the near and far, the dark and light, the
horizontal and vertical) spoken of in Daodejing, in whose paradoxical proximity comes a
subtlety of understanding unavailable from a singular search for first things.
(p. 4) Staying with last things is thus a struggle with how experience of the world is
socially coded. Cézanne is a painter and the mountain is part of the scenery which is to
become the painter’s motif. This is a set of relationships for which there are ‘already
constituted relations, contracted into bodies as habit’ (Massumi, 2002: 82). Cézanne
knows this, and struggles to overcome it. Overcome the platitudinous version of
habituated meanings that saturate this situation and prevent the event of this mountain,
here and now for Cézanne from being shown as being and becoming. How can he
maintain his receptive power so that he can belong to the situation—the mountain, the
scenery, the light, the canvas, the colours, his body and its capacities—and in the duration
of this belonging, become with the event, the trace of which is the painting, that is then
copied onto this book’s cover, and many other places. Every belonging to a situation is a
participation in a field of potential (all the multiplicities that the situation holds together
via its many relationships) and the event (painting a picture, viewing it, reproducing it) is
the release of this potential into a becoming. The whole multiplicity cannot be released
into a creative becoming as bodies and their contexts provide conditions and limitations.
There is an actual Mont Sainte-Victoire, which is the grounding component in the
situation that includes Cézanne’s body (and its capacities) and the scenery at large. But
there is a virtual Mont Sainte-Victoire too, an idea, sense, affect that Cézanne wants to
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Process is How Process Does
actualize as a painting. This is done as an intensive (passionate) process of receiving the
situation so that one belongs to it, become with the event of ‘painting it’, and make this
materialize on a canvas.
To us, this is a splendid example of process ‘research’: learning to see the world in its
multiplicity, nurturing one’s receptive capacity so one can abide with the world, belong to
it or stay with it, and direct the forces of the event in an intensive process of becoming
that creates by differentiating the quality of the new—an image of Mont Sainte-Victoire in
this case. Using process philosophy in organization studies finds us similarly following
intensive processes, provocations, a restless observation and curiosity that might, with
diligence, be inspired as was the expressiveness of Cézanne. Going into organization we
find what James called a whole ‘blooming buzzing’ condition. This is the basis from which
the subjects, objects, norms, procedures, and judgements arise, all of them the separating
abstractions of the researcher to which we are socially habituated in thought (with its
representations and relations) and action (with its goals, and regimented movement).
Process philosophy begins with undifferentiated unity existing prior to any individuation,
even the individual—there is raw experience prior to an individuated conscious being,
there is desire productive of subjects. Such a world of last things is not readily confined
by the concepts and categories of language if, as process thinking suggests, we are to
remain with, and attend to, experience as we find it. To the extent we can become part of
the picture (an admittedly poor word to use referring to the painting), to the extent we
belong to it, we also become with it. This, being part of life, staying with the things,
maintaining an openness towards the multiplicity of things, we will try to describe using
aspects of process.
1.2 Thinking Process
(p. 5)
On the basis of working with process philosophers and the chapters in this book, we have
arrived at a way to think process that has crystallized into five aspects: temporality,
wholeness, openness, force, and potentiality. Together our five aspects are an attempt to
provide what could be described as themes in a musical score guiding the process of
thinking and enquiring processually into process. As aspects, following Wittgenstein, they
do not supplant one another, but can persist together, with one dawning and others being
occluded, without thereby being lost. Not all writers devote themselves equally to all five
aspects, yet all resonate in some way. Equally important, all five aspects touch on
emerging concerns in organization studies. Temporality, dynamism, and experiences of
time arise in longitudinal, sensemaking, discourse and historical studies, as well as in
ethnographic, genealogical, and narrative analyses. Wholeness, or resisting dualisms,
finds expression in studies of materiality and technology, of gender and identity, and of
actor-network analysis. It also forms a concern for the entire gamut of studies concerned
with language itself, such as communication, rhetoric, and performativity, all related in
various ways under the elusive label of (post-)structuralist. Openness, understanding
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things in relation to ‘the other’, is of interest in ethics, institutional work studies and
studies of human relations more generally, in policy communities, political economy,
studies of new organizational forms, often related to innovation, entrepreneurship, and
non-governmental organizations. Force, intensity, the enquiry after movement, is what
concerns studies of creativity, innovation, and (again) entrepreneurship, operations
management and supply chains, and governance, as well as power, resistance, and
influence (such as governmentality studies) and gender and identity studies. Finally,
potentiality, that which ‘might become’, is what grounds strategy studies and broader
enquiry into the possibility of alternative economic and social settings (such as in social
entrepreneurship).
Using the metaphor of (musical) score to describe this way of thinking and enquiring
processually into process stresses the importance of music and dance for our
understanding of process. For thinking process there is then a task presented to us,
which Nigel Thrift describes as ‘following being in its genesis, by accomplishing the
genesis of thought in parallel with the object’ (Thrift, 2007: 256) or ‘ontogenesis’ or,
again, as ‘the self-production of being in becoming’ (Massumi, 2011: 84). Let us then
move on to this score, held together by five aspects, which describes how we relate
ourselves to the task of ontogenesis, i.e. what orients us when thinking process. Following
this we will move on to propose how we can ‘do process research’.
Temporality.
The passing of time represents the perishability of the world, what Whitehead called the
passage of nature. The perishability of the world is what creates its multiple possibilities
of creating new forms. Bergson, Heidegger, Whitehead, and Mead all engage intensely
with time, where vulgar or clock time, left to itself, constitutes a flattening and deadening
of what they feel is a more primordial, lived, or qualitative (p. 6) time—what Bergson
called duration. Duration, Deleuze says, is ‘inseparable from the movement of its
actualization’ (1988: 42–3). Time, as duration, loosens the thingness of things as their
becomings are revealed, while not depriving them of their right to thingness. The
incessant shift between becoming and thingness is temporally conditioned, as presents
turn into events to be modified with the passing of time. The great enigma is that of the
present, which for Bergson is a non-numerical duration in which the world opens as an
irreversible, intense manifold of experience whose multiplicity refuses the stabilizing
embrace of intellectual definition. For Mead, on the other hand, the present is forever
emergent, and does not exist as a stretch of time per se, while Whitehead sought to
incorporate human experience of the present as a ‘slab of duration’, something akin
perhaps to Heidegger’s ‘spans’, though these are woven with an accompanying sense of
mortality, a being-unto-death Peter Sloterdijk twists gracefully into a being-unto-life.
Garfinkel, extending from phenomenology, associated the present with indeterminacy,
which confers upon it creative agency and the possiblility of acquiring
‘eventness’ (Bakhtin). Processually minded writers, while being loath to take distinctions
for granted, would open for understanding actors thrown into time, while seeking to
incorporate how they establish their existence with the use of ordered time, such as
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schedules, clocks, and calendars. Being in time means that we are forever wedged
between the absolute absences of what has been and what may become. Process thinking
invites us to treat past and future as blank slates upon which the processual narrative is
inscribed, slates which would be the same token signals that there is no continuity of
future without continuity of past, nor is there change of future without a change of past.
Wholeness.
The intimacy between the whole and the parts is a persistent theme in process
philosophy, where the thrust of their thinking is how the one emerges from the many, or
vice versa. Wholeness, for example, means we cannot think away society and focus on the
individual, nor think away the individual and focus on society; a closeness that John
Dewey describes as the sympathy between intention (individual) and habit (collective),
the latter allowing the former space to become aware of what is of situational
significance, the former endowing the latter with the possibility of transformation. It also
means we cannot think away the body from the experience of thought (Merleau-Ponty),
nor thoughts from extensions of the body. Actors and organizations are simultaneously
consubstantial and empirically inseparable; they are understood in the light of how they
produce each other, and themselves. Massumi (2002: 71) provides a condensed
description of such wholeness: ‘they might be seen as differential emergences from a
shared realm of relationality that is one with becoming—and belonging’. Process thinking
takes the world whole, connected, and permits connections between everything. Bergson
expands on such by suggesting that such an insight that such connectivity is not spatial (a
mathematical way of looking at the world folded out, map-like, into representations of
things, parts of things, and possible relationships between them) but relational (space is
in things rather than things being in space), whereby we have to appreciate the varied
simultaneity of experience. In our own experience, for example, change occurs to us
entirely, not in parts, and the change only makes sense in relation to a persistent
awareness of (connection to) wholeness from which the possibility of (p. 7) change
emerges. The whole alerts us to what is not sensed as being there; being absent, which
does not mean that it is non-existent. Spinoza’s ontology thinks one substance (God or
Nature, used interchangeably) is all that exists, and everything else is connected as
modes and attributes. How something becomes is always a question of how it is related
and what forces are at play in such relations. Relationality indicates connective capacity,
how in joining the world (rather than separating from it) we hazard an improvisation
along what Deleuze calls lines of flight. There is always a potential for change maintained
via such openness, which always makes relations and situations spill over, revealing the
excessive creativity of life, far exceeding our intellectual capacity to represent it.
Openness.
The openness of the world begins with awareness of one self as being open. The open self
is emphasized by Mead as a continuous process of self-construction in a process of social
accomplishment that realizes neither a fixed nor an essentialist being. In her analysis of
Adolf Eichmann, Arendt showed how an elastic self, ready for different inscriptions, might
under certain conditions lead to the monstrous and absurd, entreating us to be wary of
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such exposure. Bakhtin too emphasizes openness. Inspired by Dostoevsky’s novels, he
uses the notion of ‘unfinalizability’ to underline that closed, finalized accounts of our
world are a reduction of that which is life-giving since ‘nothing conclusive has yet taken
place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been
spoken’ (Bakhtin, 1984: 166); ambiguity is continuously at play here. Since the world is
open, ordering is a project that is ‘always ongoing and ever unfinished; and it is always
opposed to the essential messiness of the world’ (Morson and Emerson, 1990: 139). That
is why absolute order can never be an actual factum; it is an ideal and all kinds of
abstract logics and theories by which the social world is neatly put in boxes is superficial.
Concepts too, as Deleuze stressed, might be made more open, less assertive, more
nomadic, without losing their capacity to transform what the poet T.E. Hulme (1936: 215)
called the ‘cindery’ nature of direct experience into something graspable, ordered. Here
abstractions illuminate by crystallizing experience, intensifying it through grammatical or
aesthetic organization, rather than generalizing everything in a common denominator
light of evening out. Concepts can be created and enlisted to provoke as much as to
clarify. As people, things, and technologies share this openness, it is our capacity for
duration, for sensing the ‘span’ or ‘bloc’ of becoming (as Bergson, Deleuze, Whitehead,
and James all were concerned with) that will decide to what extent we can understand
such phenomena processually. Openness brings us into encounters with absence.
Typically we consider absence with aversion: a hole to be filled, a territory to be claimed
and occupied, a wasteland to be made productive, a darkness to be lit, rather than go
along with it, treating it as a provocative ally of analysis, like the use of the unmarked
space in Spencer-Brown’s mathematics of form. Perhaps this urge to complete, to find
presence, finds its apotheosis in organization studies in the question of the human agent
and agency, with what Sloterdijk calls the mania for identity, a preoccupation with how
best to articulate and protect the agent as the bearer and measure of all things, all the
while forgetting that it is an accompanying insubstantiality through which any self carries
equal potential. This mania is so prevalent that even otherness (p. 8) itself becomes its
own form of presence, as in De Beauvoir’s analysis of women being given the largely
servile ontological status of ‘other’. Openness further points us into the aspect of force,
which is ever only observable as effect, but which maintains its virtual reality while
producing these effects. Kirkegaard’s concept of freedom (openness) and the necessity to
decide and shape the self provides an example of how openness calls for force.
Force.
When we insist on staying with life, without resort to external start points such as
‘structure’ or ‘desire’ as the cause of change, we become alert to the dynamics of the
social and self, but as creative forces. Dewey, for one, argued against the ‘veil that shuts
man off from nature’, joining in Whitehead’s (and Bergson’s) plea to consider process as
creative energy rather than interacting masses. Stability is reached in hierarchies, yet a
hierarchy is always a contested relationship between dominating and dominant forces;
forces are always relative to other forces, and their strength and accomplishments.
Forces, Nietzsche teaches us, are either active or reactive, but never fully graspable if not
related to what he calls a will to power, which can be either negative or affirmative.
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Reactive forces are adaptive and limiting; they separate active forces from what they can
do, and deny active forces or turn against themselves. Active forces find their way to the
limits of their consequences, and affirm their difference (Deleuze, 1983, reading
Nietzsche). We understand organizational life not so much from positions, structural
coordinates, or subjectivities. Instead, we follow how dominant and dominated forces
shape subjectivities, how subjectification affects what can be said, by whom and when/
where. Force is perhaps the monarch of all processual characteristics, that which gives
vent when we dissolve the view of the organization as configured by positions, co-
ordinates, and sovereign agents, or of our intellect configured solely as an organ of utility
and measurement that begins and works towards immobile things such as concepts (like
Kant’s antinomies). Force allows our intuition in a capacity to work with force in all its
sinuous play (Bergson, 1922: 32–9). Foucault, for example, spent much effort on
describing and analysing forces operating in the social, normalizing the expectation that
certain effects in behaviour would habitually be expected to ‘be performed’—force, in this
case, securing the predictability, and therefore control, of behaviour. His empirical
archival work follows how dominant and dominated forces shape subjectivities, how
subjectification affects what can be said, by whom, and when/where. Tarde, Dewey,
Peirce, and De Beauvoir all worked similarly on how force is subjectivity, upending the
idea that force is what emanates from the decision of a subject, bringing to
questionability the very basic and beguiling idea that there is such a thing as a ‘subject’
to be found, once all the characteristics, habits, the lived effects of time, and attributes
have been stripped back.
Potentiality.
The concept of potential that qualifies process as the production of the new is for
Whitehead (1929: 28) an awareness that ‘[T]he reality of the world exceeds that of
objects, for the simple reason that where objects are, there has also been their becoming.
And where becoming has been, there is already more to come. The being of an object is
an abstraction from its becoming’ (Massumi, 2011: 6). Thus potential is a curious
melange of time and force, a ‘felt moreness to ongoing experience’, as Massumi (p. 9)
(2002: 141) puts it. Potential receives its most persistent and original airing in the work
of Spinoza, who understood a body as dynamic composition of movements and rest. Not
so much actual physical movement, but the capacity to enter into movement and rest,
which he called its power to affect and be affected. Potentiality can also describe the
virtual powers of becoming that characterize all life and into which we are thrown. This
becoming carries no causal initiation or origin point, there is no sentient or even material
agency starting something. Process thinking finds such an ontology of starting points
upended by what Dewey calls one of complicit experience; we do not act upon the world,
but through belonging to it. Here Bergson, again, is careful to note we maintain life’s
openness and recognize the multiplicity involved in experience; there is, he suggests,
little difference between the real and possible where the former is a spooling off from
precedent. Creation needs to be understood as actualization of the virtual, rather than as
realization of the possible, without conflating the virtual with the unreal (Bergson,
Deleuze). For the real would already be in the possible, and all of the possible cannot be
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realized, and realization is thus a limited copying of the possible, i.e. no creation.
Actualization does not need to realize anything. The virtual is real, but lacks actuality, and
this requires difference and creation—for it needs to establish a contextual-relational
presence in an ongoing world, where forces and will to power already are at work.
Gregory Bateson refers to this contextualized presence as ontogenesis, extending the
biological term describing the maturing of an organism through its life cycle to cover the
environmental conditions that require adaptive behaviours from organisms which in turn
prosthetically reach out into the wider environment; a beaver’s lodge being a classic
example of how such ontogenesis broaches any distinction between being, environment,
and presencing. Where human thought has gone awry, processually speaking, is in
thinking their constructions, unlike those of the ‘thoughtless’ beavers, are designed
through a unique capacity for reason by whose operations they presume themselves
separate from the world, occupying a perspective from which to impose already
elaborated plans (see Ingold, 2000: 175). Process thinking eschews such separatist
metaphysics, instead finding human exposure to the wider environment akin to that of
animals, feeling (in sensation, perception, action, and thought all as one), in a tentative,
emergent, and relational way, life being what Bergson (1911/2002: 27) calls ‘a current
passing’ through which all organisms move and flow. It is from such awareness that Thrift
(2007) and Massumi (2002) also refer to ontogenesis, but here referring to a specifically
human form of consciousness and thought as that which accompanies the genesis of
being as the mode by which being dwells, to use Heidegger’s term. In dwelling with the
wider environment we not only learn to skilfully accommodate ourselves appropriately to
the wider world of things (materials, skies, and even spirits), but we do so also in
imagination. Here thought exposes itself to the unhomely, the strange, the different, that
which is other than but which invites us to strive, to open up, and move along lines of
flight. It is through this ontogenesis as the thought accompanying of our evolution of
being that we become aware of our self-productive potential as that which makes being
present in various possibilities of actualization.
(p. 10) We now go on to think with these five aspects of process philosophy as we
elaborate on how we can engage in process research.
1.3 Doing Process Research
Process philosophy encourages us to follow the goings-on of organization, finding a world
of swelling, falling away, erupting, and becalming without rest. The techne or craft of
doing research becomes more like following, a going with things, rather than attempting
to capture and fix them. To investigate organizational life is to use representational
concepts whilst being attentive to how they can, in turn, use us, confining our vision with
prescriptions of neatness that find us smoothing over the frayed and recalcitrant aspects
of experience. We cannot but help use concepts, categories, words. Yet we might become
wary of how in ‘producing’ knowledge we have had a tendency to reach after glass-
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