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Traditional approaches to organizational improvisation treat it as a merely functional response to environmental constrains and unforeseen disruptions, neglecting its moral dimension, especially the valued ends improvisers aim to achieve. We attempt to address this gap by drawing on virtue ethics. In particular, we explore how phronetic improvisation is accomplished by drawing on the diary of an emergency-room physician, in which she describes her (and colleagues’) experience of dealing with Covid-19 in a New York Hospital, during the first spike in March–April 2020. We argue that improvisation is phronetic insofar as practitioners actively care for the valued ends of their practice. In particular, practitioners seek to phronetically fulfil the internal goods of their practice, while complying with institutional demands, in the context of coping with situational exigencies. Phronetic improvisation involves paying attention to what is salient in the situation at hand, while informed by an open-ended commitment to valued ends and constrained by scarce resources, and driven by a willingness to meet what is at stake through adapting general knowledge to situational demands. Such an inventive process may involve reshaping the original internal goods of the practice, in light of important institutional constrains.

Scholars are increasingly examining how formal leaders of organizations change moral norms. The prominent accounts over-emphasize the role of rational persuasion. We focus, instead, on how formal leaders successfully break and thereby create moral norms. We draw on Dreyfus’s ontology of cultural paradigms and Williams’s moral luck to develop our framework for viewing leader-driven radical norm the change. We argue that formal leaders, embedded in their practices’ grounding, clarifying, and organizing norms, get captivated by anomalies and respond to them by taking moral risks, which, if practically successful, create a new normative order. We illustrate the framework with Churchill’s actions in 1940 and Anita Roddick’s Body Shop. Last, we discuss normative orders, when ordinary leaders change norms, evil, and further research.

In this chapter, I attempt to show how phenomenology enables a richer (i.e. anti-dualist) account of organizational phenomena by enabling researchers to capture the logic of practice. By offering a more complex ontological understanding of agency (embodied, temporally structured, and embedded), phenomenologically informed organizational research enables us to see the multiple ways in which agents relate to the world. By according priority to being-in-the-world, as the primordial way of being, it offers a holistic ontological framework that focuses on relationality. By emphasizing enaction, it underlines the partly self-constitutive character of knowing through action. And by bringing out the non-successive character of temporality, it highlights the incessantly processual character of experience. I illustrate my account with examples from organizational research.

Organizations operating in extreme contexts regularly face dangerous incidents they can neither prevent nor easily control. In such circumstances, successful sensemaking can mean the difference between life and death. But what happens afterwards? Our study of emergency management practitioners following a major bushfire reveals a process of post-incident sensemaking during which practitioners continue to make sense of the incident after it ends, during the subsequent public inquiry, and as they try to implement the inquiry’s recommendations. Different varieties of sensemaking arise during this process as practitioners rely on different forms of coping to develop and share new understandings, which not only make sense of the original incident, but also enable changes to help the organization deal with future incidents. Our study also shows that practitioners experience a range of emotions during this process, some of which inhibit sensemaking while others – particularly different forms of anxiety – can facilitate it. Our study makes an important empirical contribution to recent theoretical work on varieties of sensemaking and provides new insights into the complex role of emotions in sensemaking in extreme contexts.

This chapter reflects on the previous handbook chapters and considers how our conceptualization of change influences how it is explained, understood, or prescribed. It explores the contrast between the synoptic (or entitative) image of change, which conceives of change as happening to organizations (or parts thereof), and the performative (or enactivist) image, which looks at change from within: how the organization responds to exogenous and endogenous stimuli. By focusing on agency, the performative “picture” conceives of stability as an accomplishment. Even when stability is deliberately perturbed through episodic-cum-planned change, the latter always retains emergence—becomingness. From a performative perspective, when planned-cum-episodic change is initiated, what is worth exploring is how the rationale for change emerges, how it is articulated and connected with diverse narratives of change that may have been available, how diverse agents intra-act, and how possibilities emerge.

Karl E. Weick’s The Social Psychology of Organizing has been one of the most influential books in organization studies, providing the theoretical underpinnings of several research programs. Importantly, the book is widely credited with initiating the process turn in the field, leading to the ‘gerundizing’ of management and organization studies: the persistent effort to understand organizational phenomena as ongoing accomplishments. The emphasis of the book on organizing (rather than on organizations) and its links with sensemaking have made it the most influential treatise on organizational epistemology. In this introduction, we review Weick’s magnum opus, underline and assess its key themes, and suggest ways in which several of them may be taken forward.\ud \ud

Risk has become a crucial part of organizing, affecting a wide range of organizations in all sectors. We identify, review and integrate diverse literatures relevant to organizing risk, building on an existing framework that describes how risk is organized in three ‘modes’ – prospectively, in real-time, and retrospectively. We then identify three critical issues in the existing literature: its fragmented nature; its neglect of the tensions associated with each of the modes; and its tendency to assume that the meaning of an object in relation to risk is singular and stable. We provide a series of new insights with regard to each of these issues. First, we develop the concept of a risk cycle that shows how organizations engage with all three modes and transition between them over time. Second, we explain why the tensions have been largely ignored and show how studies using a risk work perspective can provide further insights into them. Third, we develop the concept of risk translation to highlight the ways in the meanings of risks can be transformed and to identify the political consequences of such translations. We conclude the paper with a research agenda to elaborate these insights and ideas further.

In this essay, I focus on the initial reaction of the then leadership of the Academy of Management (AOM) to President Trump’s travel ban issued in January 2017. By viewing the travel ban in purely administrative terms, AOM leadership framed it as an example of “political speech”, on which they were organizationally barred to take a public stand. I subject this view to critical assessment, arguing that the travel ban had a distinct moral character, which was antithetical to scholarly values. Τhe travel ban, I suggest, should be viewed as a non-prototypical case of political speech, which required AOM leadership to flexibly adapt existing rules in situ: to imaginatively frame the travel ban in order to undertake responsible action. Accordingly, the early 2017 AOM rules about political speech should be seen not as recipes-for-action but as reminders-for-action, thus allowing an imaginative reframing. Finally, exploring the notion of moral imagination, I distinguish between “disclosive” and “incremental” moral imagination and responsibility, and suggest that AOM leadership engaged mainly in the latter.

Extended narrative sensemaking consists of (a) agents generating actionable stories when faced with unexpected situations to which they need to respond in real time, and (b) emplotting actions that were undertaken and events that occurred during their response, in order to make deeper sense of them afterwards. When sensemakers revisit critical incidents in which there were involved, they join (a) and (b) through story work. In this article, through the study of stories told by police officers in relation to unexpected, impactful incidents, we show how story work is accomplished. We argue that sensemakers simultaneously enact situations, emplot events, and renew identity. Specifically, we demonstrate that police officers strive to accomplish three different things: first, show how, as engaged responders, they were involved in the ongoing enactment of an actionable story (situated agency); secondly, seek to deeper understand, after the event, what happened to them through emplotting their experiences (complexified sense); and thirdly, update their narrative identity by weaving their experience of the handling of the unexpected situation with the rest of their life story (identity renewal). Our account extends current understanding of ongoing narrative sensemaking by showing how agents construct agency, meaning, and identity at once, and how all three are part of an extended, ongoing sensemaking process.

Institutions—the taken-for-granted structures, practices, and meanings that define what people and organizations within their jurisdiction think, do, and aspire to—are all about process, even though this may not always have been evident in some of the institutional theory literature. In this introduction, the editors call for a strong process approach to institutional dynamics, one that highlights institutions as emergent, generative, political, and social. They first relate “weak” and “strong” process views with the two metaphors commonly used to explain institutionalization—diffusion and translation. After reviewing some of the recent developments within institutional theory that set the ground for a strong process view, they move to exemplify the potential of a strong process view for institutional theory. They then end the introduction with some suggestions that will contribute positively to the ongoing development of institutional theory through a strong process view.

We develop a typology of sensemaking in organizations that reconsiders existing sensemaking research by providing a more coherent and integrative conceptualization of what defines sensemaking and how it is connected with organizing. Drawing on existential phenomenology, we make the following core claims: (1) sensemaking is not a singular phenomenon but comprises four major types: immanent, involved-deliberate, detached-deliberate, and representational sensemaking; (2) all types of sensemaking originate and take place within specific practice worlds; (3) the core constituents of sensemaking within a practice world (sense–action nexus, temporality, embodiment, and language) are played out differently in each type of sensemaking. Furthermore, we elaborate the links between sensemaking and organizing, focusing especially on the connections between types and levels of sensemaking, and the consequences of sensemaking outcomes for organizing. Finally, we discuss how the typology contributes to the existing sensemaking perspective, outline methodological implications, and suggest ways of advancing sensemaking research.

This chapter addresses the question: “How can findings from case studies and ethnographies be generalized?” It advances an epistemological defence of small-N studies in the context of organization and management theory by drawing on Wittgenstein, and argues that the distinctive theoretical contribution of small-N studies stems from seeing particular cases as opportunities for further refining our conceptualization of general processes. Theorizing is an analogical process: small-N studies researchers notice analogies with processes described in other studies and, in an effort to account for the specificity of the particular case under study, draw new distinctions and thus further refine what is currently known. It is not so much analytical generalization that small-N studies aid as heuristic generalization (or analytical refinement). By doing so, the craving for generality is the craving for a clearer view. They aid generic understanding without annihilating the epistemic significance of the particular.

Organizations undertake action even in the absence of decisions, and make decisions without necessarily following them through with actions. An outcome that may appear to an observer to be the product of a sequence of decisions, may not be so if approached from the perspective of the actor. How is that possible? A Heideggerian perspective enables us to accommodate most currently available theories of decision making into a new ontology. A lot of what ordinarily passes for “decision making” is nothing else but either practical coping or deliberate coping, both occurring in the midst of action, and a great deal of action routinely undertaken in organizations consists of either spontaneous responses to the circumstances at hand, or deliberate choices often made in an analogical manner. These points are illustrated with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal that was revealed by the award-winning journalist Seymour Hersh in 2004.

It is argued that to understand change in organizations better, we need to move away from a mechanistic imagery to embrace an ecological imagery, inspired by complexity thinking. An ecological imagery better reflects our common experience of change in organizations, especially if due attention is given to language. Drawing on Bakhtin and Wittgenstein, this chapter pays particular attention to dialogicality as a process of bringing about change from “within.” It describes the importance of moments of common reference created between interlocutors, which join individuals as co-participants in a situation and give their interactions a common orientation. Put simply, co-participants in a dialogue form both transitory understandings of where the discussion has got to so far and certain anticipations as to where it might go next. The change that may be brought about though re-orientation by simple, ordinary language is illustrated with a dialogue between a researcher and an IT manager.

This chapter argues that to appreciate what strategy-as-practice (SAP) has to offer strategy researchers, and to fully realize its potential, it needs to be grounded on an onto-epistemology that acknowledges the various ways through which strategies qua practices may develop, as well as the various modes of intentionality and language use that, crucially, underlie strategy-making. A fully developed Heideggerian onto-epistemological framework provides a coherent way for different types of strategy-making to be researched from a practice perspective. A Heideggerian lens on SAP first brings intentionality under scrutiny and shows how it is constructed in strategizing episodes through practitioners drawing upon particular sociomaterial practices. Secondly, it shows the “inherited background” from which practitioners engage in coherent practical coping, and explores how aspects of this “inherited background” are brought to explicit awareness in the face of breakdowns.

This chapter addresses the question of how routines are created and recreated from within, and proposes a process model focusing on the internal dynamics of routines. In particular, by unpacking the performative and ostensive aspects of routines, it grounds endogenous explanations of routine creation and recreation to the situated understandings and actions of mutually susceptible participants. Mead’s concept of role taking helps to account for the fitting together of individual lines of action (performative) and the sharing of participants’ schemata (included in the ostensive) as mutually constituted processes that occur as participants develop distinct selves in the context of a joint activity. Moreover, the content and structure of the ostensive aspect is accounted for, and a conceptualization is proposed that does justice to it as a singular structural construct and allows for its multiplicity.

When it comes to the field of organization and management theory, a philosophical perspective enables us to conduct organizational research imbued with the attitude of “wonder”; it helps researchers question dominant images of thought underlying mainstream thinking, and provides fresh distinctions that enable the development of new theory. In bringing together a collection of key essays by Haridimos Tsoukas, this volume explores fundamental concepts, such as organizational routines, that have gained currency in the field, as well as revisiting traditional concepts such as change, strategy, and organization. It discusses organizational knowledge, judgment, and reflection-in-action, and, at the meta-theoretical level, suggests complex forms of theorizing that seek to reflect the complexity of organizations. The conceptual attention throughout is on process and practice, underlain by performative phenomenology and an emphasis on agents’ lived experience. This provides us with the language to appreciate the dynamic character of organizational behaviour, the embeddedness of action, and the complexity of organizational life. The theoretical claims presented in this volume have important implications for scholarly practice, insofar as they help retrain our attention: from seeing structures and individuals, we can now appreciate processes, experiences, and practices. A phenomenological attitude makes organization theory more open, more creative, and more reflexive, and this book will be essential reading for researchers and students in the field of organization studies.

Despite several insightful empirical studies on how new knowledge is created in organizations, there is still no satisfactory answer to this question. The purpose of this chapter is to address the question by focusing on direct social interaction. By reinterpreting several organizational examples, as well as findings from organizational knowledge research, the chapter illustrates the process by which new knowledge in organizations originates and develops using a dialogical perspective. When productive, dialogue leads to self-distanciation, namely to individuals taking distance from their customary and unreflective ways of acting as practitioners. Dialogue is productive depending on the extent to which participants engage relationally with one another. When this happens participants are more likely to actively take responsibility both for the joint tasks in which they are involved and for their relationships with others.

Drawing on the philosophy of Cornelius Castoriadis, I argue that organization is an ever incomplete effort to shape chaos and formlessness. More specifically, organization consists of three ontological components, each pointing to a different function/process: representation, meaning-making, and improvisation. First, portions of the world need to be re-presented in terms of the ensidic logic for an entity to become organized. Secondly, while through representation human actions are sought to be decontextualized, they are necessarily rooted in the practice of a particular community, through which they acquire collectively shared meanings. Thirdly, both syntax (rules) and semantics (meanings) are applied by concrete people in a concrete world, which is infinitely more complex than its representations. There is always a phronetic gap between representations and the world, which is filled in through actors improvising. When a human system is said to be organized, all three functions/processes must be in place.

This chapter argues that, rather than theory development aiming at simplifying complex organizational phenomena, it should aim at complexifying theories—theoretical complexity is needed to account for organizational complexity. Defining the latter as “nontrivial” action, it explores a complex “system of picturing” of organizations as objects of study that provides an alternative to the dominant disjunctive style of thinking. Complex theorizing is conjunctive: it seeks to make connections between diverse elements of human experience through making those analytical distinctions that will enable the joining up of concepts normally compartmentalized. Insofar as conjunctive theorizing is driven by the need to preserve the “living forwards–understanding backwards” dialectic, it is better suited to grasping the logic of practice and doing justice to organizational complexity. This argument is illustrated with several examples from organizational and management research.

The purpose of this chapter is to articulate the philosophical underpinnings of the perspective commonly known as “practice theory.” The latter originates and has grown out from the long-standing philosophical critique of the logic of scientific rationality, which underlies a large majority of theories within organization and management theory, and social science more generally. Practice theory aims to capture the basic understandings manifested in how actors and materials are entwined in a relational whole over time. Seeing actors as embedded in practices orients researchers to explore how actors follow rules and handle their experiences in enacting the practices they partake in. This chapter explores the philosophical underpinnings of practice theory, with a particular focus on Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and distinguishes three approaches to the study of practice: commonsensical theories, general theories, and domain-specific theories.

This chapter argues that a representationalist view of theory in an applied or practical science, such as Organization and Management Theory (OMT), is unrealistic and misleading, since it fails to acknowledge theory’s ineradicable dependence on the dynamics of the lifeworld within which it has its “currency.” It explores some of the difficulties raised by the use of representational theorizing in OMT, and the nature of a more reflective form of theorizing. Reflective theorizing invites practitioners to attend to the grammar of their actions, namely to the rules and meanings that actors draw upon in their participation in social practices. It works to draw their attention to aspects of people’s interactions in organizations not usually noticed; to bring to awareness unconscious habits, confusions, prejudices, and pictures that hold practitioners captive. This view of theory—as perceptually reorienting rather than as cognitively explaining—is illustrated by looking at Karl Weick’s sensemaking theory.

How does an administrator, manager, or other practitioner know how to do what she does while she does it? Building on the work of Donald Schön, this chapter proposes a phenomenological theory of practice and of reflection-in-the-course-of-practice that transcends what is seen as Schön’s cognitive orientation, as well as some other limitations in his theorizing. The theory includes: an appreciation for the evaluative dimensions built into competent practice that encourage, if not require, reflecting; a further theorizing of the character of surprise; and a fuller delineation of the character of improvisation in relation to practice and its surprises. Schön’s arguments are reframed in phenomenological, especially Heideggerian, terms, and these discussions are illustrated with vignettes from the world of practice drawn from field research.

There is an increasing concern that organizational theories are not relevant to practice. This chapter contends that the overall problem is that most organizational theories are unable to capture the logic of practice because they are developed within the framework of scientific rationality. The latter, along with the accompanying representational view of theory, are grounded on an entity-based ontology that foregrounds the subject-object separation. Drawing on Heidegger and his interpreters, existential ontology is suggested as an alternative, which is spacious enough to allow that a practice world shows up to beings who are absorbed in it, and that human beings can engage with the practice world in variously detached ways, through which its components appear to them. Accordingly, practical rationality is elaborated as an alternative framework, and shown to enable development of theories that grasp the logic of practice, and thus are more relevant to organizational practice.

This chapter elaborates on how singularities (unique, first-time/once-occurrent events) may be thought of in organization science, and how an organization science of singularities may be possible. Organizations are designed to generate regularities. Historically oriented towards capturing regularities, organization science has treated organizations as abstract systems, devoid of the idiosyncrasies of human agency. However, while organizations categorize and generalize, insofar as people in organizations act, they inevitably create and encounter differences. Difference indicates uniqueness implicit in the particularity of things, and the repetitiveness of regularities in organizations does not indicate the reproduction of sameness, since repetition is an occasion for generating difference. An organization science of singularities is concerned with bringing to attention the unique features of organizational life that create new possibilities. Such a science is performative, seeking to provide action-oriented accounts of organizational life from within.

This chapter explores the process through which people in organizations, especially those in leadership positions, arrive at judgment. The rationalist orientation of the (somewhat limited) literature on judgment in management studies prevents us (scholars and practitioners alike) from properly grasping important features of the hermeneutical-developmental process involved in coming to a judgment. In particular, the role of emotions, moral agency, and language use, and, especially, the selective and integrative nature of perceptual processes are too easily ignored. This chapter makes the case for a particular notion of judgment understood as Aristotelian “phronesis” (practical wisdom). Phronetic leaders are people who, in their search for a way out of their difficulties, have developed a refined capacity to intuitively grasp salient features of ambiguous situations and to constitute a “landscape” of possible paths of response. This chapter sheds light on how this is accomplished, by drawing on neo-Aristotelian, phenomenological, and Wittgensteinian philosophy.

Practical wisdom and judgment, rather than seen as “things” hidden inside the mind, are best talked of as emerging developmentally within an unceasing flow of activities in which practitioners are immersed. When practitioners (namely, individuals immersed in a practice, experiencing their tasks through the emotions, standards of excellence, and moral values the practice engenders) face a bewildering situation in which they do not know how to proceed, the judgment they exercise emerges out of seeking to establish a new orientation to their puzzling surroundings. They do so through actively trying to be in touch with their felt emotions and moral sensibilities, while attempting to articulate linguistically the feelings experienced, in order to get a clearer view of relevant aspects of the situation at hand. Coming to a judgment involves moving around within a landscape of possibilities, and in so doing, being spontaneously responsive to the consequences of each move.

This chapter revisits Gareth Morgan’s seminal book Images of Organization and considers its main thesis—that organizations have no essence, but we can bring out their features through the metaphorical lenses we see them through—in the context of pragmatist-hermeneutical philosophy. Morgan’s “metaphor” metaphor approaches organizations as texts, inviting readers to become sophisticated readers of organizational life. Images of Organization, rather than providing ready-made answers, provides its readers with the resources to search for answers, thus enabling readers-practitioners to refine their ordinary practices of understanding, and become phronetic practitioners who must simultaneously maintain what Dewey called “a state of doubt” while searching for better candidates of belief.

This sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. —Plato, Theaetetus, §155d At the foundation of well-founded belief lies belief that is not founded. —Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §253 Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity [ … ] The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection....

Organizational contradictions and process studies offer interwoven and complementary insights. Studies of dialectics, paradox, and dualities depict organizational contradictions that are oppositional as well as interrelated such that they persistently morph and shift over time. Studies of process often examine how contradictions fuel emergent, dynamic systems and stimulate novelty, adaptation, and transformation. Drawing largely from rich conversations at the Eighth International Symposium on Process Organization Studies, this volume unpacks these relationships in more depth. In this introduction, the authors provide an overview of the topic at hand, review the papers in this volume, outlining how the varied lenses of dialectics, paradoxes, and dualities help articulate the interplay between organizational process themes and contradictions, and offer suggestions for further research.

I seek to further develop the behavioral approach to strategic management through sketching a communitarian view of the firm. Specifically, I argue that the latter, informed by a practice-based onto-epistemology, especially a neo-Aristotelian understanding of praxis, and the related institutional work of Selznick, suggests the centrality of value commitments firms make, which, through habituation, are integrated to form organizational character. The latter provides firms with certain core competences – a distinctive style with which practitioners enact their tasks. Organizational character helps confront the self-command problem firms face. However, the behavioral consistency that character provides may lead to rigidities when competitive circumstances change, while organizational character, through praxis, may take on features that prevent the leadership of a firm from realizing the novelty of the circumstances in order to modify existing core competences and the accompanying organizational character dispositions.

Skillful performance has become one of the most perennial and critical questions within management and organization studies (MOS). This introductory chapter discusses how skillful performance has been conceptualized and investigated in three main interrelated research areas within MOS, namely strategic management, organizational learning and knowledge management, and human resource management. It critically scrutinizes these bodies of literatures, showing that while they have generated an abundance of knowledge about what characterizes the properties of the capabilities, knowledge, competence, and expertise related to skillful performance, they have considerably less to say about how they are enacted in skillful performance. As a way forward, the chapter introduces a range of process-based approaches to advance our understanding of how capabilities, knowledge, competence, and expertise are enacted in the skillful performance of individuals, groups, and organizations.

In this paper I argue that, rather than theory development aim at simplifying complex organizational phenomena, it should aim at complexifying theories – theoretical complexity is needed to account for organizational complexity. Defining the latter as the capacity for ‘nontrivial’ action, I explore a complex ‘system of picturing’ organizations as objects of study that provides an alternative to the hitherto dominant disjunctive style of thinking. A complex ‘system of picturing’ consists of an open-world ontology, a performative epistemology, and a poetic praxeology. Complex theorizing is conjunctive: it seeks to make connections between diverse elements of human experience through making those analytical distinctions that will enable the joining up of concepts normally used in a compartmentalized manner. Insofar as conjunctive theorizing is driven by the need to preserve the ‘living-forward – understanding backward’ dialectic, it is better suited to grasping the logic of practice and, thus, to doing justice to organizational complexity. We come close to grasping complexity when we restore the past to its own present and make distinctions that overcome dualisms, preserving as much as possible relationality, temporality, situatedness and, interpretive open-endedness. I illustrate the argument with several examples from organizational and management research.\ud

Through a wide-ranging critical review of relevant publications, we explore and articulate what constitutes the sensemaking perspective in organization studies, as well as its range of applications and limitations. More specifically, we argue that sensemaking in organizations has been seen as consisting of specific episodes, is triggered by ambiguous events, occurs through specific processes, generates specific outcomes, and is influenced by several situational factors. Furthermore, we clarify the application range of the sensemaking perspective and identify, as well as account for, the types and aspects of organizational sensemaking that have been under-researched. We critically discuss the criticism that the sensemaking perspective has received so far and selectively expand on it. Finally, we identify the main limitations of the sensemaking perspective, which, if tackled, will advance it: the neglect of prospective sensemaking, the exclusive focus on disruptive episodes at the expense of more mundane forms of sensemaking implicated in routine activities, the ambiguous status of enactment, the conflation of first-order and second-order sensemaking, and the lack of proper attention to embodied sensemaking. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.