Seminar with Philippe Lorino

Innovation as a transactional inquiry: The case of urban development.

Innovation, a complex social process, can be analyzed as a transactional inquiry, as defined by the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. Inquiring involves knowing through the inseparable intertwining of narrating (making new hypotheses), reasoning, and experimenting. Transaction implies the inseparable entanglement of inquiring and inquired; the ongoing dynamics of re-defining and re-naming facts and events; the purposing nature of the inquiring process, which transforms its own aims in the very course of inquiring; and its dialogical nature: sense is not built by an autonomous conscience, but emerges from the ongoing exchange of acts and discourses. This approach is illustrated by a field study in which a group of institutional actors, trying to transform the habits of urban planning through the design of a new urban district in the South of France, gets involved in a series of transactional inquiries focused on the gradual invention of a fictional character, the future inhabitant.

Philippe Lorino is Distinguished Professor, Accounting and Management Control Department at ESSEC Business School in Paris. Before becoming a professor at ESSEC he held a number of top level positions in French private and public sector companies. He has also consulted with a number highly prestigious companies. As an organizational scholar Philippe Lorino specializes in pragmatist theory and process philosophy.