Book launch: A Process Theory of Organization

This book presents a novel and comprehensive process theory of organization applicable to 'a world on the move', where connectedness prevails over size, flow prevails over stability, and temporality prevails over spatiality. The framework developed in the book draws upon process thinking in a number of areas, including process philosophy, pragmatism, phenomenology, and science and technology studies. Salient ideas from these schools are carefully woven into a process theory of organization, which makes the book not only a thought provoking theoretical contribution, but also a much-needed glimpse into the challenges of organizing in a complex and moving world. Taking a distinctly temporal view of organizational life the author shows how actors continually carve out their temporal existence from being in the flow of time. This on-going work, in which technologies, concepts, and social actors take part, is crucial for the making of any type of organizational formation. A key construct of the book is that of events, which provide force, movement, and historicity to organizational life.

Read more about the book here.

Programme:

15.30 – 15.40 Welcome by Professor Kristian Kreiner, Head of Department of Organization, CBS

15.40 – 16.00 Introduction by Professor Silviya Svejenova Velikova, Department of Organization, CBS

16.00 – 16.40 Book presentation by Professor Tor Hernes

16.40 – 17.00 Open discussion

17.00 – ???? Reception at Kilen, 4th floor

Please sign up via seminar.ioa@cbs.dk

Here is what some people have said about the book:

These remarkable insights offered in this book provide a language and a style of analysis that help us move from process and reality to process as reality. Tor Hernes has captured the elusiveness of organizing in motion in a way that is unmatched. This book is a major accomplishment that enables all of us to be more observant and more skillful analysts who can now ask better questions about fleeting structures in an on-going present.

Karl Weick, Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan

The time of structures is gone, but much of organization theory – and practice – holds compulsively to it. Tor Hernes' book will help theoreticians and practitioners to let go – and enter the world where fluid processes cross through the global economy.

Barbara Czarniawska, GRI, School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg

This book is a refreshingly bold attempt to provide a genuinely alternative approach to the study and analysis of organization as precarious and temporary accomplishments; time and temporality feature significantly in its theoretical agenda. Hernes takes a step back and attempts to theorize organization on the basis that process itself is constitutive of reality. Hernes is to be complemented for undertaking such an ambitious endeavour in making us aware of the consequences of taking process and becoming seriously.

Robert Chia, Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow