Doing Process Research in Organizations

Introduction

This book takes up the challenge that process philosophy and process ontology pose to conventional, entity-based empirical research, even daring to question the relevance of methodology in contemporary process organization studies. A process ontology demands reimagining and ongoing reinvention of how researchers inquire into and engage with the movements and moments of a morphing world. This in turn requires us to notice differently in our empirical engagements.

Shared Commitment

Contributors to this book share a commitment to research that is more-than-representational in its concern to notice and act-with the latencies and diversities of living experience. Drawing inspiration from process philosophies, posthuman subjectivities, post qualitative inquiry, art, poetics, cinematics, and aesthetics, the chapters actively manifest the doing, reading, and writing of process research by attuning to occasions, moments, atmospheres, affects, agencements, with-ness, difference, and multiplicity.

Methodological Approaches

In bringing these ideas alive, the authors engage with their own empirical unfoldings by means of communing, corresponding, caring, performative writing, depersonalization, subject proliferation, mindfulness, relating, slow seeing, rhythmanalysis, listening, chromatic empiricism, and diffraction. Each chapter offers a unique worlding constituted in the particular elements it brings together, affording a style of reading that is oriented towards sensing rather than knowing or mastery.

Reading and Resonance

The chapters can be read in any order, alone or with and through each other. Collectively they evoke a mycelial web of resonance travelling across, between, and beyond the contents of this book.