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ONTOLOGY: ORGANISATION AS 'WORLD-MAKING' Chapter Contribution to Point/Counterpoint: Central Debates in Organisation Theory Edited by Robert Westwood and Stewart Clegg Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Robert Chia Dept of Management, School of Business and Economics University of Exeter Streatham Court, Rennes Drive Exeter EX4 4PU Email: R.Chia@exeter.ac.uk Overview The purpose of this chapter is to trace the foundational roots of modern attitudes towards organisation and management and to relocate their origins in the broader civilisational processes that have taken place especially in the last three millennium Its central argument is that organisation must not be understood as a concrete social entity (whether socially-constructed or otherwise) with durable characteristics and tendencies Instead, organisation is better understood as the aggregative unintended outcome of local efforts at ordering and regularising our otherwise intractable and amorphous life-world in order to make it more predictable and liveable Organisation is more a tedious and interminable process of factioning out the real than a solid, static thing This suggests that we ought to think about Organisation Studies (OS) not as the study of 'organisations', but as a sustained analysis of the generic organisational impulses shaping contemporary modes of analysis, codes of behaviour, social mannerisms, dress, gestures, postures, the rules of law, disciplines of knowledge and so on These micro-ordering processes collectively serve to shape our identities and aspirations and to orient us towards ourselves and our environment This has profound consequences for what we take as the legitimate objects of analysis, our modes of theorising and the imperatives we draw to inform managerial action It is this broader dimension of organising as 'world-making' which offers a richer alternative to the study of organisation and its consequences for the world of affairs Introduction 'In each period there is a general form of the forms of thought; and, like the air we breath, such a form is so translucent, and so pervading, and so seemingly necessary, that only by extreme effort can we become aware of it' (A N Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 1933: 20) In 1884, more than a hundred years ago, representatives from twenty-five major countries convened at the Prime Meridian Conference in Washington and came to an agreement on the exact length of the universal day They then proceeded to divide the earth into twenty-four time zones each one hour apart with Greenwich as the zero meridian Prior to this momentous event a traveller from Washington to San Francisco would have had to reset his watch more than two hundred times as he passed through each of the towns on the way to his destination The pressure for adopting standard time zones thus came initially from the railroad companies but was gradually taken up across the world so that by the early part of the twentieth century most countries had aligned itself with Greenwich time Crucially, it was the invention of first the telephone and then the wireless telegraph which made it possible for simultaneous events taking place in various parts of the world to be registered, coordinated and synchronised according to this universal standard time The ability to experience distant events simultaneously, made possible by the wireless and dramatized by the sinking of the Titanic on the night of 14th April 1912, was a part of the major cultural shift taking place during that period This expanding experience of simultaneity and presence was further reinforced by concerted attempts to standardise the previously agreed time zones across the world The globalization of time occurred on July st 1913 At 10 o'clock that morning the Eiffel Tower in Paris transmitted the first time signals around the world thereby registering the advent of a universal framework for temporal coordination and control Whatever sentiment and charm local time might have once meant the world was henceforth fated to wake up with buzzers and bells triggered by impulses that travelled around the world with the speed of light This representation of private lived time and its systematic conversion into public ‘spatialised’ domains marked a crucial moment in the shaping of the modern world order In one single stroke it became possible to coordinate actions, intentions and aspirations across space in an unprecedented way and to achieve a level of predictability and productivity in social interactions never before envisaged This is a triumph of modern organisation It provides an important illustation of how an otherwise dispersed and heterogeneous concatenation of atomic event-occurrences spread out across a vast geographical space can be regularised and made to fit within a singular coordinated framework with highly productive consequences Such is the scope and power of the phenomenon of organisation The establishment of the World Standard Time over a century ago epitomises a form of relentless social ordering that has had an incalculable impact on our everyday life and on our understanding of social reality Like the invention of the alphabet and the printing press, several centuries before, it represents yet another momentous attempt to forge a universal system of communication and organisation out of an otherwise inchoate and amorphous mass of local orderings and tacit understandings in the conduct of daily life Organisation is the quintessential technology for real-ising the real: for making what appears initially irrelevant and unconnected part of a universal order that gives sense and consequence to our everyday action and experience Oxford university, quarks, blackholes and gravity are real to us in our common-sense understanding, not because we can see or experience them, but because we are able to attribute causal consequence to their purported existence The construction of identities, their simple location, and their causal attribution, however, are precisely modern strategies of organisation: central features of our modern will-to-order They reflect our capacity for 'world-making': for drawing together the seemingly dispersed and the unrelated into a coherent and plausible system of explanation Such forms of social ordering inevitably influence, amongst other things, how the flux and flow of our life-worlds are structured and conceptualized into events, things and situations; how identity is established and social entities created; how taxonomies and systems of classifications are produced and with what effects; how reification takes place and causal relations imputed and with what consequences; and how symbols and representations are used to substitute for reality and with what outcomes, particularly in terms of organisational priorities and practices It is this second-order concern with the organisation of our forms of social life, our ways of seeing, our modes of understanding and explanation, and our methods of knowledge-creation that constitutes an alternative way of conceptualising the role of Organisation Studies One that invariably emphasises the realityconstituting or ontological character of organisation What is significantly overlooked in much of conventional OS, therefore, is a rigorous and critical reflection on the underlying social, cultural and historical forces shaping the way we see, think and act within the institutionalised and organised structures of the modern world Against the restricted and restrictive view of OS as an economicadministrative discipline, an expanded Social Theory of Organisation seeks to critically examine the generic organising logic underpinning the societal and institutional strategies of rationalization that both Max Weber and Michel Foucault, amongst others, identified as the defining feature of modernity This chapter begins by examining the structuring effects of language on our perception and conception of reality It attempts to show how language, and in particular the alphabetic system of writing, has substantially inspired an atomistic, entitative and causal view of reality This view of reality was reinforced by the arrival of a typographic system of thinking some five hundred years ago following the invention of the printing press It is argued here that the introduction of such a typographic mindset led to the modern obsession with collecting, classifying and typologising natural and social phenomena precipitating the kind of systematic empiricism that we now associate with scientific realism We then move on to briefly examine an alternative becoming ontology as the basis for reconceptualising organisation as an emergent process rather than as a stable phenomenon From this alternative metaphysical orientation, it will be shown that organisation involves the relentless arresting, fixing and stabilsiing of an intrinsically wild, fluxing and changeable reality 'Organisations' are, in fact, islands of relatively stabilised patterns of interactional order selectively abstracted from a sea of chaos They not possess 'thing-like' characteristics We not directly experience ‘an organisation’ even if we are admittedly affected by the complex of social relationships we find ourselves in at various points in our lives Such organising relationships are nothing more than the dynamic network of implicit assumptions, expectations, social obligations, rules, conventions and protocols which shape how our individual identities are constructed and how as fundamentally social creatures we are expected to behave and act within a specific community at a given point in time Organisation, as such, is not so much a solid, stable entity as it is an ongoing 'world-making' activity This activity of constructing and reinforcing our all-too-familiar organised world is intrinsic to the process of modern civilisation It goes far back to the invention of writing and, in particular, the invention of the alphabet The Alphabetization of the Western World 'If today we are so often tempted to speak of the "European mind" or the "Western mind", vague as these determinations are, they have a factual basis insofar as we mean those cultures which have continued to employ the Greek invention' (E Havelock, The Literate Revolution in Greece and its Cultural Consequences, 1982: 346) Any understanding of Western cultural evolution and change is impossible without a prior appreciation of the fundamental changes in sense-ratios, and hence attitudes of observational discrimination, brought about by the invention of the alphabet Introduced some three thousand years ago by the Phoenicians and appropriated and modified by the Greeks some three centuries later, alphabetic writing paved the way for the de-tribalizing of ancient Greece and its subsequent rise into prominence in the first millennium BC Through the newly-systematized alphabetic script, the Greeks created, from the fifth and fourth century BC, one of the richest literatures of all times, including poetry, drama, epics, history and philosophy The advantage of the alphabetic system over previous forms of scribal writing lay in its startling economy and flexibility of use in communication: as an achievement it has often been compared to the invention of the wheel and the domestication of the horse (McArthur, 1986) As a number of influential studies show (Gelb, 1952; Diringer, 1962; Ong 1967, 1977, 1982; Havelock, 1982), the alphabetic system of writing dramatically altered the character of the pre-literate Greek culture that had existed up to that period Ong (1982), for instance argues that the shift from oral to literate alphabetic culture did more than change patterns of art, politics and commerce It facilitated a profound shift in human consciousness bringing about the linear, abstract form of Western logic that we take very much for granted today This 'ABCDEmindedness' brought about by the introduction of the alphabet, creates a kind of chirographic bias that subtly ranks sight above sound and the eye above the ear Knowing became inextricably linked to vision and it led Aristotle to subsequently write in the very first few lines of his Metaphsics: 'Of all the senses, sight best brings about knowledge of things and reveals many distinctions' (Aristotle, in Treddenick, 1933: 1) Moreover, thinking came to be intimately associated with visual metaphors: 'observation' privileges visual data; 'phenomenon' owes its origin in Greek to the notion of 'exposure to sight'; 'definition' comes from 'definire', to draw a line around; and sight is internalised into our vocaublary of knowledge - insight, idea, illuminate, enlighten, reflect, survey, perspectiv, point of view, show, overview etc This shift in the balance of the senses away from the aural to the visual also favoured 'a new kind of personality structure' (Ong, 1967: 8) because, as McLuhan and McLuhan (1988) convincingly argued, prolonged mimesis of the alphabet produced a dominant mode of perception which elevated the individual, the abstract and the static as the basis of analysis The phonetic alphabet first translates images into arbitrary consonants and sound syllables which, by themselves, are meaningless These are then mentally reassembled back into the form of words from which meaning is then extracted Meaning, therefore, only becomes possible at the operative level of words and not at the level of the individual alphabet Literacy training systematically develops the ability to construct meaningful frames out of otherwise meaningless consonants and sound syllables As McLuhan astutely observed, it is through 'the meaningless sign linked to the meaningless sound (that) we have built the shape and meaning of Western man' (McLuhan, 1967: 50) Hence, the Greeks did not just invent an alphabet, 'they invented literacy and the literate basis of modern thought' (Havelock, 1982: 82) The alphabetic culture puts a premium on sharp outlines and clear-cut sequences and therefore promotes 'literal meaning….as something altogether wholesome and altogether desirable' whilst at the same time regarding 'other…more profoundly symbolic meaning with disfavor' (Ong, 1967: 47) The introduction of the alphabetic system made available a permanent visualized record in place of an acoustic one thereby displacing the need for memory, repetition and copiousness in speech performances However, not all systems of writing invented has had this effect Ong maintains that unlike Chinese writing, which does not at root work from words as sound, the alphabetic system works by 'atomizing' linguistic sound, and in particular the syllable, into its acoustic components and then assigning a specific alphabetic shape to each of these sound elements This breakthrough in streamlining an otherwise cumbersome assortment of signs and symbols gave language an overall orderly shape and made it much more manageable than ever before Instead of having to deal with the hundreds of distinct pictograms (picture signs), ideograms (idea signs) and logograms (word signs) that are to be found in cuniform, hieroglyphics or Chinese writing, between twenty and thirty quasi-phonetic symbols can now be used to portray an infinity of words and hence afford a much wider variety of expressions Moreover, it enabled literacy to spread faster because this method of atomizing linguistic sound 'placed the skill for reading theoretically within the reach of children at the stage where they are still learning the sounds of their own vocabulary' (Havelock, 1982: 83) One unexpected consequence of the introduction of the alphabetic system was the popularising of the method of atomization - the breaking up sound into component elements and then reassembling them in space to form meaningful words This brought with it an overwhelming sense of order and control that had never been before experienced Thus, 'When the alphabet commits the verbal and conceptual worlds….to the quiescent and obedient order of space, it imputes to language and thought an additional consistency of which preliterate persons have no inkling' (Ong, 1967: 45) Ong therefore concludes that it is no accident that 'formal logic was invented in an alphabetic culture' (Ong, 1967: 45) It is this formal logic of analysis associated with alphabetization which eventually led to the almost obsessive fixing, naming, classifying and thematizing of material and social phenomena as a way of creating order and predictability in an otherwise fluxing and amorphous life-world Writing, in general and alphabetic writing in particular, is inextricably linked to the systematic ordering and organisation of society Thus, ‘Communities developed ranks, casts and guilds, armies their divisions, priesthoods their hierarchies, merchants their inventories and farmers their fields and boundaries’ (McArthur, 1986: 32) As Goody (1986) perceptively points out, modern nations are highly dependent on writing for their legislatures and for their systems of governance For Goody, ‘the desk and the bureau’ (p 90) are critical to Weber’s concept of bureaucracy Likewise Green (1981) argues that the emergence of largescaled, centralized bureaucratic institutions is a consequence of the rise of writing which 'enabled the administration to grow and, through written liability, to maintain direct authority over even the lowest levels of personnel and clientele' (Green, 1981: 367) In sum, the alphabet is, as McLuhan (1967) puts it, ‘an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of cultures’ (p 48) It precipitated the abstraction, simple-location1, and objectification of phenomena for the purpose of analysis, and by reducing all our senses into visual and pictorial or enclosed space, precipitated the rise of the Euclidean sensibility which has dominated our thought processes for over two thousand years The alphabetization of the Western world, and the method of atomization it introduced, constitutes the most successful and widespread approach to organising, structuring and representing the aural-oral world of lived experience in a way that readily lends itself to cognitive manipulation In this most fundamental sense the alphabetization of the Western world is a prime example of organisation as a 'world-making' activity With its introduction, came an entirely new emphasis on visual control and organisation and the reliance on atomization as a generic method of analysis The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Rise of Typographic Thinking 'Print gave the drive to collect and classify…Getting together an assemblage of snippets on classified subjects culled from any and every writer now paid a thousandfold' (W Ong, The Presence of the Word, 1967: 85) Nearly two and a half millennia after the invention of the alphabet, in around the year 1447, Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz became the first in the West to mechanize printing Initially, printing appeared to complement manuscript writing which was much in demand by the upper and middle classes and which the monastic scribes became increasingly unable to cope with Soon, however, like the cottage industries of more recent times, the slow and laborious process of producing the written word The term ‘simple-location’ is used here to reflect the widespread rational belief that our phenomenal experiences, including our physical sensations can be fixed spatially and hence systematically differentiated from other phenomenal experiences In this way it becomes possible to locate the symptom felt and thus deal with it in a manner reminiscent of the way a doctor diagnoses ailments by establishing the part of the anatomy associated with the symptom and then dealing with it accordingly gave way to printing This marked another significant moment in the modification of the visual/tactile/aural sense-ratios that had first been first rendered apart by the introduction of the alphabet For whilst manuscript culture is effectively conversational in that ‘the writer and his audience are physically related by the form of publication' (McLuhan, 1967: 84) since each manuscript produced was commissioned by the instructions of a specific individual, the print culture created the distinction between authors and the consuming public Henceforth, multiple copies of a manuscript could be made and distributed widely so much so that it was very likely the readership may never have met the author of a particular piece of work Conversational exchange gave way to the commodification of output The invention of typography ‘extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge, providing the first uniformly repeatable commodity, the first assembly-line, and the first mass-production’ (McLuhan, 1967: 124) Typography as the first mechanized handicraft radically shaped not only private sense-ratios but also the prevailing ‘patterns of communal interdependence’ (McLuhan, 1967: 164) Uniform quantification, assembly, measurability, individualism, and centralized control became important priorities in the management of economic and social life Uniform quantification because print made it possible to produce almost identical copies in increasingly larger quantities And this, in turn, generated a larger appetite for more of the same For the first time ever, assembly and mass-production, as we understand it today, became possible Print, in facilitating the translation of the vernacular into a mass media, initiated the demand for uniformity and standardization and hence inspired the homogenizing forces of modernity But it also promoted a widespread type-setting mode of thought through its emphasis on combining and recombining the otherwise discrete and infinitely-manipulable individual characters of the alphabet As Ong (1967) writes: 'What was crucial for the ultimate locking of sound in space was the invention of the movable alphabetic typecast from matrices which had been made with punches…Some twelve to sixteen steps…intervened here between the written word (already one remove from the spoken) and the printed sheet…To perform them, knowledge of the language concerned is not necessary…The commitment of spoken words to space here in typography has a depth and intensity continuous with but far exceeding that achieved by alphabetic chirography…What happened with the emergence of alphabetic typography was not that man discovered the use of his eyes but that he began to link visual perception to verbalization to a degree previously unknown' (Ong, 1967: 48-50) The idea that any phenomenon, material or social, can be capture and represented by firstly breaking it up into individual component pieces and then reassembled as needs be, first initiated by the invention of the alphabet but enormously magnified by the advent of typoography, became the dominant metaphor for analysis It is this typographic metaphor which serves as the leitmotif for modernist thought Centralized control and a linear, hierarchical order were also accentuated through the print culture because the latter provided possibly the first truly economical means to significantly overcome the hitherto troublesome limitations of space and time in terms of communication and influence For print made it possible to achieve widespread communication at a distance and across time for the masses to be reached directly thereby influencing their attitudes, cultural habits and lifestyles It is this principle of extension and intensification of communicational channels which made possible the kind of large-scaled, centralized and bureaucratic institutions that Green (1981) referred to in his perceptive analysis of the organisation of society Without the written word, communication would have had to be passed on ‘by word of mouth’ thereby incurring inevitable distortions Without the alphabetic system the range of abstract meanings, perspectives, concepts and ideas would have remained very limited or else evolved at a much slower pace than that achieved through the advent of literacy Without the printed word, communication would have been restricted only to the privileged few and not to the critical masses required to produce revolutionary changes in the priorities and mindsets that paved the way for the Enlightenment to take place The dramatic transformations and breakthroughs achieved in the West over the last five hundred years especially would not have been possible Key Axioms of Modern Rationality 'Industrial society rests on order Order means everything in its place…a society bent on order should put the body into order by putting order into the body; society gains order by "training"' (R Schoenwald, 'Training Urban Man', 1973: 674) The Enlightenment was a historical watershed because of the emphasis it gave to four key ideational imperatives that were inspired by the advent of literacy and 10 Moreover, the invention of the printing press precipitated a complementary 'type-setting' mentality for dealing not just with the material world, but with our amorphous life-world of fleeting events and experiences This practice, as we have shown, is best exemplified by Linnaeus's monumental attempt to observe, collect, name and classify the many species of flora and fauna found in the natural world In the social realm we find equivalents in the works of Wilkins and Spratt, founding members of the Royal Society in the seventeenth century (Kenner, 1987) and in Jeremy Bentham's 'methodization' (Chia, 1998) as a prescribed approach for taming the urban masses that congregated into the cities as a result of the industrial revolution It is this generic organisational strategy of observing, naming, listing, classifying, categorising and tabulating which constitutes the central thrust of systematic empiricism These two basic techniques of organisation (i.e., atomistic rationalism and systematic empiricsm) are, in turn, predicated upon the assumption that language and hence signifiers such as names, labels, classes and categories are able to accurately capture the essence of the phenomenon being investigated Clearly, since literal meaning involves the fixing of a relationship between a specific symbol and a referent, it carries with it an implicit assumption that reality itself must be also stable and relatively unchanging For only then would it be possible for a static symbol to capture reality in full This assumption is what gives rise to the representationalist epistemology underpinning modernist thought Such a representationalist epistemology, in turn, fuels the belief in the idea of an almost inexorable progress towards complete, certain and universal knowledge thereby making the idea of the 'accumulation' of knowledge through the process of 'theorybuilding', a central pursuit in academic endeavours The metaphor of 'collection' and 'accumulation' again becomes a dominant feature of this mode of thought These key organising axioms mark the epistemological limits of modernist thought and hence our current conceptualisation of organisation However, it is possible to reconceptualise organisation and, hence, OS in a way which opens up new avenues for investigation For this an alternative becoming ontology must be introduced A Becoming Ontology 15 'Upon those who step into the same rivers flow other and yet other waters' (Heraclitus, Fragments, in Mansley Robinson, 1968: 91) The pervasive intuition that ‘all things flow’ and is in a continuous process of becoming and changing remains a vague and enduring but relatively untheorised aspect of Western consciousness In the East it is readily accepted as a given In the West, it first appeared as one of the key propositions of the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus Since then, however, it has been the Parmenidean-inspired system of thought with its emphasis on being, permanence, stability and equilibrium which has held sway within the intellectual circles in academia This remains the case despite the fact that a number of more recent thinkers including especially Henri Bergson (1911, 1913, 1946/92) and Alfred North Whitehead (1926/85, 1929, 1933) as well as other more contemporary 'process physicists' (Bohm, 1980; Prigogine, 1996) have unequivocally upheld the 'flux of things' (Whitehead, 1929: 240) as the ultimate basis of reality As Bohm writes: 'Not only is everything changing, but all is flux That is to say, what is is the process of becoming itself…all objects, events, entities, conditions, structures, etc., are forms that can be abstracted from this process' (Bohm, 1980: 48, emphasis original) It is this resurrecting of the primacy of movement and change (what Bohm calls the 'implicate') over that of atomistic entities and end-states, which provides a radically alternative ontology for understanding organisation as a world-making activity For, it is only when ultimate reality is taken to be ceaselessly changing and in process that the apparent stability and solidity of entities becomes an issue in intellectual analysis From the point of view of a process ontology, organisations are 'islands' of relatively stabilised order in a sea of chaos and flux: that is, relative to the temporal flow of our own consciousness, what we call organisations exhibit a degree of endurance through time Such a becoming ontology greatly simplifies matters As Rescher (1996) notes: 'Instead of a two-tier reality that combines things together with their inevitable coordinated processes, it settles for a one-tier ontology of process alone For it sees things… as the manifestations of processes It replaces the troublesome ontological dualism of thing and activity with a monism of activities of different and differently organized sorts’ (Rescher, 1996: 49, emphasis original) 16 In other words, an ontology of becoming can well absorb and explain more coherently, the problems and contradictions induced by the unquestioned commitment to a being ontology which may concede that change does occur, but remains unable to explain why change does in fact take place if stability and equilibrium are the natural order of things For process ontologists, what we call things are merely stabilised patterns that we impute to phenomena via the influence of language This metaphysical ‘reversal’ has radical consequences for our understanding of the meaning of organisation, change and the creative impulses underlying the processes of evolution Four axioms and imperatives are detectable in this processual approach to analysis Firstly, in place of the modernist emphasis on the ontological primacy of substance, stability, order, regularity and form, an ontology of becoming seeks to emphasise the Heraclitean primacy accorded to process, indeterminacy, flux, formlessness and incessant change This process orientation must not be equated with the commonsensical idea of the process that a system is deemed to undergo in transition Rather it is a metaphysical orientation which emphasises an ontological primacy in the processual nature of things; that see things as always already momentary outcomes or effects of historical processes It rejects what Rescher (1996) calls the process reducibility thesis whereby processes are often assumed to be processes of primary 'things' Instead, it insists that ‘things’ are no more than ‘stability waves in a sea of process’ (Rescher, 1996: 53) What this means is that 'things' appear solid, stable and clearly circumscribed precisely because language is an ordering structure which inspires the carving-up of the flux of our experiences into meaningful fragments By so doing, the fragments themselves come to exhibit patterns of regularity over time A process ontology, therefore, elevates a more intuitive, de-centred, dynamic and dispersive view of reality that actively resists linguistic capture and representation Language can only 'point to' or allude to an ultimate reality beyond the symbolic realm (Bohm, 1980: 16-17) What we call concepts and theories are therefore merely intuitive 'insights, i.e a way of looking at the world, and not a form of knowledge of how the world is' (Bohm, 1980: 4) Theories, as the Greek root theoria implies, are ways of viewing and not bodies of knowledge as we generally assume them to be Secondly, from this commitment to a process ontology, it follows that language, and in particular the activities of naming and symbolic representation, 17 provide the first ordering impulse for the systematic structuring of our human lifeworlds It maintains that the structured nature of language is what creates the impression that reality itself is stable, pre-organised and law-like in character Without the acts of naming, classifying, and the creation of a subject-predicate structure through language, lived reality is but a ‘shapeless and indistinct mass’ (Saussure, 1966: 111) Through the process of naming pre-established symbols are used to substitute for our tacit lived experiences Thus, from this aboriginal flux of pure experience our attention first carves out, and then conception names: 'in the sky "constellation", on the earth "beach", "sea", "cliff", "bushes", "grass" Out of time we cut "days" and "nights", "summers" and "winters" We say what each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts' (James, 1911/96: 50) Names, symbols, concepts and categories help objectify our experiences to ourselves and in so doing help make for a more stable and predictable and hence liveable world Yet, in this process of operationalizing thought, much of our intuited forms of knowing are marginalised and subsequently forgotten A becoming ontology, therefore, promotes a heightened appreciation of the limitations of language in understanding our experiences of reality and hence a deeper awareness of what lies behind symbols and language As Bohm (1980) convincingly illustrates: 'For example, consider the sentence "It is raining", Where is the "It" that would according to the sentence, be "the rainer that is doing the raining"? Clearly, it is more accurate to say: "Rain is going on" Similarly, we customarily say, "one elementary particle acts on another", but as indicated in the previous chapter, each particle is only an abstraction of a relatively invariant form of movement in the whole field of the universe So it would be more appropriate to say, "Elementary particles are on-going movements that are mutually dependent"' (Bohm, 1980: 29) Language promotes a certain style of thinking and it is this very style of thinking which needs addressing in order to truly begin to think in processual terms Moreover, this realisation of the impact of linguistic structure on our sense of reality reminds us that social reality, as we know it, is very much an arbitrarily constructed artefact Hence, alternative social realities with radically different modes of thought, codes of behaviour and disciplines of knowledge are, in principle, possible as many historical and anthropological studies have shown Thirdly, commitment to a becoming ontology entails modifying the conceptual asymmetry created between conscious action and unconscious forces, 18 between the explicit and the tacit, between the visible and the invisible, and between presence and absence The elevation of visual knowledge, instrumental rationality, intentionality and choice in the modernist explanatory schema surreptitiously overlooks the role of the unconscious, hidden and nomadic forces shaping rational choice and deliberate planned action A becoming ontology thus emphasise the heterogeneous, multiple and alinear character of real-world happenings Events in the real world, as we experience it, not unfold in a conscious, homogeneous, linear and predictable manner Instead they ‘leak in insensibly’ (James, 1909/96: 399) As such, human actions and motives must not be simply understood in terms of actors' intentions but also in terms of unconscious metaphysics, embedded contextual experiences, accumulated memories and cultural traditions that create and define the very possibilities for interpretation and action Against the grand narratives of linear universal progress, timeless truths, total control and predictability the becoming approach advocates a more tentative and modest attitude towards the status of our current forms of knowledge and towards the realisation that intentions and outcomes are always a product of the creative 'tension' between human will and and the oftentimes unspecifiable set of circumstances surrounding individual action Finally, instead of thinking in terms of tightly-coupled causal explanations commitment to a processual approach to analysis privileges the ideas of resonance, recursion and resemblance as preferred expressions for describing nonlocal relationships between events and occurrences in space-time Nonlocal descriptions imply that the dynamics of movement and change cannot now be explained in terms of simply-located origins and end points as well as linear trajectories; that is, in terms of the identity and location of cause and effect This is because the initial condition for change can no longer be specified as a point in space but as some probabilistic region Trajectories or causal relations are mere idealizations because of the inherent transience and instability of phenomena Instead we now need to think in terms of 'resonances' in a manner analogous to the coupling of sounds 'Resonances are not local events, inasmuch as they not occur at a given point or instant They imply a nonlocal description and therefore cannot be included in the trajectory description associated with Newtonian dynamics…they lead to diffused motion' (Prigogine, 1996: 42) Prigogine goes on to conclude that with this new understanding of reality, 'Becoming is the sine qua non of science, and indeed, of 19 knowledge itself' (Prigogine, 1996: 153) This, in turn implies that the future is no more a deterministic given Rather it 'becomes a "construction" (Prigogine, 1996: 107) It is argued that thinking in this more open-ended, allusive and elliptical manner enables us to better appreciate how social phenomena such as 'individuals' and 'organisations', can be viewed as temporarily stabilised event-clusters loosely held together by relational networks of meaning rather than as concrete systems and entities simply located and with distinct and definable boundaries What dominates the modernist view of the world is the idea of discrete and isolatable systems existing within the context of an external environment Such a view helps pave the way for the privileging of a 'tightly-coupled' form of causal analysis For if phenomena are indeed stable, systemic and clearly bounded they then become much more amenable to causal explanations because it is possible to separate antecedent causes from consequent effects It is this stubbornly-held idea that reality is invariably 'systemic' and hence isolatable in character that processual analyses seek to disabuse us of These four theoretical emphases in a becoming ontology provides a fertile base for reconceptualising organisation and the function of OS Organisation as 'World-Making' 'Durkheim's (1933) interpretation of the division of labour stressed the locatability of people and objects in the social grid of society….The division of labour thus becomes a set of strategies for translating the mute, mutable, and motile…into a locatable and speakable space' (R Cooper, 'Assemblage Notes', 1998: 124) 'Organisations' are culturally-defined patterns of social abstraction They not exist externally to the mind They cannot be immediately experienced Rather, they are products of sensemaking in which regularities have been imputed to an arbitrarily delineated aspect of phenomenal experience Organising actions, on the other hand, are the real and observable material acts which make up our numerous micro-interventions into the realm of lived experience in order to extract sense and to construct a pattern of order, meaning, control and predictability from what would otherwise have been a 'blooming, buzzing confusion' Organising actions are, therefore, essentially effort-saving routines Conservation of energy and the 20 preservation of existence is what drives our will to organise This is part of the survival instinct we inherit and it is also what accounts for the civilising process As Marshall Sahlins writes in Evolution and Culture, all living things have an inherent tendency to increase their 'thermodynamic accomplishment'; that is, the rate at which they are able to conserve energy and put it to use in the maintenance and upgrading of their of organic structure Hence, 'It is the amount (of energy) so trapped….and the degree to which it is raised to a higher state that would seem to be the way that a crab is superior to an amoeba, a goldfish to a crab, a mouse to a goldfish, a man to a mouse' (Sahlins, 1960: 21) Thermodynamic accomplishment is therefore fundamental to the progress of all living systems More specifically, the evolution of the human race, as a whole 'is characterised by a net increase in the rate at which energy is harnessed and used' for self preservation and to extend control over our environment (Ingold, 1986: 19) All efforts at organising, therefore, contain a principle of economy that is directed at overcoming, if somewhat temporarily, time and space and to achieving a desired level of control and predictability in affairs of the world Language and symbolic representations provide perhaps the most basic of these organisational impulses What language and symbols achieve is a form of substitution whereby a material utterance or inscription is made to stand for an absent image, idea or concept Thus the word 'tree' stands for the isolated material phenomenon we repeatedly apprehend in the forest This process of substitution is an essentially economic operation The word ‘tree’ stands for the intractable piece of materiality existing in the forest By uttering the word, we are able to evoke the necessary image without ever needing to physically bring the material piece of tree to whomsoever we are communicating with Yet, it must be noted that the alphabetic term does not in any significant way resemble the image it evokes The connection between the word 'tree' and the image of a tree is purely a product of convention (Saussure, 1966) This is what is meant when we say that the alphabet is an abstract language Unlike Chinese idiograms, for example, there is no trace of resemblance between the word and the thing Despite the arbitrary nature of this process of substitution, and in many cases reified construction, by learning the alphabetic system, we come to quickly recognise what the word 'tree' stands for Meaning is less about having a specific image in mind than about how a term differentiates itself from other terms This is also how more abstract concepts such as love and 21 prosperity are grasped in the Western mind Whereas the Chinese word for 'prosperity', for instance, contains images of clothing, shelter and paddy fields (i.e., the symbols for food) the word 'prosperity' in the alphabetic system is defined by other words such as 'success' or 'wealth' each of which are themselves abstract in their definition Meaning, then, within the alphabetic system, relies on a network of other qualifiers and not on a specific referent Such is the abstractive power of the alphabetic system which has made it the dominant linguistic form in a technologydriven modern world Moreover, once this substitution process has become habituated as discussed previously, we begin to talk and think in more and more abstract and reified terms So words like 'the weather', the 'market', the 'strategy' or even 'intention' and 'choice' increasingly become common currencies even if their meanings and what they exactly refer to are not entirely clear This is the reified (and rarified) realm within which much of modern organisational theorising operates (Sandelands and Drazin, 1989; Chia, 1996) Other languages such as the Sumerian pictograms, the Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the Chinese ideographs are far more concrete languages relying more on resemblance than on conventionally-established practices of association For this reason, Chinese and associated languages such as Japanese have developed a different form of logic from that of the alphabetic system Needham (1962) calls this different logic 'correlative thinking' whereby the real world is perceived as 'an organism made of an infinity of organisms, a rhythm harmonising an infinity of lesser rhythms’ (Needham, 1962, Vol, 2: 292) This is a world-view which resonates deeply with process thought Shimizu (1987) has used this fundamental distinction between formal logic and correlative logic to explore different approaches to complexity in the biological sciences He notes that, whilst it has often been popularly believed that analytical and wholistic approaches are what characterises Western and Eastern ways of thinking, a deeper and more valuable differentiation is to see the West as tending towards ‘serial information processing’ whilst the Eastern tendency might be called ‘parallel information processing’ In the latter instance, the dominant emphasis is not so much the search for causal relations, but the discovery of relationships between different pieces of information which on the surface appear to be totally unrelated to each other Shimizu points out that this latter mode of thought is eminently suited for dealing with complex and disparate phenomena which not initially appear connectable or possess any apparent commonalities 22 Such contrasting predispositions have lead to a number of characteristically different emphases King (1982) notes that in place of the one-on-one external causal sequences emphasised by the West there is an emphasis on contextual-causal interpretations In place of a straight-line ‘progress’ of events leading to a climax of some sort in a limited time-span, there is a historical process in which time is ‘cylical’ Moreover: ‘Individual entities, including man, will not be seen as so substantially separable from other entities as in Western thought, but rather as a single flowing event in which the interdependent relationships are as real, or even more real than the related entities themselves…In Eastern thought he is part and parcel of the universe in which his existence is set, one little wavelet in a vast ocean of being/non-being…his visceral values, existential concerns, and intuitional awareness will be fully as important in relating to and understanding the universe as his sheerly rational knowledge – if not more so’ (King, in Nishitani, 1982: xii) Correlative thinking is emphatically dynamic, non-discrete and urges the ‘harmonising of internal wills’ through concrete-existential engagement rather than abstract thinking It is intimately linked to the ideographic character of its writing Ideography, and calligraphy in particular, is a kinetic art consisting of the choreography of human gestures or ‘conversation of gestures’ which is not reducible to human physiology Language, thus, takes on the semblance of performance rather than static representation What this simple comparison between Eastern and Western logic tells us is that the form of language adopted immeasurably affects the way we apprehend our phenomenal worlds and how they come to be organised Social reality, as we understand it, and as we often take so much for granted, is the product of a series of historically-embedded decision-making processes so that a particular ontological outlook - that which views the world as comprising patterned regularities - comes to be taken as eminently natural Thus, as Whitehead (1926/85) noted, the natural world is perceived 'as with qualities which in reality not belong to them, qualities which in fact are purely the offspring of the mind' In truth nature is 'a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material endlessly, meaninglessly' (Whitehead, 1926/85: 69) Social reality is an abstracted version of the phenomenal real; the real that we existentially experience is inherently undifferentiated and perpetually in flux and ceaseless becoming What is real is our concrete existential experience not pseudo-objects created by our conceptualised 23 understandings The latter comes by way of subtraction and not by way of addition to these initial existential encounters The issue of language and social convention, and the manner in which they shapes our epistemology, our understanding of organisation, and hence our management priorities are, therefore, central to an expanded realm of OS It is one which begins with the recognition that the modern world we live in and the social artefacts we rely upon to successfully negotiate our way through life, are always already institutionalized effects of primary organisational impulses Taken-for-granted social objects of analysis such as ‘the organisation’, ‘the economy’, ‘the market’ or even ‘stakeholders’ or ‘the weather’, are part of our discursively-shaped understandings that derive from a particular set of ontological commitments They are not natural phenomena existing in the realm of the real Instead, like the idea of stellar 'constellations' they are a product of our own unconscious 'will-to-order' Order and organisation, therefore, not exist a priori to our human intervention Instead, they have to be forcibly carved out of the undifferentiated flux of raw experience and conceptually fixed and labelled so that they can then become common currency for communicational exchanges and for concerted social action Modern social reality, with its all-too-familiar features, has to be continually reconstructed and sustained through such aggregative discursive acts of realityconstruction The idea that reality, as we know it, is socially constructed, has become a commonly-accepted claim What is less commonly understood is how this reality gets constructed and from what it is constructed out of in the first place and what sustains it For the philosopher William James, as we have seen, our social reality is always already an abstraction from the brute reality of our pure empirical experience Moreover, such abstractions always produce relative knowledge since they necessarily exclude or marginalise some aspect of brute reality It is precisely for this reason that we are able to find an infinite number of competing perspectives since each such perspective is informed by a particular set of ideological imperatives But what remains absolute is the immediacy of our unthought lived experience Our pre-thought life-world is an undifferentiated flux of fleeting senseimpressions and it is through acts of differentiating, fixing, naming, labelling, classifying and relating – all intrinsic processes of organisation – that social reality is systematically constructed, sustained and modified 24 Conclusion Language and discourse are multitudinal and heterogeneous forms of material inscriptions or verbal utterances occuring in space-time They act at a far more constitutive level to form social objects such as 'individuals' and ‘organisations’ And, by circumscribing selected parts of the flux of phenomenal experiences and fixing their identities it then becomes possible to talk about them as if they were naturally-existing objective entities This ‘entitative’ form of thinking, which is overwhelmingly widespread in organisational theorizing, conveniently forgets the fact that organisational action is firstly and foremost an ontological activity Viewed from this perspective, the apparent solidity of social phenomena such as ‘the organisation’ derives from the stabilising effects of generic discursive processes rather than from the presence of independently existing concrete entities In other words, phrases such as ‘the organisation’ not refer to an extra-linguistic reality Instead they are conceptualised abstractions for which it has become habitual for us to refer to as independently existing ‘things’ Through the regularising and routinization of social exchanges, the formation and institutionalization of codes of behaviour, rules, procedures and practices and so on, the organisational world that we have come to inhabit acquires its apparent externality, objectivity and seemingly stable structure Moreover, organisation itself should not be thought of as something performed by pre-existing individual ‘agents’ Instead the agents themselves, as legitimised objects of knowledge, must be understood as organisational effects too The identity of the individual agent is constructed in the very act of organising The tendency to construe individuals as somehow prior to or free from organisational forces overlooks the ontological role of acts of organising From the point of view emphasised by this chapter, we ourselves are organised as we engage in acts of organising My identity is established in the very act of differentiating and detaching myself (i.e., the process of individuation) from my surroundings through material inscriptions and verbal utterances The idea that primary reality is an undifferentiated flux and ceaselessly changing is central to a revised understanding of organisation Such a view does not dispense with an extra-linguistic reality What it does maintain, however, is that this reality does not initially possess 'thing-like' characteristic The apparent solidity, stability and regularity of social reality is a human accomplishment It is one forged out from a cacaphony of lived experiences 25 through recursive acts of organisation Thus, how we come to acquire particular modes of thought, codes of behaviour, social mannerisms, and so on, become very much a concern of OS Such a revised understanding is grounded on an alternative ontology of becoming in which 'organisations' are viewed as islands of achieved regularity in a 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