Philosophical Organization Theory Enquiries into Organization and Management Research

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 routine, 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 do justice to 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 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.

Haridimos Tsoukas is the Columbia Ship Management Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Cyprus, and a Distinguished Research Environment Professor of Organization Studies at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of Organization Studies (2003-2008), is a co-founder and co-convener of the annual International Symposium on Process Organization, and co-editor of the Perspectives on Process Organization Studies. He is an Honorary Member of the European Group of Organization Studies and a recipient of the Joan Martin Trailblazer Award from the OMT Division of the American Academy of Management (2016). He is interested in, among other things, practical reason and the epistemology of practice, and applying process and phenomenological perspectives to organization theory.