Oxford Handbook of Process Philosophy and Organization Studies

Citation

Mumford, C. (2016), "Oxford Handbook of Process Philosophy and Organization Studies", Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, Vol. 11 No. 3, pp. 209-210. https://doi.org/10.1108/QROM-12-2015-1343

I loved this Handbook and confess to having lost many hours reading it when I should by rights have been completing other chores. The book serves as an invaluable resource for organizational scholars who wish to engage creatively with process-based thinking in their own research. However, it also works at a more general level for those who just wish to read some intellectually stimulating writing about a variety of thinkers, from the Sixth Century BC to the current period, who the editors have assembled in this one volume as “process philosophers”. The book is no easy beginner’s guide to these featured process philosophers. It is a weighty tome, comprising 36 chapters and 638 pages in the hardback version (now also available in paperback). Most of the chapters do require some commitment and close attention to get to grips with the ideas being offered. The process philosophy perspective is not easy to absorb, nor to summarize, but loosely involves issues of becoming, multiplicity, instability and fluidity, ways of observing self-other relations and experiencing the world in time. The editors in the introductory chapter suggest that:

[p]rocess philosophy encourages us to follow the goings-on of organization, finding a world of swelling, falling away, erupting, and becalming without rest (p. 10).

And exemplify process research as being about:

[…] learning to see the world in its multiplicity, nurturing one’s receptive capacity so one can abide with the world, belong to it or stay with it, and direct the forces of the event in an intensive process of becoming that creates by differentiating the quality of the new (p. 4).

Their introductory chapter is followed by 34 chapters, each written by different author-contributors and specifically dedicated to the work of a particular process philosopher: Laozi, Heraclitus, Confucius, Zhuangzi, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kierkegaard, Dilthey, Peirce, James, Tarde, Nietzsche, Bergson, Dewey, Whitehead, Mead, Kitarō, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Bakhtin, Lacan, Bateson, Arendt, de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Naess, Ricoeur, Garfinkel, Spencer-Brown, Deleuze, Foucault, Irigaray, Serres, and Sloterdijk. The final chapter, Chapter 36, differs in that it contains some thoughts about process thinking written by Robert Cooper, who the editors credit as a “transitional and transformative figure” who has done much to exemplify process thinking in organization studies (p. 15).

Some of the names featured will be well known to the QROM audience, but the book is likely to introduce new thinkers alongside more familiar subjects. This leads, in fact, to my only real complaint: that it was not clear to me how the editors chose which names to include, especially given the acknowledgement that some philosophers are little known and so far little used in organization studies, or are not typically associated with a process perspective. I was left wondering who had counted as a process philosopher worthy of inclusion, and how many potential candidates had been excluded. (Karen Barad’s name came to mind as someone I have often heard mentioned and who might have warranted a chapter, but she does not appear. Other people such as Bruno Latour, Emmanuel Levinas and Mary Parker Follett appear as references within chapters dedicated to other people, but are not given chapters of their own.) Of course some cut-off point is needed, and there may be very good reasons for the choices made, but it is an aspect about the collection that is left vague.

Each of the 34 dedicated chapters is structured loosely in the same way, beginning with an introduction to the writer’s life and historical context, then addressing his/her main ideas that are considered helpful for process thinking, and finally discussing the potential implications and uses of these ideas within organization studies research. It is a structure that does not constrain the text unduly. There are different styles of writing, different sub-structures of thematic headings and ways of ordering across the range of chapters. Some contributors draw on literary, visual and artistic works to illustrate concepts. Some are more straightforwardly descriptive than others. The result feels more like a collection of essays than a reference book. While the effect could potentially have felt disjointed, for me it produced a really colourful anthology of philosophical writing. Reading often felt more like the enjoyment of a good biographical short story about clever, deep-thinking characters and their creative legacy. Indeed, I would love to have had some more biographical detail available within the book about the chapter authors themselves, other than the minimal organizational affiliation which is presented, in order to see them more clearly too, as characters interwoven into the process of the Handbook’s construction.

One aspect to note is that there is a deliberate editorial strategy not to give too much away in terms of thematic linkages between writers. The first chapter provides really the only (and very useful) thematic signposting in the book, organized around five aspects – temporality, wholeness, openness, force and potentiality – to show how the different process philosophers cover somewhat similar ground and might resonate with each other. Apart from the first and last chapters, the book is organized in a very simple way, chronologically by birth date of the process philosopher. The editors suggest that this structure allows readers to create their own connections and new relationships. This is perfectly valid of course, and it is possible to compare and contrast the ideas of the various philosophers, both through the author-contributors’ in-chapter references to others, and through the indexing at the back of the book. However, it demands time in order to absorb properly the creative implications and the similarities and differences between the various writers. I found the Handbook wonderfully engrossing and thought-provoking, and while I am not sure I understood everything on first reading, I very much enjoyed trying. I will be returning to its chapters again soon.