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In this paper, I compare Theodore Schatzki’s practice theory, the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger upon whom Schatzki drew in its formation, and my own theory of institutional logics which I have sought to develop as a religious sociology of institution. I examine how Schatzki and I both differently locate our thinking at the level of practice. In this essay I also explore the possibility of appropriating Heidegger’s religious ontology of worldhood, which Schatzki rejects, in that project. My institutional logical position is an atheological religious one, poly-onto-teleological. Institutional logics are grounded in ultimate goods which are praiseworthy “objects” of striving and practice, signifieds to which elements of an institutional logic have a non-arbitrary relation, sources of and references for practical norms about how one should have, make, do or be that good, and a basis of knowing the world of practice as ordered around such goods. Institutional logics are constellations co-constituted by substances, not fields animated by values, interests or powers.

Because we are speaking against “values,” people are horrified at a philosophy that ostensibly dares to despise humanity’s best qualities. For what is more “logical” than that a thinking that denies values must necessarily pronounce everything valueless? Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” (2008a, p. 249).

This paper extends our understanding of the concept and global practice of political economy.

The paper sets out the limits of conceptual analysis regarding political economy. It then applies Heidegger’s theory of metaphysics to the cultures of China and the West.

It is possible to construct an account of Confucianism metaphysics which contrasts with modern western metaphysics. The paper suggests some implications of the contrast.

The paper is exploratory and broad-brush. It suggests the potential of further systematic enquiries.

National and business leaders seek to understand the global business environment. This requires insights into the nature of culture and the foundations of cultures. The paper provides a way to make sense of national aspirations and global political/business responses to changed circumstances.

The paper continues a research programme which seeks to explicate Chinese decision-making and relate it to the western decision-making. It is the first paper to use Heidegger’s concept of metaphysics in relation to Confucianism.

The focus of this chapter is quantum dialectical storytelling and its contribution to generate anticipatory knowledge of the future through the intra-play between the ante-narrative and the anti-narrative. The theoretical framework on quantum dialectical storytelling is based upon Boje’s triad storytelling framework interfused with Hegelian dialectics and Baradian diffraction. Through the inspiration of Judith Butler’s performative theory, Riach, Rumens, and Tyler (2016) introduce the concept of the anti-narrative as a critical reflexive methodology. By drawing on Hegel’s work on the dialectical phenomenology of critical reflexive self-consciousness, a dialectical pre-reflexive and reflexive framework emerges as intra-weaving modes of being-in-the-world toward future.

This chapter proposes a quantum relational process philosophy as an approach for studying organization-in-becoming as a world-creating process. Furthermore, the quantum relational process philosophy is tied to quantum storytelling. Whereas the quantum relational process philosophy outlines a philosophy of a processual ontology, epistemology, and ethic, quantum storytelling provides the storytelling medium through which such an ontology, epistemology, and ethic emerges through articulation and actualization. As such, the two approaches are introduced as inseparable from each other.

The focus of this chapter is to unfold the ties between the quantum relational process philosophy and quantum storytelling through the perspective of the quantum relational process philosophy itself.

The proposed quantum relational process philosophy is defined as Being-in-Becoming. Thereby, this approach is suggested as an alternative to the “Being” perspective and the “Becoming” perspective or at least as a further development of the becoming perspective. These latter two perspectives present two different ways of viewing organizational change: development and transformation.

The being perspective relies on substance ontology acknowledging the existence of entities: that “which is.” In substance ontology, however, entities such as individuals and organizations are viewed as existing in themselves in fixed space-time frames. This view entails a rather static and stable ontology, perceiving the organization as a ready-made world of stable, unchanging entities. This perspective is often referred to as the approach of building the organizational world through intervention and control of change.

As a contrast, the becoming perspective relies on a process ontology while the organization is perceived as a sea of constant flux and change through which the organization emerges on the way. In this process-oriented perspective, attention is directed toward “that which is becoming.” In this perspective, the organization is perceived as a world-making phenomenon emerging through ceaseless processes of transformation. This approach is often referred to as the dwelling approach, that is, to dwell in the world-making phenomenon letting it happen. This perspective tends to ignore that which exists, that is the ready-made forms, and only focus on that which is becoming.

In this chapter, the proposed being-in-becoming perspective views the tension between being and becoming as a dialectical interplay that is decisive to organizational transformation. However, in the being-in-becoming perspective, “entities” are viewed from a quantum perspective whereby being-in-becoming differs from the substance ontology in its view of the nature of “entities.” In this perspective, the organization is viewed as a dialectical interplay between, at the one hand, the organizational form(ing) of life and, at the other hand, the aliveness of unfolding and transforming living life-worlds of being-in-the-world in fluid space and open time. This dialectical interplay is conceived as central in organizational world-creating processes.

The aim of the chapter is to develop a conceptual framework of a quantum relational process philosophy that embraces the dialectics of transforming organizations. The contribution is to be capable of understanding the performative consequences of dialectic to organizational transformation viewed from the being-in-becoming perspective of the quantum relational process philosophy.

Through the contribution of Heidegger, Hegel, Aristotle, and Boje, and further enriched by Barad, Bakhtin, and Shotter, a conceptual framework is developed for understanding, analyzing, and problematizing dialectical organizational world-creating.

This framework is called “Fourfold World-Creating.” The fourfold world-creating framework keeps the dialectic of organizational transformation at its center while it at the same time take into consideration the dialectical interplay of ontology, epistemology, and ethic. In this sense, the framework is proposed as quantum relational process philosophy. The incorporation of ethic in the quantum relational process philosophy represents an additional contribution of the chapter.

The fourfold world-creating framework is furthermore suggested to be conceived as a quantum relational process philosophy of the antenarrative dimension in David Boje’s quantum storytelling triad framework encompassing: (1) the narrative, (2) the living stories, and (3) the antenarrative. In his recent research, David Boje has a developed a dialectical perspective on his storytelling framework. Following in line with this thinking, this chapter suggests viewing (1) the narrative as the ready-made form, (2) the living stories as the living life-worlds, and (3) the antenarrative as fourfold world-creating.

In this sense, the proposed dialectical fourfold world-creating framework and its embeddedness in the quantum relational process philosophy contributes to our understanding of the research contributes of antenarrative storytelling in organizational studies.

As findings, the chapter proposes what could be considered as ontological, epistemological, and ethical key constituents in dialectical organizational world-creating. The contribution of these findings encompasses an analytical framework for (1) understanding the dialectical, transformative movements of the organization as well as (2) analyzing and problematizing the cease of dialectical tensions that seems to lock the organization in a particular state of being, only capable of repeating and reproducing its ready-made world in fixed space-time frames.

Phenomena are what we as researchers begin with, and to study phenomena is to appreciate how any determination of things and events always relates back to the context in which they appeared. Phenomenology is the study of such relations of appearance and the conditions of such relations. Appearance is an active rather than superficial condition, a constant bringing together of experiencing beings and experienced things (including sentient beings), in what the modern “father” of phenomenology Edmund Husserl called conditions of intentionality, and what his errant, one-time student Martin Heidegger called conditions of thrownness and projection. This chapter delves into the philosophical background of this mode of study, before opening up into consideration of, first, where phenomenology has been influential in organization studies, and, second, the potential of the approach. In so doing, we suggest much can be made of reorienting research in organization studies away from an entitative epistemology in which things are seen in increasingly causally linked, detailed isolation, and toward a relational epistemology in which what exists is understood in terms of its being experienced within everyday lives.

This study is a queer autoethnography which deconstructs assumptions about a queer musical perspective and the associated heteronormative power and privilege. Using the lens of a Heideggerian interpretive phenomenology, it examines the request for and subsequent actualising or unfolding of musical compositions that respond to works of art. The request, being for a ‘queer compositional response’ to artworks occurred as personal; it touched my experience of being occurring as a kind of existential threat. As such, the personal is clearly political, positioning the experience of the request for queer compositions as a cultural experience which I am examining as socially unjust, or discriminatory. Furthermore, examining the intersectionalities of oppressive heteronormative and sexist attitudes and actions as queer in the world is an authentic mode of being in Heidegger's analytic of Dasein.

This chapter engages Heidegger’s notion of caring-for-others to consider what it means to care authentically for young students who are struggling to engage in their professional education. While care is commonly understood as an emotive or cognitive state, from Heidegger’s perspective, caring for students is expressed in human action. In “Being and Time”, Heidegger examines how humans care for one another in variable ways in the course of everyday life and distinguishes between “inauthentic” and “authentic” modes of caring. The author critically builds upon Heidegger’s underdeveloped analysis, which articulates a binary between “leaping in” for others (inauthentic modes), and “leaping ahead” of others (authentic modes). From within this conceptual binary, the author argues that authentic care could be mistaken for the educator’s capacity to somehow always care for students in leaping ahead modes, and that such a view leaves little room for the possibility of pedagogic situations that sometimes call educators to leap in for students. Drawing on an Australian youth work lecturer’s story about her experience caring for a student, the author shows how any authentic caring on the educators’ part is predicated on students leaping ahead of themselves, toward their own futural selves as caring professionals in the world.

This chapter outlines the potential of phenomenology to illuminate how individuals experience the emotions replete within organizations. It employs one particular type of phenomenological approach known as Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). The chapter considers how the hermeneutic and phenomenological foundations of this approach lend themselves to the study of affect. The chapter then clarifies and develops established IPA guidelines to render them more appropriate for research on emotions. In doing so, the chapter demonstrates how IPA can produce contextualized accounts that explore the role of emotions in individuals’ experiences of organizational events and processes.

Our aim in this chapter is twofold: first, to review briefly the history of the hermeneutic traditions; second, to examine its influence in organization studies. We begin with a review of hermeneutic philosophy including ancient Greek origins and Biblical hermeneutics. We then delve more deeply into the work of 20th-century hermeneutic philosophy, particularly Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, to demonstrate how hermeneutics became a field that is concerned not only with texts but also with verbal and nonverbal forms of action and the preunderstanding that makes any interpretation possible. Finally, we explore how hermeneutic philosophers claim that interpretation is the mode by which we live and carry on with one another. In the third section, we suggest that the field of organizational studies has discovered the relevance of hermeneutic theory, a rarely explicitly acknowledged debt. In particular, we outline the influence of hermeneutic theory on several figural areas, including culture, sensemaking, identity, situated learning, and organizational dialogue.

The double challenge of strategic management research is to come up on the one hand with a truthful account of issues relating to the organization itself and on the other hand doing so in a way that is relevant for meeting the challenges of strategic management. To achieve this need for increased rigour and relevance we follow Heidegger's thinking and develop an ontological ascertainment of the organization as being a work. A work in this sense is the kind of entity that is fundamentally characterized by setting up a world for people. We then argue that because an organization is a work, an appropriate way of giving an account of an organization is in the form of strategic narratives: narratives that give a truthful account of the world of an organization as it is and as it could be. Since narratives play a fundamental role in human existence and are a powerful means to shaping peoples thinking and actions, we argue that strategic narrative research and development meet the double challenge of strategic management research and illustrate the application with an account of strategic narrative research and development in an organization.