Understanding Organization As Process

Organization takes place in a tangled world, intermeshed by changing markets, products, standards, technologies, institutions and social groups. Coming to grips with the complexity and fluidity of organization and management is a persistent problem for scholars and practitioners alike, which is why process issues have received renewed interest in r

Coming to grips with the actual complexity and fluidity of organization and management is a persistent problem for scholars and practitioners alike, which is why process issues have received renewed interest in recent years. This book, aimed at scholars and higher level students, frames some of these issues in novel and instructive ways.

Institutions - the structures, practices, and meanings that define what people and organizations think, do, and aspire to - are created through process. They are 'work in progress' that involves continual efforts to maintain, modify, or disturb them. Institutional logics are also in motion, holding varying degrees of dominance that change over time. This volume brings together two streams of thought within organization theory - institutional theory and process perspective - to advocate for stronger process ontology that highlights institutions as emergent, generative, political, and social. A stronger process view allows us to challenge our understanding of central concepts within institutional theory, such as 'loose coupling', 'institutional work', the work of institutional logics on the ground, and institutionalization between diffusion and translation. Enriched with an emphasis on practice and widened by taking a broad view of institutions, this volume draws on the Ninth International Symposium on Process Organization Studies to offer key insights that will inform our thinking of institutions as processes.

Social life is a collective process, virtually all shaped in contemporary industrial nations by formal organizations and recognized social institutions. Understanding Organizations takes a fresh look at the sociology of organizations, blending classic theories with contemporary studies and debates.

Business processes are the production lines of the new economy. When they fail us, our products and services fail our customers, and our business fails its owners. The more businesses change, the more they must concern themselves with their stakeholder relationships and manage their processes so that technologies and organization designs have a common business purpose. This book shows you how to deliver integral processes and helps you build a fully process-managed enterprise. The Process Management Framework provides the strategic guidance and tactical steps to make the switch. Encompassing eight phases, the Framework migrates organizational and process transformation through strategy, design, realization, and actual operations. For each phase, this book provides detailed descriptions of the steps, their inputs, outputs, guides, and enablers, as well as the tricks, traps, and best practices learned by experienced practitioners. It also covers the related disciplines of managing programs, risk, quality, projects, and human change, and how process management is the key to ensure a fit among all these areas. For those of you about to embark on a process journey, this book provides a compelling call to action, a guide for management, and an invaluable reference. Learn the concepts and transform your business! See why process management is an inevitable trend that won't go away. Understand why relationship management needs effective processes to work. Define your stakeholders and determine their needs. Discover what other organizations have done to manage processes successfully. Explore a complete framework for managing business, process, and human change. Apply your knowledge to manage process projects effectively and efficiently. Learn what to do and what to avoid in every step. Develop processes to align technology, organization, and facility transformation. Gain cross-organizational acceptance of process and personal change. Anticipate objections and proactively manage stakeholder concerns.

The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies provides a comprehensive and timely overview of the field. This volume offers a compendium of perspectives on process thinking, process organizational theory, process research methodology and empirical applications. The emphasis is on a combination of pedagogical contributions and in-depth reviews of current thinking and research in each of the selected areas, combined with the development of agendas for future research. The Handbook is divided into five sections: Part One: Process Philosophy Part Two: Process Theory Part Three: Process Methodology Part Four: Process Applications Part Five: Process Perspectives

Time, temporality, and history are inherently important constructs in process organization studies, yet have struggled to move beyond limited conceptualizations in management theory. This volume draws together emerging strands of interest to adopt a more nuanced approach in understanding the temporal aspects of organizational processes.

This book presents a novel and comprehensive process theory of organization applicable to 'a world on the move', where connectedness prevails over size, flow prevails over stability, and temporality prevails over spatiality.The framework developed in the book draws upon process thinking in a number of areas, including process philosophy, pragmatism, phenomenology, and science and technology studies. Salient ideas from these schools are carefully woven into a process theory of organization, which makes the book not only a thought provoking theoretical contribution, but also a much-needed glimpse into the challenges of organizing in a complex and moving world. Taking a distinctly temporal view of organizational life the author shows how actors continually carve out their temporal existence from being in the flow of time. This on-going work, in which technologies, concepts, and social actors take part, is crucial for the making of any type of organizational formation. A key construct of the book is that of events, which provide force, movement, and historicity to organizational life. The book is suitable for scholars and advanced level students in organization studies, management studies, technology studies, and sociology. It contains a number of practical examples to illustrate the theoretical framework.