nucleation

ARG-048: Tsoukas and Chia's radial extension and institutionalization show how the exercise of a shared perspective can transform it with no agent governing the change, the agents and the institution kept distinct

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Properties7
StatusProposed
Formsource
Tagssocial-ontology, agency
Linedistributed-agency
GroundsTHEORY-1284 — Organization is a secondary accomplishment of change: change in organizations is continuous, as actors reweave their webs of beliefs and habits to accommodate new experience, and organization is both the attempt to stabilize that flux and the pattern that emerges from it, THEORY-1279 — Organizational categories are radially structured, so applying them to nonprototypical cases extends and changes them; this is one source of continuous change in routine organizational action
ConcludesCLAIM-418 — Possessing, enacting or being shaped by an organizational perspective does not establish an independent agent, and perspectival, agential and institutional boundaries need not coincide: several agents can share a perspective, one agent can act through several, and a perspective can be reproduced with no agent governing it; where a perspective contributes to an agent's activity it can enable and constrain the exercise of agency, and that exercise can reproduce or transform it, while whether agency universally requires such a perspective stays open
Rendered intodocs/arguments-by-conclusion.md

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The inference

CLAIM-418’s third part holds that a perspective can be reproduced or transformed with no agent governing it. Tsoukas and Chia say how such a change happens:

  • An institutionalized category is radially structured. Applying it to a nonprototypical case is “an imaginative extension” that extends “the radius of application of the concept, thus transforming it” (p. 574; THEORY-1279).
  • Change of that kind “occurs naturally, incrementally, and inexorably through ‘creep,’ ‘slippage,’ and ‘drift’” (p. 579). No one decides it.
  • Whether a local extension becomes the organization’s depends on institutionalization in a “structural context” (pp. 578–579). That can fail (THEORY-1284).

The agents act, the category changes, and the institution may or may not take the change up. These are the three things CLAIM-418 keeps apart.

Critical questions

  • Does the work say this, read in context? Yes. Radial extension is the paper’s own account (p. 574), with Feldman’s move-in routine as its example (pp. 574–575). The condition of institutionalization is stated on pp. 578–579.
  • Is it said within the scope the claim needs? Mostly. Tsoukas and Chia speak of categories and routines, and CLAIM-418 of perspectives. A perspective in TERM-072’s organizational sense is carried in such categories, but that link is the record’s, not the paper’s.
  • Does the claim lean on the reading for more than it holds? No. The paper does not test the mechanism; it argues it and illustrates it with other researchers’ cases. So this is a second line in argument, not evidence, and Proposed.

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