Tsoukas, H., & Chia, R. (2002). On organizational becoming: Rethinking organizational change. Organization Science, 13(5), 567–582. doi:10.1287/orsc.13.5.567.7810.
Read in full in NOTE-1489.
Key takeaways
- Synoptic, stage-model accounts of change treat it as a series of states, and so miss change itself, which “goes on between them” (James, quoted p. 571). Synoptic and “performative” accounts are both needed (p. 572).
- Organizing generalizes action into institutionalized categories. Those categories are radially structured, with a stable prototypical core and an unstable periphery. Applying them to nonprototypical cases extends and so changes them (pp. 573–574).
- Humans also change their categories reflexively, by interacting with their own descriptions (pp. 574–575).
- So “organization aims at stemming change but, in the process of doing so, it is generated by it” (p. 577). Inertia is the failure of local change to be institutionalized, not the absence of change (p. 579).
Why this is here
Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy 2024 (LIT-1902) cite it twice. On p. 1349 it is named for drawing on Bergson and James. On p. 1351 the paper says its theory “parallels existing conceptions of organizational becoming (see Tsoukas & Chia, 2002), yet explicates the role agency plays in this process”. On p. 1365 it is the example of process research that stresses that “organizational becoming is an ongoing process” while it “focuses less on moments when individuation is interrupted, blocked, or halted”.
On reading, the citations are fair but thin. The Bergson and James attribution is accurate. “Parallels” understates a real difference. Tsoukas and Chia’s becoming is carried by human agents: “actors are conceived as webs of beliefs and habits of action that keep reweaving” (p. 575), driven by “the intrinsically human ability to be reflexive”, and organization emerges “through the ongoing agency of organizational members” (p. 579). That is the agent-based starting point the parent paper rejects. The parent does not say so. The p. 1365 remark is fair: Tsoukas and Chia treat stalled change as failed institutionalization (p. 579), not as interrupted becoming.