nucleation

THEORY-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

2 min read

Properties5
StatusProposed
Tagssocial-ontology, social-science
SourceLIT-1913 — On Organizational Becoming: Rethinking Organizational Change
Bears onQUESTION-259 — How do populations of heterogeneous processes generate, reproduce and transform organizational perspectives, and what further conditions let such a perspective become the object of its own effective governance?
Cited as “grounds” byARG-044 — The MSF meeting reanalysed by Bencherki, Brummans and Vézy shows that an interaction can make available a way of relating its participants did not hold, and names the condition under which it lasts; it does not show that taking part comes before the reinterpretation, ARG-046 — Tsoukas and Chia's reading of Total Quality in the US Navy is an organizational instance of changing efficacy while the competing proposals stay fixed, 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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Source

Tsoukas & Chia (2002), LIT-1913, pp. 567–579; read in NOTE-1489.

What was actually shown

An argument and illustrations. Stage models describe change as a succession of states and so miss it (pp. 570–571). Institutionalized categories cannot hold their meaning fixed, because they meet nonprototypical cases and because actors reflect on their own descriptions (pp. 573–575). So “organization aims at stemming change but, in the process of doing so, it is generated by it” (p. 577). Published ethnographies are reread to show routines and change programmes being modified in performance (pp. 575–579). Nothing was done that could have come out the other way.

What this does not say

  • That organizations constantly change. Inertia is granted, and it is redescribed as local change that is not institutionalized (p. 579).
  • That agency is without agents. The change is carried by “actors … reweaving their webs of beliefs” and “the ongoing agency of organizational members” (pp. 575, 579). Citing this paper for an agent-free process ontology, as LIT-1902’s “parallels” invites, takes from it more than it says.
  • How individual reweaving becomes organizational. That is left open (p. 579).

Connections to the record’s own argument

Added 2026-10-31 by a pass connecting the readings of Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy 2024 and the works it leans on to the record’s lines. Analogies are marked as such.

Distributed agency and individuation

  • CLAIM-418, part 3, and CLAIM-430, part 3: radial extension, and the condition of institutionalization (pp. 578–579).

Will-organization, organizational affect and authenticity

  • CLAIM-122: the Navy TQ case and its structural context.
  • CLAIM-080: actors carry the change.

Nucleating argument and formal apparatus

  • CLAIM-189. It supports the counter that change in a developing argument is legitimate, and that traceability, not preservation, is what a record secures.

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