Barbara Simpson – författare

This book takes up the challenge that process philosophy and process ontology pose to conventional, entity-based empirical research, even daring to question the relevance of 'methodology' in contemporary process organization studies. A process ontology demands reimagining and ongoing reinvention of how researchers inquire into and engage with the movements and moments of a morphing world. This in turn requires us to notice differently in our empirical engagements. Contributors to this book share a commitment to research that is more-than-representational in its concern to notice and act-with the latencies and diversities of living experience. Drawing inspiration from process philosophies, posthuman subjectivities, post qualitative inquiry, art, poetics, cinematics, and aesthetics, the chapters actively manifest the doing, reading, and writing of process research by attuning to occasions, moments, atmospheres, affects, agencements, with-ness, difference, and multiplicity. In bringing these ideas alive, the authors engage with their own empirical unfoldings by means of communing, corresponding, caring, performative writing, depersonalization, subject proliferation, mindfulness, relating, slow seeing, rhythmanalysis, listening, chromatic empiricism, and diffraction. Each chapter offers a unique worlding constituted in the particular elements it brings together, affording a style of reading that is oriented towards sensing rather than knowing or mastery. The chapters can be read in any order, alone or with and through each other. Collectively they evoke a mycelial web of resonance travelling across, between, and beyond the contents of this book.

Leadership, as an area of research, seems to be a source of endless fascination. So much has been written about it, and yet the questions keep coming. It is almost as if we are asking the wrong questions. In Diffracting Collaborative Leadership, Barbara Simpson takes a novel approach to tackling this problem, proposing that leadership in organizations may be understood as a complementary duality of 'leaders' and 'leading'. Whereas questions about 'leaders' are already well researched, the same cannot be said for the social processes of 'leading'. Familiar research methodologies, and the theories that inform them, seek to represent 'reality' as stable, or at least temporarily stabilized structures and entities, but as such, they are not well equipped to deal with the performative fluidities of 'leading'. Grappling with the slipperiness of a world-on-the-move requires a serious commitment to ontologically processual research that can participate with the flow of lived experience. The author draws on Pragmatism as a systematic, ontologically processual philosophy, using it to diffract the experiences of the senior management team in an arts-based company. This analysis explores 'leading' as a creative, collaborative process of future-making that arises from uncertainties. Leadership then, is what we do when we don't know what to do.

Creativity, innovation and change are vital to the development and sustainability of all organizations. Yet, questions remain about exactly how novelty comes about, and what dynamic processes are involved in its emergence?Ideas of emergence and process, drawn from a variety of different philosophic traditions, have been the focus of increasing attention in management and organization studies. These issues are brought to bear on novelty and innovation in this volume by examining new organizational and product development processes, whether planned or unplanned. The contributions in this volume offer both theoretical insights and empirical studies on, inter alia, innovation, music technology, haute cuisine, pharmaceuticals and theatre improvisation. In doing so, they throw light on the importance of emergence, improvisation and learning in organizations, and how both practitioners and scholars alike can best understand their own assumptions about process. In addition, the volume includes general essays on process perspectives in organization studies.