Robin Holt - Böcker

Process approaches to organization studies focus on flow, activities, and evolution, understanding organizations and organizing as processes in the making. They stand in contrast to positivist approaches that see organizations and phenomena as fixed, static, and measurable. Process approaches draw on a range of ideas and philosophies. The Handbook examines 34 philosophers and social theorists, both those commonly linked to process thinking, such as Whitehead, Bergson and James, and those that are not as often addressed from a process perspective such as Dilthey and Tarde. Each chapter addresses the background and context of this thinker, their work (with a focus on the processual elements), and the potential contribution to organization and management research. For students and scholars in the field of Organization Studies this book is an entry point into the work of philosophical thinkers and social theorists for whom the world is far from being a solid place.

Our most basic relationship with the world is one of technological mediation. Nowadays our available tools are digital, and increasingly what counts in economic, social, and cultural life is what can be digitally stored, distributed, replayed, augmented, and switched. Yet the digital remains very much materially configured, and though it now permeates nearly all human life it has not eclipsed all older technologies. This Handbook is grounded in an understanding that our technologically mediated condition is a condition of organization. It maps and theorizes the largely unchartered territory of media, technology, and organization studies. Written by scholars of organization and theorists of media and technology, the chapters focus on specific, and specifically mediating, objects that shape the practices, processes, and effects of organization. It is in this spirit that each chapter focuses on a specific technological object, such as the Battery, Clock, High Heels, Container, or Smartphone, asking the question, how does this object or process organize? In staying with the object the chapters remain committed to the everyday, empirical world, rather than being confined to established disciplinary concerns and theoretical developments. As the first sustained and systematic interrogation of the relation between technologies, media, and organization, this Handbook consolidates, deepens, and further develops the empirics and concepts required to make sense of the material forces of organization.

Process approaches to organization studies focus on flow, activities, and evolution, understanding organizations and organizing as processes in the making. They stand in contrast to positivist approaches that see organizations and phenomena as fixed, static, and measurable.Process approaches draw on a range of ideas and philosophies. The Handbook examines 34 philosophers and social theorists, both those commonly linked to process thinking, such as Whitehead, Bergson and James, and those that are not as often addressed from a process perspective such as Dilthey and Tarde. Each chapter addresses the background and context of this thinker, their work (with a focus on the processual elements), and the potential contribution to organization and management research. For students and scholars in the field of Organization Studies this book is an entry point into the work of philosophical thinkers and social theorists for whom the world is far from being a solid place.

Holt argues strategy is the process by which an organization presents itself to itself and others. To bring this about exponents of strategic inquiry attempt t gather knowledge about the conditions in which any organization is being organized: emerging markets, restless geo-political environments, networks of technological ordering, populations with differing skill sets, and the like. The upshot of such inquiry is a succession of images by which an organization attains distinction as a unity, or 'self'. Using work from literature, art, and philosophy, Holt explores what it means to present such an organizational 'self'. In strategy practice, he identifies three related forms of presentation. First comes strategy as a project of representational knowledge. Here strategists generate accurate, timely, and complex information to build successive images of the organization and its place in the world. Though pervasive and persistent, these overtly technical images remain subject to the basic skeptical challenge that things could be otherwise. In response, come the second and third forms of self presentation: the creation of visionary images, or assertions of competitive brute will. Here too come problems. With vision comes the risk of collective thoughtlessness, and with brute will a one dimensional condition of aquisitive competition. Holt suggests judgment offers another way of responding to the skeptics' challenge. Tracing a narrative through the ideas of David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, William Shakespeare, William Hazlitt, Hannah Arendt, Stanley Cavell, Harold Pinter, Virginia Woolf, Martha Nussbaum and others, Holt finds much might be gained from associating strategic inquiry with a form of critical or poetic spectating. It is, he argues, by having this un-homely sense of 'being besides' oneself that an organization can best present itself to itself and others.

Entrepreneurship, as the creation of new organizations, has globally become an appealing call for individuals and governments alike. Too often still, it is simply associated with the idea of 'enterprise', thus sustaining a pervasive politics of homo economicus agents living a 'measured life' in competition-based individuality.Organizational Entrepreneurship, Politics and the Political disconnects entrepreneurship from the politics of enterprise to more fully explore its potential to resist the economic and ethical demand of the enterprise to be instrumentally innovative and instead to disrupt and disturb the established order. As such, entrepreneurship is seen as inevitably political – it is a constant attempt at declassifying existing structures and institutions, de-normalizing practices and sensemaking to make room for and initiate the new. The chapters invite the readers to revisit key concepts in entrepreneurship studies – opportunity, motivation, identity, experimentation, creative destruction and experimentation – by approaching them through a political process lens. This book offers a new conceptual repertoire and vocabulary that reconnects entrepreneurship studies with the socio-political dimensions of organization-creation, opening up multiple possibilities for understanding and questioning the meanings and effects of entrepreneurship in society. Combining philosophical reflections with organizational and processual perspectives, this book will be of interest to academics, students and researchers in the areas of business, social and political entrepreneurship, organization studies and management. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Entrepreneurship and Regional Development.

Entrepreneurship, as the creation of new organizations, has globally become an appealing call for individuals and governments alike. Too often still, it is simply associated with the idea of 'enterprise', thus sustaining a pervasive politics of homo economicus agents living a 'measured life' in competition-based individuality.Organizational Entrepreneurship, Politics and the Political disconnects entrepreneurship from the politics of enterprise to more fully explore its potential to resist the economic and ethical demand of the enterprise to be instrumentally innovative and instead to disrupt and disturb the established order. As such, entrepreneurship is seen as inevitably political – it is a constant attempt at declassifying existing structures and institutions, de-normalizing practices and sensemaking to make room for and initiate the new. The chapters invite the readers to revisit key concepts in entrepreneurship studies – opportunity, motivation, identity, experimentation, creative destruction and experimentation – by approaching them through a political process lens. This book offers a new conceptual repertoire and vocabulary that reconnects entrepreneurship studies with the socio-political dimensions of organization-creation, opening up multiple possibilities for understanding and questioning the meanings and effects of entrepreneurship in society. Combining philosophical reflections with organizational and processual perspectives, this book will be of interest to academics, students and researchers in the areas of business, social and political entrepreneurship, organization studies and management. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Entrepreneurship and Regional Development.

Do human rights make sense? They have been central to post-war political life, and our picture of moral self. But this is being eroded, Holt argues, and with it the viability of human rights discourse. The pre-social individual and its mental armoury is being challenged by an increasing awareness of genealogical forces in which the self is less a lone claimant than an exponent or rebel.Using Wittgenstein's philosophy, this book considers the liberal position on human rights, along with the communitarian and pragmatic attacks, and challenges the intelligibility of each from the perspective of what it is to be a language user. Wittgenstein, Politics and Human Rights argues that moral relations are not dead; but that their life resides with the on-going relations of selves governed by universal principles.

Do human rights make sense? They have been central to post-war political life, and our picture of moral self. But this is being eroded, Holt argues, and with it the viability of human rights discourse. The pre-social individual and its mental armoury is being challenged by an increasing awareness of genealogical forces in which the self is less a lone claimant than an exponent or rebel.Using Wittgenstein's philosophy, this book considers the liberal position on human rights, along with the communitarian and pragmatic attacks, and challenges the intelligibility of each from the perspective of what it is to be a language user. Wittgenstein, Politics and Human Rights argues that moral relations are not dead; but that their life resides with the on-going relations of selves governed by universal principles.

Strategy exhibits a pervasive commitment to the belief that the best approach to adopt in dealing with affairs of the world is to confront, overcome and subjugate things to conform to our will, control and eventual mastery. Performance is about sustaining distinctiveness. This direct and deliberate approach draws inspiration from ancient Greek roots and has become orthodoxy. Yet there are downsides. This book shows why. Using examples from the world of business, economics, military strategy, politics and philosophy, it argues that success may inadvertently emerge from the everyday coping actions of a multitude of individuals, none of whom intended to contribute to any preconceived design. A consequence of this claim is that a paradox exists in strategic interventions, one that no strategist can afford to ignore. The more single-mindedly a strategic goal is sought, the more likely such calculated instrumental action eventually works to undermine its own initial success.

Strategy exhibits a pervasive commitment to the belief that the best approach to adopt in dealing with affairs of the world is to confront, overcome and subjugate things to conform to our will, control and eventual mastery. Performance is about sustaining distinctiveness. This direct and deliberate approach draws inspiration from ancient Greek roots and has become orthodoxy. Yet there are downsides. This book shows why. Using examples from the world of business, economics, military strategy, politics and philosophy, it argues that success may inadvertently emerge from the everyday coping actions of a multitude of individuals, none of whom intended to contribute to any preconceived design. A consequence of this claim is that a paradox exists in strategic interventions, one that no strategist can afford to ignore. The more single-mindedly a strategic goal is sought, the more likely such calculated instrumental action eventually works to undermine its own initial success.

How can human flourishing arise from what the poet Mary Oliver called 'good work/ongoing'? In its attentiveness to the material, form and purpose of distinct, well-made things, craft epitomizes good work. In its disciplined, quiet giving over to the repetitions of tradition, craft is ongoing. Perhaps more than any other practice, craft work reveals the intimacy between a manifest sense of self and the imperative of its common expression. In a world broken into shuttered units, each separated from the other for the purpose of measured comparison and control, Robin Holt argues that craft work can produce the unassigned remainder that refuses being broken up: it generates its own sufficiency and joy.

How can human flourishing arise from what the poet Mary Oliver called 'good work/ongoing'? In its attentiveness to the material, form and purpose of distinct, well-made things, craft epitomizes good work. In its disciplined, quiet giving over to the repetitions of tradition, craft is ongoing. Perhaps more than any other practice, craft work reveals the intimacy between a manifest sense of self and the imperative of its common expression. In a world broken into shuttered units, each separated from the other for the purpose of measured comparison and control, Robin Holt argues that craft work can produce the unassigned remainder that refuses being broken up: it generates its own sufficiency and joy.

The bulk of Management and Organization Studies deals with time as organization. Time is performed, organized, enacted, and as such is a locus of power. In this edited book, we stress the importance of organization as time. Time is an organizing force. The happening and becoming of collective activity, its technologies, its images, keep empowering, dominating or (more rarely) emancipating the fragile and ephemeral subjectivities of our world. The turn to digitality in all aspects of contemporary life has made the organizing power of time more pervasive than ever. How to describe organization as time? How to explore the relationship between becoming, duration, images, events, non-events or historicity and their relationships with power and emancipation? These are the rich and varied challenges seized by this book by a team of leading scholars interested in time and temporality in the context of management and organization.

The bulk of Management and Organization Studies deals with time as organization. Time is performed, organized, enacted, and as such is a locus of power. In this edited book, we stress the importance of organization as time. Time is an organizing force. The happening and becoming of collective activity, its technologies, its images, keep empowering, dominating or (more rarely) emancipating the fragile and ephemeral subjectivities of our world. The turn to digitality in all aspects of contemporary life has made the organizing power of time more pervasive than ever. How to describe organization as time? How to explore the relationship between becoming, duration, images, events, non-events or historicity and their relationships with power and emancipation? These are the rich and varied challenges seized by this book by a team of leading scholars interested in time and temporality in the context of management and organization.

When re-imagining, re-thinking, and re-writing entrepreneurship in this book, the authors have come to the conclusion that the concept that describes it most precisely is one that signifies a process that includes imagining, seductively describing, playfully organizing, political agility in navigating common sense, and business sensibility before possible commerce.This book develops a process theory of entrepreneurship by exploring how key concepts in such a theory – affect, desire, assemblage – allow us to think about entrepreneurship differently. This makes a significant contribution to bridging the fields of entrepreneurship and organization studies. Using literature and literary characters and their stories as main sources, entrepreneurship research is here revitalized, and the result provides students of entrepreneurship processes with new conceptual opportunities. The book is also a contribution to a multi-disciplinary research tradition in social sciences more broadly where humanities is a key “conversation partner”. Undergraduates in entrepreneurship, PhD students, and entrepreneurship and organization scholars will find this to be a refreshing renewal of research into entrepreneurship and the creation of organization.

At least since the ancient Greeks, strategists have sought to direct and distinguish organized activity through planned, rational decision-making, through the imaginative creation of vision, or through the assertion of will. In all cases, argue Holt and Zundel, strategy impoverishes, not because it only ever offers limited view of organized life, but because it is dedicated to concealing these limits behind grand generalities. The situation is exacerbated when machines and algorithms, not humans, organize. Holt and Zundel draw on philosophy, literature, media theory, art, mathematics, computing and military thinking in an attempt to rescue strategy by isolating what, they argue, remains its essence: strategy is a continual organizational struggle towards authenticity. This, too, is a condition of poverty, but one that sets in place an unhomely condition of questionability as opposed to one of distinctive settlement. It is, argue Holt and Zundel, the sole gift of strategy to thoughtfully refuse rather than impose, organizational imperatives.

When re-imagining, re-thinking, and re-writing entrepreneurship in this book, the authors have come to the conclusion that the concept that describes it most precisely is one that signifies a process that includes imagining, seductively describing, playfully organizing, political agility in navigating common sense, and business sensibility before possible commerce.This book develops a process theory of entrepreneurship by exploring how key concepts in such a theory – affect, desire, assemblage – allow us to think about entrepreneurship differently. This makes a significant contribution to bridging the fields of entrepreneurship and organization studies. Using literature and literary characters and their stories as main sources, entrepreneurship research is here revitalized, and the result provides students of entrepreneurship processes with new conceptual opportunities. The book is also a contribution to a multi-disciplinary research tradition in social sciences more broadly where humanities is a key “conversation partner”. Undergraduates in entrepreneurship, PhD students, and entrepreneurship and organization scholars will find this to be a refreshing renewal of research into entrepreneurship and the creation of organization.

At least since the ancient Greeks, strategists have sought to direct and distinguish organized activity through planned, rational decision-making, through the imaginative creation of vision, or through the assertion of will. In all cases, argue Holt and Zundel, strategy impoverishes, not because it only ever offers limited view of organized life, but because it is dedicated to concealing these limits behind grand generalities. The situation is exacerbated when machines and algorithms, not humans, organize. Holt and Zundel draw on philosophy, literature, media theory, art, mathematics, computing and military thinking in an attempt to rescue strategy by isolating what, they argue, remains its essence: strategy is a continual organizational struggle towards authenticity. This, too, is a condition of poverty, but one that sets in place an unhomely condition of questionability as opposed to one of distinctive settlement. It is, argue Holt and Zundel, the sole gift of strategy to thoughtfully refuse rather than impose, organizational imperatives.

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With over 100 entries on key concepts and theorists, the Dictionary of Qualitative Management Research provides full coverage of the field, explaining fundamental concepts and introducing new and unfamiliar terms. This book provides:

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Engagingly written by specialists in each area, this dictionary will be the definitive and essential companion to established textbooks and teaching materials in qualitative management research.