Overcoming Strong–Weak Dualisms in Process Organization Studies via Three Theory-Methodology Hybrids

2.1 The Weak Version of Process Research in a Sociology of Organizations: A World of Entities

Different sorts of entities exist, including material, biological and symbolic entities. In a weak process view, the world is made up of entities, some of which are organizations (Davis and DeWitt 2022), while others are actors, such as managers. In this representation, entities are relatively stable and hence identifiable and recognizable. As such, managers manage them by acting on these recognizable and identified characteristics. A process view is interested in how those things taken to be phenomenal objects, known in the sense that subjects make of them, are maintained in practice. Giving primacy to entities that are the subjects and objects of processes is a characteristic of weak process research (Johns 2024). In a process-entity ontology, things and correlative causal mechanisms making up the world are transformed and translated. Ontologically, socially constructed things take primacy: it is what is taken for granted as being present that is fundamental. Process, interweaving actors and actants, links institutions’ histories, connecting past and present objectives, changes, and emergent contradictions.

In its weak version, process research focuses on the “temporal occurrence of significant events” (Van de Ven and Poole 2005, p. 1389). The divisibility and differentiation of time is assumed (McGrath and Kelly 1986). While time may be objectively divisible not every moment is alike, with some points representing critically eventful moments that can only be defined in their criticality after the fact of their occurrence. In the process, not every time division is equal; there will come a point when, in retrospect, sequences of events can be explained, the mid-point of a specific period can be said to have been reached, a highpoint “punctuation” of the old “equilibrium” before the emergence of one that is new (drawing on Gersick 1991). In a weak process view, temporal dynamics are studied in a linear mode, as bridges between stages or episodes, with the arrow of time moving from time 1 to time 2. In practice, this can consist of comparing one entity in time 1 and in time 2, normally assuming something relevant happened between these moments, such as change management initiatives. Attention to time is required for such explicit comparison, looking at the organizational entity as relatively stable, phenomenally preserved over time but changing as an a result of specific interventions and contingencies. Time is divisible into ‘before’ and ‘after’ some event or events that cause phenomenal change. Time passing references a sequence of changes that the entity is undergoing.

Some mechanisms of change are endogenous, such as biological causes; others are exogenous, such as environmental jolts (Meyer 1982) or coevolutionary dynamics (Volberda and Lewin 2003). It is necessary to consider the role of what is normally collapsed into the label “environment”. In a weak process view, forces/stimuli that cause change in a phenomenon between T1 and T2 are identified. Typically, these are mechanisms that “unfreeze” (Weick and Quinn 1999) phenomenal being as it is. Such mechanisms may include a management-led change initiative (Kotter 2012), a change in competition (Vuori and Huy 2016), the arrival of a new disruptive technology (Adner 2002) or an external shock (Meyer 1982). Despite containing “vestiges of stage-based thinking” (Tsoukas 2015, p. 11), these mechanisms offer important insights for a process view of organization. What is important in this view is to capture the stages in the process, their linear sequencing, in a way that corresponds to the (representational) actuality of that observed. In this version, there is a consideration of time and change but the process mainly consists in a discrete sequence of phases.

Godard (1963) captured a stage conception of sequencing metaphorically when he scripted, in Le Petit Soldat, the aphorism that “Photography is truth. And cinema is truth 24 times a second”. Of course, it is a truth framed by the director’s gaze, the scriptwriters’ craft, the actors’ art, the set designers’ flair, and so on through all those credits at the end of a movie. Truth’s construction requires a great deal of artifice and the creation of an ecology of standing conditions that requires considerable attention to many details. The dramaturgical metaphor needs extension; it is not only the audience, the other actors and the immediate props that comprise staging but the whole “illusion” (Bourdieu and Waquant 1992), constituting a shared reality.

As in early cartoons, using traditional animation, where a sense of movement was represented by rapidly flicking through hand-drawn painting on celluloid of the same character in different moments of sequential stasis, in weak sociological process theory movement is captured linearly through changes from one moment of scrutiny to another. The illusion of movement is created through the path dependencies sequencing organization theories, such as stage-gate models of new product development (Cooper 1990), life cycle views of organizations (Van de Ven and Poole 1995) or eight-step models of change (Kotter 2012), all conceptualizing change in a linear and sequential way. In these models, time refers to staged evolution. Where an organization may go is shaped by the path it has travelled before (Farjoun and Fiss 2022). Historical institutionalism (such as in Thelen 2004) examines how the formation of common rules, norms and practices constitute path dependencies. Such path dependencies are best considered not as determinist, technologically or otherwise, so much as resulting from the ways in which actor networks’ articulations are positioned strategically and fixed, for a time, in relationships (Clegg 2023). Nonetheless, in time, all things must pass as organizational processes are animated by a variety of mechanisms that cause entities to change, which directs us towards a strong process approach, which we will next explain.

2.2 Strong Process Research in a Sociology of Organizations: Process as all There Is

In a strong process perspective, process is all-there-is (Sandberg, Loacker, and Alvesson 2015). In such logic, organizations are constantly becoming constituted, re-constituted, reproduced and transformed (organizing). They are circuits of power in which arranging the standing conditions is a struggle to secure stability in a world of events and change (Clegg 2023). For scholars in this tradition, an atomized, entity-based, view of reality is limiting. In a strong process view, an ontology of becoming represents the world as continuous unfolding, as flux rather than as finalized or even a temporarily stabilized process. The organizational world is, in a word, ‘liquid’ (Bauman 2024; Clegg 2024). The notion that things exist per se is contestable; things are temporary and flowing manifestations of becoming (Hargrave 2021). As Hegel pointed out, all life is living and dying at the same time (Hegel 1812; more contemporaneously, we can note that in the dialectic, that which is not actively creating, that ‘not being born, is busy dying’; Dylan 1965). Dialectics represents the world as the ceaseless interplay of opposing tendencies (Clegg, Cunha, and Cunha 2002; Farjoun 2021a; Raisch, Van de Ven and Hargrave 2018). Contradictions inevitably emerge in social totalities (Benson 1977) in which diverse actors follow distinct interests, as both Marx (1976) and Weber (1978) stressed. Systems’ dynamism involves an interplay of what Ashmos and Huber (1987) refer to as reproduction/maintenance and deviation/change, depending on organizational learning capacity, which Clegg (2023) refers to simply as reproduction/transformation, in response to events.

In a strong process ontology, time is not reduced or reducible to chronologically divisible horology. It is insufficient from this perspective to approach processes as objective, divisible and unique. Time is chronos and kairos, fact and psychological duration, “the happening of what happens” (Guerlac 2015, p. 31). To understand organizing, scholars may use diverse knowledges to incorporate multiple scales of time and space, exploring how scales affect other scales; for example, how short-term real time responses affect the long run but also how the long-term may potentially affects the short-term, for instance, when scenario planning becomes performative (de Geus 1988). Ontologically, time scales depend on highly differentiated ways of knowing, temporally embedded in diverse practices (Dille, Soderlund, and Clegg 2018). Time scales are thus dependent on knowing-in-practice; in consequence, objective divisibility becomes a function of knowing, which differs both from knowledge as an objective phenomenon as well as from that thing that knowledge names; knowing is personal (Polanyi 2012; see also Hadjimichael, Pyrko, and Tsoukas 2023), albeit inscribed in intersubjectively customary ways of being in the world.

In strong process approaches, time is not linear, an arrow moving towards the future. There are fast and slow effects, with some causes expressing their consequences with a delay or at a distance (Williams, Whiteman, and Kennedy 2021), rather than immediately or locally (Willer 2003). On the other hand, present structures reflect past decisions, in some cases, centuries old, as Lampedusa (1986) was acutely aware: “Lampedusa’s sense of history is double: there are events, but these events are somehow illusory, superficial, and behind them, below them, the deep habits of power, subordination, and corruption” (Jones 2003), providing an apt lodestar for sceptical organization sociologists.

In strong process, time can be approached in ways unconstrained by Newtonian assumptions. For example, reacting to fast changes often means that organizations respond to effects rather than to causes (Williams, Whiteman, and Kennedy 2021). Instead of representing time as an objective monotonic measure, a strong process approach treats time as expressed in different scales (fast-slow, short term-long term). For this reason, what looks like change may in fact be a façade for stability, while stability may dialectically produce novel syntheses that do not repudiate the past but rather incorporate it into solutions that transcend a given order (Farjoun 2021a). Strong process may promote scholarly time travels with analysis reaching backwards into the past, diving deep into a future or alternating between past, present and future (Cunha 2004; Hernes 2022). Notions that revisit the past to create a future, such as restoration (Miller, Gomes, and Lehman 2019), express this possibility. The assumption that time is a chronological progression imprints organization theory with a distinctively teleological mark. Such a teleological trait limits understanding of how layers of past organizing still haunt present day organization, as traces of the past are sedimented in the structures beneath the surface of things (Clegg 1981). In this sense, the organization may be viewed as a palimpsest over which multiple layers of meaning are inscribed over time (Cunha et al. 2015). Excavating layers expands understanding of time and of organizing.

Ideal typically, change matters in combination rather than in isolation (Farjoun 2021a), with actor network relations energizing processes. Deep structures are laid down by past actor networks, sedimented in time, meaning that it is unlikely that “change agents”, seeking to build change on this sedimentation, will be able to change as much as they might think (Tureta, Américo, and Clegg 2021). Agents may be “instantiations” of deep structures over which they possess limited agency (Silva and Hirschheim 2007). Here it is the dynamism contained and liberated by the actor network system that is of interest for researchers. Different forms of energy are released by actors and actants. The pacing and rhythm of a system’s unfolding depend on how organizations and their stakeholders interact (Roulet and Bothello 2022) and on the paths travelled before.

Strong process generative mechanisms regard changes precipitated by an identifiable episode/decision as a result of past dynamics, often emerging over long periods. A given occurrence (e.g. the introduction of an honour code in a US business school) that seems to be caused by some specific event (i.e. the appointment of a new Dean), may in fact result from the entanglement of many factors whose co-occurrence over time transformed a potentiality into an actuality (Gehman, Trevino, and Garud 2013). The existence of unintended consequences is a well-known organiational process (MacKay and Chia 2013; Merton 1936) for which many explanations are, perhaps, insufficiently processual.

4.1 Liquefying: Accentuating Strong in Weak

Our first hybrid, liquefying, following Bauman’s (2013) notion of liquidity, emphasizes the changing order of reality, accentuating the fluid, fluxing nature of things. We contrast it with a second (reifying) hybrid approach, which assumes that what appears as being is a product of effortful becoming (being is becoming). The becoming of the world is represented as a space in which there are places and of flows (Lim 2014). In this case, for example, in a reversal, charismatic leaders are placed in a distal omnibus context (Johns 2024), not as figures that make history but as figures created by history, leaders as instruments of history rather than history as a creation of great leaders (Cunha, Rego, and Clegg 2011).

Liquefying may also be used to explore the ongoing dynamics of supposedly solid material instantiations. Illustratively, work on routine dynamics is showing how solid, lasting entities such as institutions, regimes or routines, can be understood as less solid, entities in permanent reconstruction, via a strong process lens. Weak views, with their emphasis on being, project an image of solidity differing from a more dynamic view based on becoming. Even accepting the prevalence of entities, researchers may create fresh knowledge by questioning solidity, for example, by exploring how solid matters, such as enduring autocracies suddenly crash, as in the case of the Arab Spring (Kallio and Häkli 2017), or how well tested routines are constantly refashioned through improvisation as a pervasive form of adaptation (Dewey 1922). Through liquefying, scholars may explain how, as Marx and Engels (1976) suggested in The Communist Manifesto, “everything solid melts into air”, how solidity is permanently scaffolded (Farjoun 2021b) and why agency is often context-induced, rather than located in the presumed agent. As Welch et al. (2022, p. 13) observed “context (…) has agency”, and this agency needs to be given more consideration.^[2]

Liquefying also shows how times past, recent and distant, are constantly being produced and re-produced in a present that, even in its moment of being eclipsed, draws on the past to remake its future, an observation for which Opatska et al.’s (2023) research in Ukraine is particularly apposite. In this hybrid, distant and recent pasts are intertwined, in order to explore how the shadow of the longue durée (temporal structures) affects recently observed events; again, the agency of contemporary agents may be strongly linked with long processual flows that may be difficult even for the participants to understand. Even effects from 16^th century decisions may be retained in present-day social and economic structures, even after they have been formally abolished. That is the case of the forced labour system called mita, institutionalized by the Spanish government of Peru in Bolivia in 1573 and abolished in 1812 (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012; Dell 2010) or the slavery regime employed on Southern US plantations from 1619 to its formal cessation in 1863, a system that still has significant effects on contemporary differences in political attitudes across counties in the American South (Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen 2016). This hybrid thus plays with the echoes of past processes in the material instantiations of the present.

An organizational illustration is how, in the distant past of the 18th century, in the putting-out trade in the textile production that seeded the English industrial revolution, productive work was outsourced to cottage industry. In order to have a central market in which to buy and sell textiles, cloth halls were built. Cloth halls centralized the market for the trade in hand woven textiles produced in the pre-industrial economy of the West Riding of Yorkshire, from the Middle Ages through to the early nineteenth century. The Piece Hall in Halifax, the heartland of the woollen cloth trade, was such a venue in which merchants could sell the pieces they collected from domestic industry situated in Pennine villages. Dating from 1779, ‘pieces’ of cloth (a 30-yard length of woven woollen fabric produced on a handloom) were collected from the domestic weavers and traded in the Piece Hall. By the nineteenth century, however, the industry had moved from domestic work that the merchant’s put-out, to factories in which workers were employed in mass production (Marglin 1974).

The reason why an organizationally specific location became the production hub of an industrial revolution, depending on the account, is either mainly to be found in the extension of merchant control (Marglin 1974) or, as Scott and Davis (2007, pp. 126–127) argue, task interdependence: ‘the extent to which the items or elements upon which work is performed or the work processes themselves are interrelated so that changes in the state of one element affect the state of the others’ (Scott and Davis 2007: 126–127). It is argued that, especially when interdependence is sequential or reciprocal (Thompson 2003), it is necessary for workers to be physically proximate to perform bodily embedded tasks. Marglin (1974) would add, especially so when they are assembled under the surveillance and control of a master that employs them under the watchful eye of factory ‘veillance’ (Zorina et al. 2021) so as to harvest the surplus value that is being exploited.

Changes in spatial relations can also be considered. The contemporary assumptions that led to internal organizational spatial relations premised on open-plan offices, hot desking and close working in small meeting rooms, are increasingly questionable. These questions of distance have achieved heightened acuity when the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic closed down many sites of economic activity and rules of social distancing were imposed. Elias (1982) argues that longer and more complex chains of interdependence between people lead to greater self-regulation because of enhanced proximity and visibility (Clegg and van Iterson 2013). Making organizing more flexible and fluid in a virtual world of working from home, or elsewhere than an office, transfers regulation from the discipline of the organization to the discipline of the self. Having been through recent experiences characterized by lockdowns and social distancing during the pandemic of COVID-19, the lack of proximity and spatial awareness of the others with whom one interacts is not just a matter of distance, as in supply chains but also of contiguity; hence, possibilities are opened for increasingly less self-regulated behaviour to occur. The recent past, improvised in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the long past, nurtured in the co-location in the modern firm, interact in the present, in attempts to (re)define the future of work.

Methodological challenges. This hybrid might create original ways of exploring organization as process, strong and weak, by organizational sociology. Scholars using such an approach to place short-term material instantiations in their historical context, endow organizational scholarship with historical sensitivity able to question whether the present is exceptional (McNamara, Vaaler, and Devers 2003). Historical sensitivity may, in turn, assist in avoidance of theorizing only about effects that are recent, irrespective of their explanatory power. Returning to the hourglass metaphor may help in reversing the slow-moving and mid-range approaches which, in turn, can help avoid methodological focus on short-term explanations.

As an example, a refreshing complement to existing research, accentuating the role of a historical person, is available. The example, provided by Moasa et al. (2023), analyses how the life of Vlad Dracula has been used to nurture a romance of leadership throughout the multiple changes in Romanian history. Using this hybrid, researchers may explore how the socio-political factors of a specific time and place create conditions for the emergence of rulers, such as the historical Dracula. In a different space and time, Trump can also be studied as a product of particular circumstances rather than as a story of the emergence of some charismatic “big man” (Tourish 2023). The extended case method (Nguyen and Tull 2022) can also integrate micro and macro factors, focusing on becoming, while downplaying the importance of being. ‘Extending’ here refers to extending up, from the consideration of ethnographic detail to the larger distal elements affecting current events. Experience sampling (Uy, Foo, and Aguinis 2010), via repeatedly measuring naturalistic episode experiences, can also be an approach for exploring how processes unfold in the short run as experienced by those who lived them, such as managers.

4.2 Reifying: Accentuating Weak in Strong

An ontology of becoming emphasizes reality as constant flux (Tsoukas and Chia 2002). Yet, even in a world of becoming, as it is said, matter matters (becoming manifests as being). Process creates its material instantiations: “’things’ of all sorts are (re)produced in ongoing fashion” (Kuhn, Ashcraft, and Cooren 2017, p. 43). This hybrid underlines the recursiveness of strong–weak, the power of material things in shaping process as well as the potentiality of process in emanating material instantiations that shape the further development of the process via non-linear processes. Therefore, the reifying hybrid, even though giving ontological priority to flux, acknowledges the importance of the material instantiations of process and alerts to the role on ongoing processes in the manifestation of things as indicators of process. This hybrid aims to apprehend how process manifests materially in ‘social facts’ (Durkheim 1982), interpreted relationally, as Worrell (2018) suggests they should be. For example, in a strong process view, historians such as Braudel have examined the longue durée (Braudel 1958, 1995). The longue durée explains events in the context of the very settings that produce them and that are influenced by them – as captured in the hourglass analogy (Clemente, Durand, and Roulet 2017). What is sometimes called “big history”, the exploration of the past in several time scales, including large scales (Christian 1991), celebrates this view of the past as present in the present. Big history approaches events between the Big Bang and current processes as parts of a single narrative (Aunger 2007). Material remains of the past help shape the present.

A hybrid view, although acknowledging the importance of process as flux and becoming, explores how processes originate material instantiations that may redirect historical trajectories but that often reinforce paths of process. This hybrid may be useful to explain how change sometimes ends up reinforcing the status quo, as when a revolution produces regime change that reinforces the status quo, as in the history of France’s first republic from 1792 to 1804. In world history revolutionaries of the past can often become midwives to the dictators of the future. Studying the emergence of charismatic leaders and their role in the continuity of the very systems they aimed to replace may benefit from this hybrid approach, which aims to highlight the role of beings in the unfolding of the world. The world is viewed as a palimpsest (Cunha et al. 2015) in which current reality is written over past layers. The discrete events are contextualized in a more distal omnibus (Johns 2024). The hybrid may also be used to explore how some by-products of long historical times, apparently finely honed cultural dispositions, such as manners, are reified as an outcome of the ‘civilizing process’ (Elias 1969). They might appear superficial, spontaneous and effortless but they are deeply acculturated practices. Practices, such as improvisation, have been associated with specific nations (Cunha 2005); what is known in New Zealand as ‘Kiwi ingenuity’ is a case in point (Downs and Bridges 2014; Toy, Simpson, and Taylor 2023), as are the organizational improvisations of the Ukraine war effort (Opatska, Johansen, and Gordon 2023), practices finding institutional rather than spontaneous, purely processual, expression.

Methodological challenges. To develop complex views of the longue durée of time with a developed sensitivity to present events and their material instantiations, researchers may explore how ‘things’ (decisions, projects, initiatives) are an outcome of historical processes. This can be done explicitly not only through the use of phenomenology and ethnography (Buroway 1982) but also by using interviews and questionnaires (Miller and Friessen 1982), exploring the genealogy of current events. The study of the appointment of a new dean as historically anchored in a number of events that are not apparently related to this particular decision may illustrate the logic of reification, how long processes originate material instantiations that give them thing-like properties. Recent studies of historical processes also exemplify this approach (Tunarosa, Lê, and Pradies 2024; Kilminster 2004; Kilminster et al. 2023; Mennell 1985), an approach that Mennell (1985) termed retrodiction, where sociological inference leads to the search for historical evidence. Another possibility consists in adopting prospective case studies (Bitektine 2008) such that time is apprehended in non-linear ways. In this case, people will be invited to reflect by moving back and forth between past, present and future to explore how processes create their own desired and unexpected manifestations. Mennell’s (2017) account of how he became an Elisian sociologist is a good example. More prosaically, organizational participants, as practical theorists, may prospectively imagine some future (Pitsis et al. 2003) and subsequently, as organizing unfolds, spontaneous processes such as improvisation or serendipity, that may be difficult to capture via retrospective methods, can be followed up as events that materialized, irrespective of the motivations and intentions of the participants.

4.3 Embedding

Vaill defined process wisdom as “the feelings of moving through situations and problems and yet somehow acting ‘wisely’ in relation to them” (Vaill 1998, p. 25, italics in the original). Process organizational research has been approached mostly from the outside through researchers exploring how processes happen. Process wisdom invites a different approach: instead of knowing about processes, researchers may also learn in the process as bodily participants, refusing a transcendental position from the researcher (Marston, Jones, and Woodward 2005), via reflexive probing in situ, constituting sociomaterially situated knowing (Nair, Burt, and Chia 2013). In other words, doing this aims to obtain awareness of the temporal lens of the participant, as Reinecke and Ansari (2017) put it.

Studying process without considering one’s context risks decontextualization (Welch et al. 2022). A case in point is Eldridge’s (1977) review of Pugh and Hickson (1976), in which he contrasted the acontextual nature of their approach to the social reality of organization in Birmingham and the West Midlands, compared to that of Rex and Moore (1967), also in Birmingham and conducted at much the same time. The specificity of place, and awareness of the historical processes transforming place, are as evident in the latter as they are missing in the former. Both studies occurred in the same place and time but only one of them shows this fact; Organizational Structure in its Context, makes no connection with the place researched.

Researchers gain from being embedded, immersed in practices (Chia and Mackay 2023) instead of being distant observers of a phenomenon, as was the case in De Rond’s (2017) fieldwork in a Coalition field hospital in Afghanistan during the war with the Taliban. For this reason, using personal experience as members of a given community may be perceived as positive rather than problematic, when this process of zooming-in on local knowledge is counterweighted with zooming-out, such as insider-outsider research teams. Exploring process may in fact imply “deep immersion and analytic reflexivity”, as noted by Jarzabkowski, Bednarek, and Lê (2018, p. 187), as well as the capacity to consider broader patterns – hence the value of zooming in-zooming out lens switching.

Illustration. To nurture process wisdom, scholars may shadow managers as they move through situations (Czarniawska-Joerges 2007). Mintzberg’s (1975) now classical study of the manager’s job provides an illustration, albeit at a diarised distance. Even though the work became known for the multiple roles that managers perform, it redirected the conversation on managerial work by locating it in diary accounts of what work was done. In a different scenario, moving ethnographically through the process, as in the case of Erickson’s (2018) study, helps to understand with vivid, first-hand, local evidence, how the predicted evolution of a pandemic outbreak in the West Coast of Africa did not unfold as the algorithm anticipated. Being in the process offers unique vantage points of process observation.

Methodological challenges. Being embedded/immersed in a phenomenon raises questions, namely that of proximity: how can one be an observer of a process that one lives through as an insider? The tension between being close and being distant can be used productively to articulate strong and weak process views. This challenge may be tackled through composing research teams with outsider-insider characteristics (Louis and Bartunek 1992), in which the tension between being proximate and distant is assumed and embraced rather than avoided. Methodologically, the need to zoom in and to zoom out has been acknowledged (Schad and Bansal 2018) as a means to compose more rigorous views. The competence is the capability to observe phenomena from different process dimensions with different methodological tools, such as big data and local, situated experience (Jones and Bartunek 2021). Despite recent enchantment with big data, the advantages of being on the ground cannot be ignored. The articulation of scales and methods, such as first-hand direct knowledge (Erickson 2018; Mills 2018) and macro patterns (Airoldi 2021) seem to offer particularly promising prospects for articulating strong and weak views of processes.