Organizing as Process: From Entity to Verb

Definition

The core insight of process organization studies is an ontological shift: replacing the question "what is an organization?" with "how does organizing happen?" Rather than treating the organization as a pre-existing entity that people inhabit and that changes over time, process thinking treats organizing as the fundamental reality—the continuous enactment of shared meaning through interaction. Organization (as noun) is understood as a secondary accomplishment, an emergent pattern arising from ongoing processes, not the container in which those processes occur.

In the Book

The book's introduction articulates this shift directly. Mainstream accounts conceive of change as "happening to organizations," like "a force that may have impacted a billiard ball." In contrast, "from a process perspective, the organization is constituted by the interaction processes among its members...Shifting attention from 'organization' as an already accomplished entity with certain pre-given properties to organizing, [Weick] underscores the process whereby ongoing, interdependent actions are assembled into sensible sequences that generate sensible outcomes."

The distinction is developed through multiple philosophical lenses. Kenneth Gergen's chapter argues for understanding organizations not as entities with properties but as ongoing relational processes. John Shotter emphasizes the embodied, dialogical practices through which organizing happens "in practice." Robert Chia draws on Oriental philosophy to contrast Western thinking's privileging of "permanence, stability, and being" with the Oriental "mentality of 'becoming'" that views organizations as "continuous, natural unfolding of sequences of events—the very essence of process thinking." The book notes that "what we call 'organization' is an abstraction which, upon closer inspection, may be explained in terms of interlocking patterns of communication. It is process all the way through."

The introduction also clarifies the distinction between variance theories (which explain phenomena through relationships among variables at different points in time) and process theories (which explain phenomena through patterns of events and sequences where temporal ordering is crucial). Organizations studied processually reveal non-linear emergence, feedback loops, and path-dependence.

Why It Matters

This ontological shift has profound practical implications. If organizing is process, then "change" is not something to impose on a resistant entity; it is the continuous reconfiguration of how people enact meaning together. Problems are not fixed failures of implementation but symptoms of stalled or inadequate meaning-making. Leadership becomes not command-and-control of structures but cultivation of the interpretive, communicative processes through which organizing happens. This reframing makes visible the actual work through which organizations are continuously (re)created.