Abstract
Part of Symposium: Bracketing Process? Event as Action but Also Non-Action
From the perspective of process philosophy, organization and organizing are constituted by happenings, events, and durations. Firms, associations, and cooperatives are not stable entities. Instead, they are simultaneously continuous and discontinuous processes. More and more voices are either expanding or challenging this ontology of time and temporality. Beyond the horizontal time of most process views, some scholars invite MOS to explore verticality and moments as temporal voids. They stress the importance of mysteries and absences in the presence, pushed by what is happening in the world. Absences, nothingness, voids, obviously matter in organizations as invisibilities, immaterialities, and performativities contribute to the world's happening. Paradoxically, process philosophy also contains a forgotten or neglected negativity. Not-yet events (as part of a project), lack, impatience, frustration, are all part of our experience of organization. They open possibilities for other past and future events and their becoming. They are not absences, empty spaces, or spaces deprived of the presence of something. They are non-events and generative incompleteness within the continuous happening of our present. The emphasis on verticality, absences, and non-events or necessary incompleteness of events are promising perspectives that we would like to discuss in this presenter symposium. They are likely to lead either to an alternative to ongoing discussions about process in an organization or to an extension of process perspectives in MOS. In particular, this symposium aims to discuss - The importance of verticality in renewing the description and experience of processes; - Negative topologies of organizing as voids, emptiness and non-existence of time-space in organizing; - Paradoxical relations between presence and absence as part of chiasms and the complex field of co-presence; - Events and non-events as both propositional in the happening and becoming of organizing; - The unity of a process perspective that includes both verticality, absences and non-events in the constitution of new process ontologies; - The institutional implications of negative ontology for MOS; - The paradoxical nature of negative ontology; - The possible contributions of new modes of writing and art-based research to a negative ontology; - The necessary renewal of methodologies to explore voids, emptiness, absences, verticality, and non-events; - Uchronia, fictions and ethnographies of what has not happened, what has not yet happened; - Relationships between negative ontologies and (post-)phenomenologies, pragmatism, Marxism (especially Marxist dialectics), and critical philosophies; - There is potential for negative ontologies to discuss and address grand challenges differently.