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Go with the flow : Post-humanist Accounts of how Matter Matters in Organizational Change
Dissertation   Open access

Go with the flow : Post-humanist Accounts of how Matter Matters in Organizational Change

Lotta Hultin
SSE
Doctor of Philosophy (PHD), Stockholm School of Economics
2017

Abstract

This thesis contributes to our understanding of “how matter matters” in organizational change. Building on research grounded in an ontology of becoming and emphasizing and experimenting with various vocabularies grounded in this ontology, it challenges and moves beyond the normative enactment of separation between human and material, subject and object, structure and agency. In five articles, based on longitudinal case studies at the Swedish Migration Board and ‘Nordic University Hospital’, the thesis decenters the human as the primary agent of change and offers insights into how matter, including information technologies and physical work environments, are entangled in, and thus constitutive of, a performative flow of material-discursive practices providing the conditions of possibilities to be, act, respond and change. In doing this, it uncovers how researchers working within an ontology of becoming can be responsive to their own entanglement in material-discursive practices and challenge and extend current conceptions of what organizational theories can do in the creative co-construction of organizational realities. Specifically, the articles present novel readings of organizational sensemaking, identity work, management ideas and institutional logics.  
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