Essai: time, duration and simultaneity; rethinking process and change in organizational analysis

The Reality of Change

Process theorists' rediscovery of actual lived time as opposed to 'clocktime' enables us to make important adjustments in our thinking about the nature of movement, process and change. For these process theorists, movement and change is reality itself, and seemingly stabilized and concrete entities such as 'individuals' and 'organizations' are nothing more than 'stability waves in a sea of process' (Rescher 1996: 53). Yet, we have an instinctive tendency to think about change as change of 'something' and to argue about movement as though it is the movement of an entity. For genuine process philosophers, however, 'there are underneath the change no things which change: There are movements, but there is no inert or invariable object which moves' (Bergson 1992: 147, emphasis original). When we listen to a melody, we have a clear perception of a movement and succession which is not a movement of 'something'. It is the very continuity of the melody and the impossibility of breaking it up which creates its impress ion upon us. Once we begin to picture the notes on a piece of paper and the keyboard upon which these notes are played, then we start cutting the melody up into distinct notes, into so many 'befores' and 'afters', thereby introducing spatial images into a time art. Contemporaneity and pure duree are thus replaced by simultaneity and succession in our explanatory scheme of things.

Movement and Change in the Creative Evolution of Knowledge

This revised understanding of movement and change provides us with an alternative means for grasping the evolution of knowledge and for rethinking the nature of knowledge itself. Consistent with our commonly held spatialized notions of time, we have traditionally conceived of knowledge as discrete units that are inherently divisible, additive and cumulative. Knowledge becomes a commodified 'product'; a thing that can be 'assembled', 'rearranged', 'packaged', 'transferred' and 'consumed'. Correspondingly, thought is deemed to be some kind of a 'brickyard', where such knowledge is baked into hard units or concepts and then piled into rows according to size, and labelled for future use.

What a truly process view of movement and change offers, however, is a radically revised understanding of the advancement of knowledge, not through the production of discrete quantitative ciphers, but through the creative absorption of previous patterns of comprehension and the endless reweaving of these into an ever new coherent, and temporarily justified, system of understanding. This is the true character of our experience of progress in human understanding. Knowledge advancement entails the ongoing reflexive reworking of thought that 'creeps from point to point, testing each step' (Whitehead 1933: 31). Much like reality itself, knowledge is 'global and undivided growth, progressive invention, duration: it resembles a gradually expanding rubber balloon assuming at each moment unexpected forms' (Bergson 1992: 95-96). Such a revised understanding of movement and change in knowledge-creation offers radical implications for the field of Organization Studies.