The Challenges of Writing about Emergence and Temporality in Empirical Studies of Time and Process

How do we present time, temporality, emergence, transformation and relationality in research accounts, especially if dynamic accounts of organizational life are best described participatively (Helin, 2015), from within? Ethnographic craftsmanship is key to doing process research (van Hulst et al., 2017), but how can we present and write about time and process in ways that further both readers’ and writers’ sense of flow and temporality in organization studies? Withness-thinking and writing from within the flow of experience has been suggested as the raison d’être of process ontological inquiry (Shotter, 2015), as opposed to about-ness studies of already objectified and categorized structures, elements and entities of organizational life. Situating writing from within the flow of conversation, writing becomes “a fully engaged approach in which [author] had to actively listen and passionately connect to that which, and to those who, [author] was writing about” (Helin, 2015, p.183). The ways in which time and temporality could be presented may create additional challenges. For example, it is challenging to present different forms of time (e.g. chronological vs event-based time) and to argue why one may be more relevant for a certain phenomenon than another. Thus, we cannot take for granted that one temporal form is somehow superior to other(s). Instead, we need to argue through why one or another form may be more or less appropriate depending on the specific circumstances.
The purpose of this Pre-Colloquium Development Workshop (PDW) is to discuss the multiple challenges of writing about and presenting studies influenced by process thinking and dealing with issues of temporality. It is offered as a joint venture between the EGOS Standing Working Group (SWG) 01 on ‘Doing Process Research’ and SWG 10 on ‘Time and Temporality’, recognizing the strong synergies between these two groups.