Why Does Process Research Require Us to Notice Differently?

This introductory chapter argues the implications of process ontology for the actual doing of process research in organizations. The chapter explores how process ontology re-conditions the ways in which empirical researchers notice what is happening, shifting attention away from the methodologies of entity-based research towards instead the situated invention of engaged practices that move flexibly with and within living experience and the converging and diverging dynamics of relating-together and living-with. Process ontological research is more about the becoming-ness of the worlds we are opening up and making than describing those we have historically or currently inhabited. It means acknowledging that the ‘doing’ of research is not only of the world, but also in the world, a worlding practice itself. To become alive and response-able to our entanglements in the becomingness of worldings, and to the performativity of our noticings as they cut across the dappled and shimmering movements of living experience, subject positions in a post-qualitative process ontological research are necessarily ‘work-in-progress’, performative and posthuman. We argue that responding to the potentiality of paradigmatic re-arrangement in living situations of empirical research, is key to the continual development of new processual thought in process organization studies. In a transversal reading, the chapter exemplifies a threading of mycelial webs of resonance travelling across the volume chapters and foregrounding process ontological research as a concern for training attention and attuning, rhythming formats and using art, poetics and aesthetics in the doing of research, as well as engaging multiplicity, difference and diffraction in agencement.