Ontology

Haridimos Tsoukas

Chapter 1.20 in Elgar Encyclopedia of Strategy as Practice, 2025, pp 82-86 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: While epistemology studies the nature of our knowledge claims about the world (how do we know what we claim to know?), ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being (what is reality made of?). Put simply, ontology concerns what exists in the world. No scientific study is possible without an, at least, implicit ontology. When scientists try to explain a phenomenon, they make assumptions about its nature – what constitutes it and how it is brought into being. When, in particular, we seek to understand an organizational phenomenon, be it sensemaking, learning, change, strategy, routines, etc., what exactly are we trying to do? What do we assume the phenomenon is constituted by? Ontology inevitably forms the bedrock of all scholarly inquiry. I present here three plus two ontologies, which are often encountered in organizational research.

Keywords: Ontology; Epistemology; Practice; Site; Entitative ontology; Process ontology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035315956
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