Studying organizations as temporary

Rolf A. Lundin and Runólfur S. Steinthórsson

Scandinavian Journal of Management, 2003, vol. 19, issue 2, 233-250

Abstract: This article reflects upon the methodological pessimism that sometimes plagues students of organizations. In particular pessimism seems to strike us when we try to get to grips with the incessant transformations of organizations--transformations that seem to occur at such great speed. Our immediate reaction to Heraclitus' statement that: "You cannot step twice into the same river" is that it has considerable methodological relevance. However, we contend that his metaphor in its orthodox version leads to too narrow a view. An elaboration of the metaphor could perhaps reduce the pessimism regarding organizational studies by promoting a focus on contextual aspects. Moreover, changes and transformations in themselves do not necessarily represent a stumbling block for the researcher. Rather studying crucial projects provides a means for studying the mechanisms at work in the host organization. The resulting approach--contextualization in a broad sense--relieves researchers of some of their pessimism, maybe even inspires optimism, by raising new questions: not only "what can be said?" (about the organization), but also "in what contexts?" and "about what manifestations in those contexts?" The article concludes with some remarks on the scarcity of the contextualization approach for studying organizations as temporary phenomena.

Keywords: Researching; the; temporary; The; extended; river; metaphor; Contextualization; Focusing; projects; Micmac; methodology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0956522102000064
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:scaman:v:19:y:2003:i:2:p:233-250

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/872/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... me/872/bibliographic

Access Statistics for this article

Scandinavian Journal of Management is currently edited by Janne Tienari

More articles in Scandinavian Journal of Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().