The Mutual Constitution of Persons and Organizations: An Ontological Perspective on Organizational Change

Alexandra Michel ()
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Alexandra Michel: Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104

Organization Science, 2014, vol. 25, issue 4, 1082-1110

Abstract: I introduce an ontological perspective, which examines the mutual constitution of persons and organizations, to explain continuous versus episodic organizational change. Informed by a cognitive tradition, prior research on organizational change examines individuals’ epistemology , such as knowledge and skills, and their interaction with organizations. From this perspective, organizations change either continuously or episodically because of the conscious cognitive concepts that decision makers use. Informed by a sociocultural tradition, I examine employees’ ontology and the mutual constitution of person and context within organizations. I use the habitus concept to describe how organizational practices structure and are structured by employees’ taken-for-granted experience of reality’s basic dimensions. Based on a two-year ethnography, I investigate how two Wall Street banks’ distinct work practices caused bankers to experience persons, time, causality, and language (“ontology”) in contrasting ways, reproducing the practices that had generated the ontology. The banks changed either continuously or episodically because bankers’ differential ontologies caused them to utilize resources in different, taken-for-granted ways, thus weaving more or less adaptable organizational fabrics.

Keywords: organizational change; ontology; habitus; mutual constitution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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