The Road since 'Structure'

TL;DR: Adaptationist literary study as discussed by the authors is a branch of literature that is based on evolutionary theory and has emerged only in the past 15 years or so, and its practitioners still constitute a relatively small community on the margins of the academic literary establishment.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors seek better understanding of the EU's own institutions, especially to the extent that they play a role in decision-making in the European Union's internal market.

Abstract: In this paper I argue that, rather than theory development aim at simplifying complex organizational phenomena, it should aim at complexifying theories – theoretical complexity is needed to account for organizational complexity. Defining the latter as the capacity for ‘nontrivial’ action, I explore a complex ‘system of picturing’ organizations as objects of study that provides an alternative to the hitherto dominant disjunctive style of thinking. A complex ‘system of picturing’ consists of an open-world ontology, a performative epistemology, and a poetic praxeology. Complex theorizing is conjunctive: it seeks to make connections between diverse elements of human experience through making those analytical distinctions that will enable the joining up of concepts normally used in a compartmentalized manner. Insofar as conjunctive theorizing is driven by the need to preserve the ‘living-forward – understanding backward’ dialectic, it is better suited to grasping the logic of practice and, thus, to doing justice to organizational complexity. We come close to grasping complexity when we restore the past to its own present and make distinctions that overcome dualisms, preserving as much as possible relationality, temporality, situatedness and, interpretive open-endedness. I illustrate the argument with several examples from organizational and management research.

TL;DR: The authors examines key issues raised by consideration of diversity in the study of environmental innovation and societal transitions, focusing on: contending social normativities concerning alternative directions for innovation; divergent disciplinary understandings of societal transitions; and disparate conceptualisations of sociotechnical diversity itself.