What is an Organization?
What if we challenged the assumption that organizations are fixed entities? How might this reshape the way we think about and practice leadership?
What if we dared to set aside the belief that an organization is a fixed entity, “a thing” that exists independently of the actors that compose it?…
Freed from this conceptual constraint, we could then approach organizations — especially those to which we belong — as dynamic and participative processes, as social constructs in constant motion, constantly created and recreated by the relationships that bring them to life.
Organization as a Social Process
In other words, we would realize that organizations are not governed by fixed rules or simple chains of causality. Rather, organizations would appear to us as a set of apparently spontaneous and often unpredictable interactions between individuals, with the primary element being, quite simply, “conversation.”
Through this shift in perspective, we would realize that there isn’t truly an organization acting upon its members from the “outside”; there is no “system” external to the people who compose it. Consequently, there are also no leaders external to the organization, only participative actors, valued…
