Ontology

Conceptual Overview

Western modes of thought remain circumscribed by two opposing and enduring cosmological traditions. Heraclitus, a native of Ephesus in ancient Greece, emphasized the primacy of a fluxing, changeable, and emergent world whereas Parmenides, his successor from Elea, insisted on the permanent and unchangeable nature of reality. One emphasized reality as inclusively processual; the other privileged a homeostatic and entitative conception of reality. This seemingly intractable opposition between a Heraclitean ontology of becoming and a Parmenidean ontology of being provides us with the key for understanding contemporary contrasting attitudes toward the object, focus, and scope of organizational research. Although there is clear evidence of a resurgence of interest in Heraclitean-type thinking in recent years, it is the Parmenidean-inspired mind-set that has decisively prevailed in the West for the past 2,500 years.

According to this neo-Parmenidean worldview, reality is made up of stable atomistic entities with identifiable properties and characteristics. Thus, form, order, individuality, and identity are privileged over flux, chaos, relationality, and interpenetration. This assumption that matter is stable and atomistic allowed Newton to assume that the state of “rest” is natural whereas movement, flux, and change are regarded as epiphenomena of stable things. Things change, but change is not constitutive of things. This privileging of order and stability over flux and change enabled the notion of causality to be formulated as an invaluable explanatory concept for relinking these (initially assumed) isolated entities so that their observed behaviors and tendencies can be adequately accounted for in a coherent system of explanation. In other words, the notion of external causality is intimately tied to a particular atomistic conception of reality.

Moreover, the privileging of an atomistic conception of reality generates both an epistemological attitude and a methodological stance in the social sciences. Epistemologically, it leads to the view that language, as a stable system of representation, is adequate to the task of accurately capturing and representing phenomena around us. For it is only when reality is taken to be atomistic and stable in space-time that it can be considered representable by symbols, words, and concepts. A correspondence theory of truth and a representationalist epistemology thus ensues that inevitably orients our thinking toward the manifest and stable end states rather than to the processes of change and transformation. These are construed as epiphenomena of primary atomistic entities, and so much so that even when change is openly acknowledged as being pervasive, it is nevertheless still conceptualized as essentially anomalous to a fundamentally stable world order.

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