A Relational View on Organization Ontology: Insights from Methodological Relationism, Process Philosophy, and Critical Realism

This chapter aims to contribute to a relational view of organization ontology. Organization ontology refers to the nature of the organization and to the question “What is the organization?”. A relational view of organization ontology in this chapter is built theoretically on three main conceptual blocks. The first is methodological relationism. This is a meta-construct that refuses the primacy of substances. Methodological relationism is therefore anti-substantialist and may allow for a conceptual shift from individualism to relationism in organizational research. The second conceptual block is Whitehead’s process philosophy because this chapter adopts the position of relation as processual. The third conceptual block is critical realism and, in particular, the emergent property. Processual relations at a lower (micro) level lead to the emergence of a novel processual entity, namely, the organization. A relational view of organization ontology based on these three conceptual blocks draws on the nature of the organization in the Relational Economics theory view of the organization.