The Contemporary Resonances of Classical Pragmatism for Studying Organization and Organizing

The legacy of classical American Pragmatism – Peirce, James, Dewey, Addams, Mead, Follett and others – in organization theory is significant, albeit that much of its influence has come through implicit and indirect routes. In light of recent calls for an empirical stance as an alternative to the prevailing metaphysical stance in organizational research, we reread Pragmatism as a process philosophy that can profoundly inform process views of organization and organizing. Our particular reading highlights Pragmatism’s emphasis on process and emergence, its theory of knowing as fallible and experimental, its denouncing of dualisms, its future-oriented meliorism, its sensitivity to ethics and democracy, and its positioning of experience as both the start and end of inquiry, arguing that these features lay invaluable groundwork for the study of organization and organizing. We advocate a reappraisal of this legacy, mobilizing seven articles from the back catalogue of this journal in a virtual special issue that demonstrates how classical American Pragmatism can reinvigorate the field while also opening up new questions and new ways of questioning.

Anthropocene slow TV: Temporalities of extinction in Svalbard

In Norway, slow television, an internationally popular format that approaches Nordic noir in export value, has been primarily concerned with entertaining viewers by showing Norwegians (and interested outsiders) their own country. The January 2020 NRK release of its slow TV programme Svalbard minutt for minutt (Svalbard Minute by Minute) focuses on this Arctic region, juxtaposing striking images of its native fauna with the remarkably well-preserved ecological crime scenes of its Anthropocene pasts. Svalbard Minute by Minute constitutes a daring mash-up of nation-branding nature programme and extractivist history documentary, via both non-fiction modes of place and process views, in which the two strains reinforce one another to pose difficult questions about the future for viewing audiences.

Decision support system for quality management in study process

The authors describe the design of a decision support system, which allows automating the works on extracting information from the survey results. The generalization of modern publications had confirmed the relevance of the primary purpose of the paper. The domain analysis determined what tasks the decision support system should solve. The results of domain analysis became the base for the requirements specification. Logical and process views represent the system architecture design. A denormalized data structure, which accelerates the acquisition of aggregated data in different dimensions, is developed. The system design provides the work with various data sources as well as incremental development of the decision support system.

Case notion discovery and recommendation: automated event log building on databases

Process mining techniques use event logs as input. When analyzing complex databases, these event logs can be built in many ways. Events need to be grouped into traces corresponding to a case. Different groupings provide different views on the data. Building event logs is usually a time-consuming, manual task. This paper provides a precise view on the case notion on databases, which enables the automatic computation of event logs. Also, it provides a way to assess event log quality, used to rank event logs with respect to their interestingness. The computational cost of building an event log can be avoided by predicting the interestingness of a case notion, before the corresponding event log is computed. This makes it possible to give recommendations to users, so they can focus on the analysis of the most promising process views. Finally, the accuracy of the predictions and the quality of the rankings generated by our unsupervised technique are evaluated in comparison to the existing regression techniques as well as to state-of-the-art learning to rank algorithms from the information retrieval field. The results show that our prediction technique succeeds at discovering interesting event logs and provides valuable recommendations to users about the perspectives on which to focus the efforts during the analysis.

Introduction: Institutions and Organizations

Institutions—the taken-for-granted structures, practices, and meanings that define what people and organizations within their jurisdiction think, do, and aspire to—are all about process, even though this may not always have been evident in some of the institutional theory literature. In this introduction, the editors call for a strong process approach to institutional dynamics, one that highlights institutions as emergent, generative, political, and social. They first relate “weak” and “strong” process views with the two metaphors commonly used to explain institutionalization—diffusion and translation. After reviewing some of the recent developments within institutional theory that set the ground for a strong process view, they move to exemplify the potential of a strong process view for institutional theory. They then end the introduction with some suggestions that will contribute positively to the ongoing development of institutional theory through a strong process view.