The morphogenesis of organisational capabilities

The capabilities micro-foundation literature has been enjoying “celebrity” status appearing in many special issues of top ranked journals in recent years. In this paper we seek to add our voice to this burgeoning field. Traditional theorising in the field seems to have been polarised on the one hand by utility maximisation of the neoclassical school while on the other by the satisficing principle of bounded rationality. Of late the conversation has taken on an ontological turn and battle lines drawn between methodological individualism and methodological collectivism. Both schools of thoughts are variously illuminating in their own right. However, to the extent that transcending the individualism-collectivism divide offers a mutually inclusive solution we suggest looking at the problematic from a third perspective. In this paper we draw on the critical realist ontology to propose a morphogenesis approach to the study of capabilities and its origins. We argue that the emergent nature of capabilities is sympathetic to Archer’s notion of analytical dualism. As such we expose organisational capabilities as emergent social structures existing in a dialectical and reciprocal interplay between the emergent powers of structure, culture and agency. Defined in terms of patterns of action, we build our argument premised on the objective pre-existence of capabilities which serve to condition the situational logic of action. Organisational actors faced with objective situations exercise their own subjective properties to weigh the opportunity cost of one course of action over another. Actions endorsing the status quo lead to the reproduction of capabilities (morphostasis) while transformative actions lead to change or dynamic capabilities (morphogenesis). Given that organisations exist in a continuous flow of action the resulting morphostasis or morphogenesis constitutes the anterior conditioning forces for the new cycle of interaction. By maintaining the ontic differentiation between structure and agency the conditions of action are therefore rendered analytically separable from action itself, so enabling their interplay, as opposed to their mutual interpenetration, to be explored

Understanding Opportunities in Social Entrepreneurship: A Critical Realist Abstraction

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This paper extends social entrepreneurship (SE) research by drawing upon a critical realist perspective to analyse dynamic structure/agency relations in SE opportunity emergence, illustrated by empirical evidence. Our findings demonstrate an agential aspect (opportunity actualisation following a path-dependent seeding-growing-shaping process) and a structural aspect (institutional, cognitive and embedded structures necessary for SE opportunity emergence) related to SE opportunities. These structures provide three boundary conditions for SE agency: institutional discrimination, an SE belief system and social feasibility. Within this paper, we develop a novel theoretical framework to analyse SE opportunities plus, an applicable tool to advance related empirical research

Evaluation Report: 2010-2015 Social Development Strategy

In 2010, Centraide of Greater Montreal adopted a strategy to fight poverty and social exclusion that was firmly grounded in a territorial approach.The hypothesis: Centraide could generate better outcomes by prioritizing investment targets and applying strategic and proactive investment approaches across a neighbourhood instead of considering agencies in isolation.Five years later, an evaluation was conducted in six communities to observe changes and draw lessons from this approach.Instead of just increasing resources so that agencies can do more, the territorial approach helped Centraide create a plan for each neighbourhood and use available vectors to support the desired improvements. These vectors include: * Support for solid and dynamic agencies that provide leadership in their communities. * Support for multi-network and intersectoral coordination so that communities can implement solutions that have the greatest chance of reducing and mitigating the impact of poverty and social exclusion. * Reinforcement of agency skills and leadership. * Ongoing relationships between organizations, mobilization initiatives and Centraid

FIVE STEPS TO RESPONSIBILITY

Responsibility has entered the academic discourse of logicians hardly more than few decades ago. I suggest a logical concept of responsibility which employs ideas both from a number of theories belonging to different branches of logic as well from other academic areas. As a comment to this concept, I suggest five steps narrative scenario in order to show how the logical dimension of responsibility emerges from diverse tendencies in logic and other sciences. Here are the five steps briefly stated: Step 1. Developing modal formalisms capable of evaluative analysis of situations (deontic, epistemic and etc.). Step 2. Drawing a conceptual borderline between normal and non-normal (weak) logical systems. Step 3. Using different kinds of models. Step 4. Agent- and action- friendly turn in logic. Step 5. Creating formalisms for modeling different types of agency. An idea advocated here within 5-Steps route to responsibility is that this concept is a complex causal and evaluative (axiological) relation. A logical account may be given for causal and normative aspects of this relation. Unfolding the responsibility back and forth through 5 Steps will result in different concepts. The technicalities are minimized for the sake of keeping the philosophical scope of the paper. For the same reason I also refrain from discussing legal and juridical ramifications of the issue

Artists as Mentors: A Mid-Career Art Educator Rekindles Her Artist Self

A mentoring relationship between a mid-career art educator and a late-stage artist, is facilitated through the art educator\u27s action research and life story narrative which is key in learning and sharing the artist’s philosophy. The author uses narrative inquiry and Deleuze\u27s sense and event to represent the affective knowing of IG learning and demonstrates psychosocial benefits of mentoring

Animating archaeology: local theories and conceptually open-ended methodologies

Animists’ theories of matter must be given equivalence at the level of theory if we are to understand adequately the nature of ontological difference in the past. The current model is of a natural ontological continuum that connects all cultures, grounding our culturally relativist worldviews in a common world. Indigenous peoples’ worlds are thought of as fascinating but ultimately mistaken ways of knowing the world. We demonstrate how ontologically oriented theorists Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Karen Barad and Tim Ingold in conjuncture with an anti-representationalist methodology can provide the necessary conditions for alternative ontologies to emerge in archaeology. Anthropo-zoomorphic ‘body-pots’ from first-millennium ad northwest Argentina anticipate the possibility that matter was conceptualized as chronically unstable, inherently undifferentiated, and ultimately practice dependent

IR theory, historical materialism, and the false promise of international historical sociology

The three-decades old call for an inter-disciplinary rapprochement between IR Theory and Historical Sociology, starting in the context of the post-positivist debate in the 1980s, has generated a proliferating repertory of contending paradigms within the field of IR, including Neo-Weberian, Post-Structuralist, and Constructivist approaches. Within the Marxist literature, this project comprises an equally rich and diverse set of theoretical traditions, including World-Systems Theory, Neo-Gramscian IR/IPE, the Amsterdam School, Political Marxism, Neo-Leninism, and Postcolonial Theory. More recently, a “third wave” of approaches has been announced from within the field of IR, suggesting to move the dialogue from inter-disciplinarity towards an integrated super-discipline of International Historical Sociology (IHS). This proposition has been most persistently advanced by advocates of the theory of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD), claiming to constitute a universal, unitary and sociological theory of IR. This article charts the intellectual trajectory of this ongoing IR/HS dialogue. It moves from a critique of Neo-Weberianism to a critique of UCD against the background of the original promise of the turn in IR to Historical Sociology: the supersession of the prevailing rationalism, structuralism, and positivism in extant mainstream IR approaches through the mobilization of alternative and non-positivistic traditions in the social sciences. This critique will be performed by setting UCD in dialogue with Political Marxism. By anchoring both approaches at opposite ends on the spectrum of Marxist conceptions of social science – respectively the scientistic and the historicist - the argument is that UCD reneges on the promise of Historical Sociology for IR by re-aligning, first by default and now by design, with the meta-theoretical premises of Neo-Realism. This is most visibly expressed in the articulation of a deductive-nomological covering law, leading towards acute conceptual and ontological anachronisms, premised on the radical de-historicisation of the fields of ontology, conceptuality and disciplinarity. This includes the semantic neutering and hyper-abstract re-articulation of the very category, which in IR’s self-perception lends legitimacy to its claim of disciplinary distinctiveness: the international. The article concludes by suggesting that an understanding of Marxism as a historicist social science subverts all calls for the construction of grand theories and, a fortiori, a unitary super-discipline of IHS, premised on a set of universal, space-time indifferent, and abstract categories that hold across the spectrum of world history. In contrast, recovering the historicist credentials of Marxism demands a constant temporalisation and specification of the fields of ontology, agency, conceptuality and disciplinarity. The objective is to lay the foundations for a historicist social science of geopolitics