Process Research in Organizations

Process research in organizations studies how and why things emerge, develop, grow, and terminate over time, treating change as a flow of events rather than a relationship between static variables. Ann Langley's 1999 Academy of Management Review article gave the field a toolkit, laying out seven generic strategies for theorizing from messy, longitudinal process data and weighing their strengths against the goals of accurate, parsimonious, and general theory. Van de Ven and Poole's 1995 article supplied a complementary conceptual map, identifying four basic motors of organizational change — life-cycle, teleology, dialectic, and evolution — that underlie how development unfolds. Langley, Smallman, Tsoukas, and Van de Ven's 2013 editorial consolidated the maturing field of process studies, foregrounding temporality, activity, and flow and clarifying the ontological commitments that distinguish process research from variance research. Together these works define a distinct mode of inquiry centered on sequence, timing, and unfolding.