Toward a Theory of an Ontology of Possibility in Organizational Settings - Drawing from the Elusive Essence of and the Sense of Expansiveness in Phelpsian Agency, Less Hierarchical Organizing, and Caring Relationality

With "an ontology of possibility," I point to the mode of engagement that people come to embody when oriented toward an opening future and opening of future from the present, engaging with and exploring beyond the boundaries of established social construction. It is a mode that is inherently involved in entrepreneurial (or any) novelty but also in true collaboration where members do not resort to zero-sum optimization among themselves. I take up the term from Lawrence and Maitlis (2012), who employed it to describe a "belief system" cultivated in caring groups, which "emphasizes the socially constructed nature of both past and present and thus facilitates action and an appreciation of its limits" (p. 641). I hold that the implied mode of engagement is more fundamental and implicitly present in a range of organizational phenomena and theories than what the originating work or organizational scholarship typically considers. The compiling part of the dissertation works toward a way to perceive the organizational premises of an ontology of possibility in organizational settings. It achieves this by articulating and then building on the experiential structure of an ontology of possibility. I begin by elaborating how an ontology of possibility and "caring relationality" that fosters it both involve enduring "not-yet knowing" and embracing of social risk in an uncalculating way that is irreducible and elusive to cognitive choice, even beliefs alone. Consequently, without what I denote as "feeds" for a "sense of expansiveness" beyond a caring group, an ontology of possibility within erodes. I explicate archetypical relations of an organization with its environment that enable such external feeds. Finally, the thesis contends that, internally, which is often a more relevant dimension for members of larger organizations with less direct access to outside feeds, an ontology of possibility and caring relationality are not fostered by any particular set of organizational values or structures but by their unfolding toward also embracing contradictory tenets. The thesis contributes by maturing our conception of an ontology of possibility and developing a perspective on novelty and relations in organizational life that conjoins a phenomenological and an impersonal organizational level of inquiry. The dissertation consists of the compiling theory development about an ontology of possibility and four contributing essays. The first and second essay hypothesize on the role of organizational evolution and values, respectively, in Edmund Phelps' theory of economic dynamism. The third and fourth essay report a multiyear qualitative study on less hierarchical organizing, depicting how, per se, contradicting practices might uphold certain open-endedness in organizational tenets. The compiling theory builds on and elaborates ideas and findings in the four essays into an emergent layer of argumentation and vocabulary beyond the domains of the individual essays.