Organizing, Managing, Designing : Double Meanings, Doings and (New?) Dilemmas

Abstract

This keynote presentation examined some strengths, weaknesses, and above all some ambiguities in the uses and meanings of gerunds and participles, in considering “Organizing, Designing and Managing”, and their overlapping, within current neoliberal times. Principally, gerunds and participles can either invoke agency and agentic action, or can refer to process with less explicit attention to individual agency. Examples of both agentic and process approaches to organizing, managing, and designing are given. The final section addresses dilemmas, possibly new dilemmas, in such approaches, in terms of: the onset of new and/or not so new realities?; the politics and/or the ontology of process itself?; and the local and/or the transnational?