This book is a collection of seventeen reedited articles and chapters authored or coauthored by Haridimus Tsoukas, originally published between 2009 and 2017, with a foreword by Karl Weick. Hence, it is very likely that you will have read some of these chapters before. But having them nicely bound into one volume makes it clear what an outstanding philosophical oeuvre this man has brought about.

The biography on the personal website of Tsoukas states that he “is not a philosopher but can’t help but see everything from a philosophical point of view.”Footnote ¹ Such is the fate of unhappy engineers, but to think and write scholarly work of such a clarity and consistency in philosophical enquiry is truly rare, whatever one’s background disciplines happen to be.

So, what does Tsoukas’s philosophical enquiry consist of? What does he do? That is easy to summarize: Tsoukas uses process philosophy to question management scholarship. Process philosophy is not only based on the premise that everything is dynamic, it also asserts that the dynamic nature is what is worth studying. Thus, Tsoukas is a process philosopher specializing in the epistemology and axiology of management.

The book is organized into three parts. Part one deals with organization and strategy, through chapters on the ontology of organization, routines, change, strategy, and decision-making. Here is an author who is passionate about organization theory, providing phenomenological accounts of what it is people do when they organize. Tsoukas is equally passionate, yet far less contemplative when he writes about strategy scholarship (chapters 4 and 5). He takes issue with circular definitions and conceptual delineations that are simply too narrow to account for observations of emerging rather than chosen action. For example, Tsoukas refers to the old tautology “management is what managers do” (132), and asks whether strategy is what strategists do, or whether we simply choose to see particular activities as “strategic.” He mentions another example from the literature, where an activity is seen as strategic to the extent that the activity is consequential for the strategic outcomes and survival of a firm. Such circularity gets us nowhere, says Tsoukas. Other definitions Tsoukas finds too narrow because these stipulate too many necessary conditions. For example, if “decision” means “commitment to action,” then how do we take account of situations in which activity occurs without an explicit commitment to action? In all of the chapters, Tsoukas offers processual accounts, but in the strategy chapters, these seem phrased as an “against” rather than helping or clarifying of mainstream thinking.

Tsoukas argues for a paradigm shift in studies about strategy. What Tsoukas sees as the mainstream literature conceives of strategy as a consciously developed analysis and plan. However, empirical studies based on such view leave out a whole range of empirical phenomena, for example, when practitioners talk about strategy-making. It is the “talking about” that Tsoukas is interested in. Thus, what Tsoukas seems to argue is that the mainstream literature is imagining an object X and then looks to reality to find that imagined object X, whereas Tsoukas finds it much more pertinent to listen to reality to hear when X is mentioned, and to then look closer and see what people are exactly doing when they talk about X.

Part two deals with knowledge and reflective judgment. Chapters are on dialogue, reflective practice, leadership, engagement, and metaphors. Tsoukas’s enquiry focuses on the relationality of and in these, and BEQ readers might find the chapters in part two most relevant for business ethics. Of particular interest to me is where Tsoukas describes how conceptual change happens through dialogue (chapter 6). Tsoukas characterizes a dialogue as “productive dialogical exchange” when it has four properties: a) turn by turn an interactional frame is constructed (collaborative emergence); b) as the dialogue proceeds, contributions maintain coherence within the emerging frame but also change it (constrained novelty); c) that process modifies the frame incrementally (incremental emergence); and d) participants attempt to index one another in new ways (indexical creativity). Tsoukas illustrates this with a sequence from a pharmacy to show how variation in routine work can be handled and resolved. Yet it seems to me that those four characteristics could also be used for analyzing how stakeholder conflicts, workplace mediation, or restorative justice after a major scandal can be successful.

Whereas part one ended with chapters that seem to have been motivated by Tsoukas’s despair at so much rubbish (my term), part two ends with a laudation of Gareth Morgan’s work on metaphor. Part three deals with theorizing. Chapters are on reflective theorizing, logic and practical rationality, generalization, singularity, and conjunctive theorizing. In the last chapter, Tsoukas returns to taking stabs at strategic management theories and their poor excuses for failing to integrate ethical considerations.

Had one wanted to write a book from scratch on philosophical organization theory, this would have been an ideal table of contents. Of course, Tsoukas would argue that tables of contents are never conceived of from scratch. The structure of a book emerges during and from the writing of it. Now, this book was written over a span of nine years (at least going with the original publication dates). How did Tsoukas manage to maintain a consistent mode of enquiry throughout those years? Simply by sticking to his guns. He writes that he has two: Heidegger’s phenomenology and Wittgenstein’s language philosophy. I could, however, see a third one: Deweyan pragmatism. Perhaps he hid this third gun in his boot and forgot he was carrying it, but reading through the chapters brought together in this volume, it is clearly there: the illustrations Tsoukas uses are all examples of how practitioners do things and get things done, e.g., creating new knowledge, developing a plan and a vision, solving problems. Always starting in the midst of things rather than from scratch. Fundamental to pragmatism, it seems to me, is that we never do anything without already doing something else. In other words, it is in the action that we start to think about what it is we are doing and how we could do it better. It is precisely that “groundedness” that I find so fascinating about Tsoukas’s enquiry.

So how does Tsoukas’s enquiry proceed? He draws on Wittgenstein to argue that management scholarship about the topic at hand uses too many reified concepts. In other words, we get stuck and stop making sense because we conceive of phenomena as objects (e.g., the example mentioned earlier of studying strategy). He then shows us, drawing on Heidegger, how a process approach allows for an understanding that is closer to the complexity of the phenomena we study, and thus enables us to perform Deweyan reflective practice and reflective theorizing⸺what is it that we do when we change our course, create insights, or solve problems.

Yet Tsoukas’s mastery lies in something more than shooting these three philosophical guns at various management and organization topics. It lies in something that makes him a true philosopher, namely the art of asking the right questions. Some examples:

The phrasing of these questions and their placing in the line of argument made me wonder: Has Socrates been mentoring Tsoukas? Is this the Greek lineage?

Of course, you already knew Tsoukas. He is a famous scholar; well read, well cited. This volume makes clear why. As will be clear from this review, Tsoukas does not address ethical questions directly. He is a process philosopher, not an ethicist. However, in Tsoukas’s work, one cannot distinguish ontology from epistemology and praxiology. That is precisely why I recommend Tsoukas’s work for business ethics scholars. Even those who already know the work brought together in this volume will benefit from obtaining a copy and seeing the oeuvre of this author.