Organizing Beyond Controlling: The Pragmatist Concept Of Inquiry As A Critical Alternative To Control

This article adopts a processual and critical approach to organizing. It questions the tendency to consider "controlling" as an inescapable dimension of the "organizing" process. After defining the distinctive features of the controlling perspective on organizing, we ask whether there may be radical, performative alternatives for the theory and practice of organizing. We then present a longitudinal action research study analyzing the gradual 30-year transformation of a government department into a multinational telecommunications company. It draws on one author's lasting cooperation with the company, to explore problematic situations and potential responses, through the establishment of pluralist communities of inquiry. We suggest that this slow and painful transformation, which caused major financial and workforce morale crises, was characterized by an underground, sometimes invisible but always intense struggle between the controlling perspective and alternative organizing perspectives which met with structural barriers. In the light of this case, we suggest that the pragmatist concept of inquiry provides an exploratory, experimental, participative and transformational organizing perspective, alternative to controlling. The inquiry perspective may also provide the critical performativity school of thought with a promising research topic and open up emancipation and democracy perspectives for the world of organizations.