Person-In-Community: Whiteheadian Insights into Community and Institution

Abstract

The philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead differs from most of those that have been influential in the West in its emphasis on process and on internal relations instead of substances and their external relations. For human beings this supports a model of person-in-community instead of the widely influential and highly individualistic and substantialist model of Homo economicus. Communities are societies that are held together by internal relations. The importance of community is widely recognized in organizational studies, but most business decisions are informed chiefly by the substantialist thinking expressed in Homo economicus. To endure and prosper, communities need institutional structures, but these should serve community.

Collective reflexivity in social marketing through ethnographic film-making: The Yolngu story of tobacco in Yirrkala, Australia

“…However, one criticism of collective reflexivity is that it limits an understating of relationality and the process of intercession between structure and agency to reflexive deliberations (Caetano, 2015). However, we agree with Caetano (2015) and Vogler (2016) that this is not a matter of discarding Archer's (2013) idea that collective reflexivity concerns relationality of people, but rather it requires an acknowledgement that understanding reflexivity and social relations may require the integration of Archer's (2013) concepts with other concepts such as process-relational theory (Cobb, 2007;Cooper, 2005) that are concerned with relationality. Our focus in this study is not to address the critiques of Archer's ideas or to study relationality per se.…”

Grown Local: Community Attachment and Market Entries in the Franconian Beer Industry

“…So far we have focused on producers and their attachment to the local community to understand the hindering effect of geographic communities on market entries. However, our view of communities as geographic territories where residents and organizations interact (Marquis & Battilana, 2009) suggests that community inhabitants too have an important effect on entrepreneurship (Cobb, 2007). Residential stability in particular has been found to reinforce the bonds between community members and producers, while it also provides local organizations with a stable reference point for local values, norms, and traditions (see Carroll & Torfason, 2011; Sampson, 2012).…”

Encompassing Stability and Novelty in Organization Studies: An Events-based Approach

“…a relation between events. In the same vein, Cobb (2007) stated that organizational understanding should include thinking of the world as made up of events. Events are here not considered as isolated, but arising out of other events (Cobb, 2007, p. 568).…”

“…Indeed, the inter-relating of events -called "prehension of events" by Whitehead (1920Whitehead ( , 1929 -means that actors act in their present through engagement with past and anticipated events. Consequently, in this approach, mainly rooted in the process philosophies of Whitehead (1920Whitehead ( , 1929Whitehead ( , 1938 and Mead (1932), and in some works in organization studies (Chia, 1999;Chia & King, 1998;Cobb, 2007;Hernes, 2014aHernes, , 2014b, stability is not only related to past and considered as the impact of the past; nor is novelty only related to the present and future and considered as a rupture with the past. Rather, past and future are continually defined and redefined in actual events.…”