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Organizational Development and the Ontology of Creative Dialectical Evolution

Roland Calori

E.M. Lyon Graduate School of Management, France, calori{at}em-lyon.com

This paper invites organizational theorists to a double stretching, towards philosophy on the one hand and towards practitioners' lay theories on the other. We rely on Henri Bergson's ontology of creative evolution so as to build a `quad-motor' theory explaining the process of development in organizations and to formulate propositions on the relationships between organizational development and the lay ontology of organizational members. Then we illustrate the links between philosophy and practice, and show how the analysis of a narrative by a practitioner (Michel Barthod, Chief Executive of Salomon, a high-growth company, in the 1980s) can elicit his lay ontology, thus making possible future empirical corroborations of the above propositions. This narrative is in line with Bergson's ontology of creative (dialectical) evolution, and also contains the concepts of an integrative framework explaining organizational development. In the third section, inspired by the philosopher, Henri Bergson, and by the practitioner, Michel Barthod, we build such a framework in which becoming and relating are two central intertwined concepts.

Key Words: creative evolution • dialectics • knowledge • ontology • organizational development

Organization, Vol. 9, No. 1, 127-150 (2002)
DOI: 10.1177/1350508402009001352
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