Dissertation Summary and Reflections

The motivation for the writing of this dissertation initially arose from the willingness to accomplish three goals as formulated in subchapter 1.4: One of the goals (i.e., goal #2) was to discuss the epistemological position of process thought and make the case for radical instead of naive constructivism thereby making a critical contribution to process thinking in organization studies in general with reference to the PROS (2011) call for papers. It was shown that many process writers – both in philosophy and in OMT – adhere to a sociological, mechanistic, and objectivist understanding of constructivism in their epistemological underpinnings which consequently remain bound to a realist worldview. However, it is precisely this latter assumption which constructivism, understood as a radical epistemological position, seeks to provide an alternative for. Consequently, the dissertation argued that process thought needs to move from its naive/trivial to a rather radical understanding of constructivism in order to fully exploit the epistemological potential of the latter which lays in the possibility of dissolving the realist assumption.