We want to understand organizational process as the temporal making of meanings, but our vocabulary for doing so is predominantly spatial. Some mistakes this has led to in my own research are reviewed, and the hope for a more thoroughly temporal mode of analysis based on an actor’s ongoing narrativization of experience is explored. © 2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. We all secretly venerate the ideal of a language which in the last analysis would deliver us from language by delivering us to things (Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, 1973, p. 4).
Richard J. Boland Jr.