The social world cannot be understood in the same way as natural and physical worlds. What sets social world apart is meaning. To understand this meaning requires one to recognize the discursive patterns embedded in world-making.
Postmodern thought helps us to see the roots of western metaphysics by privileging becoming over being, change over stability, process over form. Postmodernism is concerned with providing local truths that are normally suppressed by metanarratives rather than explanation per se. The postmodern then is concerned with giving voice and legitimacy to those tacit and unrepresentable forms of knowledge that modern epistemologies depend upon yet overlook in the process of knowledge creation. Its axioms are (Tsoukas, 2005):
- Instead of the traditional emphasis on stability, identity and order postmodern analyses seek to emphasize the Hereclitean primacy accorded to process, flux, formlessness and incessant change. The ontological primacy lies in the becoming of things. It eschews an atomistic thinking.
- The focus on this ‘becoming ontology’ asserts that symbolic representations don’t mirror the going-ons in the world. Theories may be workable, yet not timelessly true.
- Due to this inadequacy of language, events cannot simply be understood in terms of actors’ intentions; yet in terms of embedded contextual experiences and accumulated memories. Surprise and unexpected are the real order of things. A more tentative attitude rather than total control defines its agenda.
- Real world happenings consist of loosely coupled and non-locally defined web of event clusters.
Given this ceaseless process of reality construction, we should appreciate that phenomena are mutually constituted rather than being trapped by certain dualisms . Exploring the discursive patterns might give a clearer sense of the world-making people are engaged in.
