Fields, Mobilization, and Switching as Key Concepts to Understand the Role of Extended Organizations in Transformation Processes

When you look at transformation processes through the lens of organizational sociology, you discover some surprising things: opportunities to explore, examine, and practice a possible future that could result from a transformation often exhibit relevant organizational characteristics without being organizations in the traditional sense. This is because they exhibit only certain basic characteristics of organizations, while others, for example formal membership, are often missing. In order to adequately capture this constellation, we envisage a strictly process-sociological and relational perspective that views organizational phenomena as extending far beyond traditional concepts of organizational boundaries and leverage processes in the organizational environment. We see a pronounced trend in contemporary society to infect environmental processes with organizational objectives. We are interested in how processes of transformation are organized, how dynamics of change are built up, what intentions are involved, and which (un-)intended consequences prevail. To analyse transformations in this way, we see the need to consider and explain the actual relational dynamics between agents and contexts, between static and dynamic moments and between latent and manifest structures in more detail.