It is helpful to both academic researchers and managerial practitioners to identify two alternative ways of discursively framing organisational and managerial activities: a systems-control way and a process-relational one. The former derives from modernist and universalistic aspirations to maximise control over human circumstances and does this through encouraging a notion of organisations as large goal-based controllable mechanical systems and individuals as small need-oriented systems. A more useful way of framing organisational realities is to focus instead on the processes of emergence in the patterning of relations between people, organisations and the wider social world. Managerial learning and managerial competence can be enhanced if managers understand the way in which their work contributes to these shaping processes through processes of meaning-making, negotiation, bargaining and the wielding of power.
Organisation theory; management; discourse; process; system; management learning