Page 71 - Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

48 Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

Organizing: Fitting Together of Lines of Activities and Actions
Through the processes of interaction, the actors construct some results: the
interaction means organizing and creating the firm, and the actors create a
moving picture of and a relation to the experiential space. The actors create
intersubjective moving pictures of the reality, which is an organizational
paradigm.

Organizing: Dynamism of the Firm
The actors create over time something we define and call a “firm.” The pro-
cesses that occur can be understood as organizing, which not only focuses
upon action and interaction but also on moving pictures of reality and
intersubjectivity.
Essentially, the firm can be understood as overlapping interactions. The
actors create the firm through interactions, but “it” has also an influence upon
them through their interpretation of “it.” This dialectical perspective appears
from the view that the firm only exists through the interactions between the
actors and thus is viewed as a corollary of these interactions. Simultaneously,
the organization is historically to the individual member, but the individual is
confronted with an already existing organizational everyday of life, which sets
the institutional parameters for his self-development. Self and organization
thus develop together and because of each other in a dialectical process of
mutual transformation (Singelmann, 1972, p. 415; see also Mead, 1934;
Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Benson, 1977; Arbnor and Bjerke, 1981/1997).
The actors have to live with and exist with uncertainty and ambiguity. In
other words, the way in which the actors handle themselves is in itself
uncertain and exposed to many different interpretations and understandings.
To reach security, the actors attempt to organize their activities.
Organizing means assembling the actions and should be seen in relation to
interpretation and understanding by the actors. The actors form their actions so
as obtain information and experiences that give meanings to the organizational
world. This is organized by the actors in an attempt to construct an under-
standing. In the organizing the dependent actions are oriented toward
removing contradictions and uncertainty: the actors seek to define and make
sense in their situation, and thus they both create the firm and the experiential
space. Organizing is to be seen as a social, meaning-making process in which
order and disorder are in constant tension with one another, and wherein
unpredictability is shaped and “managed.” The raw materials of organizing are
people, their beliefs, actions, and their shared meanings that are in constant
motion (see Sims et al., 1993, p. 9).
There is a similarity between the phenomenological meanings of the
practical activity of organizing and theorizingdthe act of sense-making is in
fact the central feature of both. Theorizing is most fundamentally an activity of