"Organizing as Explaining" and the Doing of Managing

Abstract

The metaphor of organizing as explaining embodies a sense of continuity and process that is absent from much organization theory. With this as a guide, attention is focused on managing rather than management and highlights a temporal dimension that is often overlooked. In addition, explaining requires us to develop a different understanding of what more traditional theorists call paradox, which here is called explaining simultaneity. Through the voices of senior executives from large United Kingdom organizations, these concepts are brought to life, and questions are raised of more established approaches to organization theorizing. In this way, the metaphor of explaining takes us towards gestalt approach (in the simple dictionary sense of "organized whole") to understanding processes of organizing.