AIMS

Call for papers. Track convened by H. letiche, JL Moriceau et G. Lightfoot.
Surprise is causation that we did not expect or anticipate and/or could not control. In a world ever more ordered by the diktats of an increasingly imperial risk management (Martin 2007; 2015), we seem less and less able to value the unexpected. A classic example from the organization studies canon that has recently become enjoined in controversy turns around how one should best make sense of the Mann Gulch disaster that formed a key exemplar for Weick of the powers of sensemaking and the costs of its breakdown (Weick, 1993, 1996; Basbøll, 2010; Holt & Cornelissen, 2014). For recent forays back into the sources from which Weick draws reveal the potential to situate the source of the disaster not so much in any failure of ‘leadership’ on the part of the “smokejumpers’ in the face of surprising turns in the fire’s development but rather in a ‘conflagration of forces” (Maclean, 1992, cited in Basbøll, 2010), that was “neither material nor social but, simply, infernal” (Basbøll, 2010, p. 89).
Recently object-oriented-ontology (O-O-O) has proposed that objects change, assert attraction on one another, generate time and space around themselves, but never cease to exist. Graham Harman’s example is putting a match to cotton (2005). There is cotton and there is a match, then there is smoldering and smoke, and thereafter there is ash; at all moments there are objects. Objects change and retreat, are transformed and reappear as something else. There is never NO object and there is never an object that is totally given to an observer. For social constructivism, the object is in the eye of the perceiver and ‘surprise’ is a subjective quality. For O-O-O the object is only partially visible or present and always ‘strange’, uncertain and somewhat indeterminate. Weick tries to control or even banish ‘surprise’; O-O-O asserts that objects are always and can only be ‘surprising’.