Abstract
This chapter introduces a handful of innovative ontological ideas about the social world: strategic action fields, assemblages theory, economic and class interests, and recent innovations in organizational sociology. These ideas proceed largely from the actor-centered perspective described in Chapter 1. Recent organizational theories have given additional emphasis to the topic of organizational culture. The theory of strategic action fields holds that organizations are configured around incumbents who are assigned roles and powers that give them both an interest and an ability to maintain the workings of the organization. Power and collaboration play key roles in their construction. The key idea within assemblages theory is that there does not exist a fixed and stable ontology of entities for the social world that proceeds from “atoms” to “molecules” to “materials”. Rather, social formations are contingent assemblages of other complex configurations, and they in turn play roles in other, more extended configurations.
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Little, D. (2020). Intellectual Tools for Understanding Government. In: A New Social Ontology of Government. Foundations of Government and Public Administration. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48923-6_4
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