What’s next? (Un)learning nothingness and non-events in management education

Most management and organization theories focus on the full existence and finitude of things. They deal with fullness and the full happening of things. Both organizing and managing mean fully producing something, doing something, or giving value to something. A good manager should follow what is happening and, even better, make things fully happen. But in everyday life, our managerial capitalism makes the world more and more impatient, problematic and incomplete, full of more and more holes, interruptions and voids that permeate experience. This is true emotionally (as frustration), narratively (as cliffhangers and suspense) and materially (as creative destruction scars our earth). In this essay for ML’s 55th anniversary, I argue for a process-oriented perspective on managerial emptiness and incompleteness based on three core interwoven negative processes–representation, narration and materialization. I explain how each of these processes contributes to a nexus of incompleting events at the heart of managerial processes. Paradoxically, I also suggest that different kinds of emptiness and incompleteness might be part of a more resonant experience of the world. Embracing patience, waiting, deep letting go, and the nuanced exploration of non-events within events could foster what Whitehead called a ‘culture of possibilities’. This perspective on possibilities – considering what might have been and what might yet be – could lead to a more harmonious relationship with nature. Finally, I encourage business schools and the corporate world to (un)learn nothingness and non-events in the context of the negative ontology discussed here.