Edinburgh Napier University

  Traditional approaches to process inquiry in a business context are at times found to be inadequate, polarised by the inability to predict consequential effects of unplanned outcomes. The theorised view in this paper, looks to resolve the issue of cause and effect being interpreted as two individual or dichotomous binary elements, and asks if improvements in inquiry, supported by a figurational approach, exist.

The discussion looks to examine, in a business context, the Eliasian concept of interdependency ties, power balances, unplanned outcomes and game models, and relate these as a new concept alongside traditional methods of process measurement and evaluation. Further, associate the outcomes from this new concept with mechanisms of knowledge transfer and adaptive change, to produce new and insightful data as a composite set of useful analytical elements. We can call these new elements of analysis ‘Figurational Dynamics’.

To achieve this aim we seat accepted principals of knowledge transfer at opposite ends of a conjoined gamut of investigation and view the interface through an interpretive figurational lens. This approach avoids classification of congruence as simply negative/positive or good/bad instances, ordinarily captured by purely metric driven approaches. Utilisation of this new adaptive lens allows incipient themes under investigation to become ultimately more rich, deep and meaningful. This allows output from the analysis to become directly transient with aspects of process innovation such as sequencing, tracking and information.

We further explain the principals behind the approach used to capture data and posit a realist interpretation and analysis of the expected outcomes.