Social magmas and the conventional explanatory pyramid

Starting from the assumptions of determinacy and identity, conventional approaches reduce social and organizational action to exogenous technological competitive and institutional contingencies and to endogenous necessities of functional unity, ascribing to the discursive aspects of action a mediative, reflective-representative ontological status. Using the themes raised in a debate between Brunsson and Löwstedt as an illustration, we explicate the intellectual and practical implications of these assumptions and develop the outlines of an alternative approach across two series of arguments. First, organizational fields of knowledge and practice are objectified-constituted within discursive practices which are articulated-instrumented around the instituted central imaginary significations of a society. Second, the relations between significations, discourses and fields are not identitary but magmatic ones: that is to say, variously determinable within and by discursive practices, but not determined in themselves.