Organizational artifacts as pre-presentations of things to come

the case of menu development in haute cuisine

Jochen Koch

pp. 277-298

in: Hannes Kramer, Matthias Wenzel (eds), How organizations manage the future, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Abstract

Whereas the temporal mode of an organization's past and present relies on material representations, an organization's future has no material equivalent. Hence, the future of an organization is an ideal but not yet materialized phenomenon. In this chapter, we adopt a process perspective on organizational artifacts, their ongoing production and reproduction. We focus on how an organization's past and present performance is inscribed into an organizational artifact and we explore how this process materializes as a pre-presentation of things to come. In doing so, we explore how performances resonate in artifacts and how artifacts in turn pre-present an organization's future. Our study is based on an in-depth and longitudinal qualitative research design conducted in the field of haute cuisine and focuses on the ongoing development process of the menu as the central artifact.