George Herbert Mead (1863–1931)

During his lifetime, George Herbert Mead published more than a hundred critical commentaries, reports, and original articles exploring how consciousness and mind arise in human conduct. Even so, his seminal thinking about the social processes of human experience remains significantly under-utilized in the organizational literature. In this chapter I argue that the synthesis of intersubjectivity and temporality, which Mead achieves by using the notion of sociality, offers an unparalleled access, both theoretically and methodologically, to the dynamics of emergent practice in organizations. In particular, his formulation of human experience as the passage of events, or present moments, emerging from the interplay between reconstructed pasts and imagined futures, invites a radical re-examination of the notion of temporal continuity and change. The chapter also positions Mead’s work in relation to other pragmatist philosophers and the hermeneutic and phenomenological traditions more generally, while also emphasizing the relevance of his ideas to contemporary organizational living.