Although process and temporality are central to all the studies in this issue, they can be viewed from different ontologies of the social world: one a world made of things in which processes represent change in things (grounded in a substantive meta- physics) and the other a world of processes, in which things are reifications of processes (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002) (grounded in process metaphysics). Rescher (1996) traced this distinction back in an- tiquity to the differing philosophies of Democritus and Heraclitus. Democritus pictured all of nature as composed of stable material substances that changed only in their positioning in space and time. From this view, substances exist indepen- dently of other substances, and their underlying