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 metaphysics)
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 antiquity
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 independently
of other substances, and their underlying