“Modern management thought was born proclaiming that organizations are the triumph of the imagination. As ‘made and imagined,’ organizations are products of human interaction and social construction rather than some anonymous expression of an underlying natural order. Deceptively simple yet so entirely radical in implication, this insight is still shattering many conventions—one of which is the longstanding conviction that bureaucracy, oligarchy, and other forms of hierarchical domination are inevitable. Today we know this simply is not true.

“Recognizing the symbolic and relationally constructed nature of the organizational universe, we now find a mounting wave of socio-cultural and constructionist research, all of which is converging around one essential and empowering thesis: that there is little about collective action or organization development that is pre-programmed, unilaterally determined, or stimulus bound in any direct physical, economic, material or deep-structured sociological way. Everywhere we look, seemingly immutable ideas about people and organizations are being directly challenged and transformed on an unprecedented scale. The world, quite simply, seems to change as we talk in it.”

David Cooperrider, Frank J. Barrett, and Suresh Srivastva, “Social Construction and Appreciative Inquiry: A Journey in Organizational Theory,” 1995, p. 91.