Rites of passage: Organization as an excess of flows

Airports have been conceptualized as the archetypal ‘space of flows’ in an emerging network-based global economy that values process, speed, improvisation, and organizational flexibility. This article seeks to extend the work of process theory in organization studies where ‘organization’ is increasingly understood as the (precarious) appropriation of order out of disorder. The research drawn upon here was primarily concerned with the role that information and communication technologies (ICTs) play in the creation and reproduction of structures of order and signification that facilitate processual efficiency and ‘flow’. In this paper, we draw upon an ongoing study at Fullton International Airport to study how contemporary information systems partake in the development of new kinds of knowledge(s) and practices that in turn place particular demands on various participants to produce and maintain organization as a genre-defying ‘sociotechnical imbroglio’. We find that different and often-incompatible modes of ordering emerge, generating an excess of flow that can be traced through a whole series of subjects, objects and their various ‘virtual-real’ combinations. In the detail of the mundane and practical accomplishment of organization we discover an over-determined range of performances of people and objects that makes management a difficult and precarious task.