Search is the watchword of the information age.  Whereas the steam engine, the electrical turbine, the internal combustion engine, and the jet engine propelled the industrial economy, search engines power the economy of information.  Search is the process that best exemplifies the challenges of contemporary organization.  Yet, ironically, those challenges cannot be solved by the search technologies that are transforming how we work, how we shop, and even how we locate ourselves in social and physical space.  The more challenging type of search is when you don’t know what you’re looking for but will recognize it when you find it.

Academics are familiar with the process.  In fact, to distinguish it from the search for the already known, we have a ready term: research.  In other fields, the process goes by a different name: innovation.   John Dewey, one of the founders of the Pragmatist school of American philosophy, used another term: inquiry.  My presentation starts from Dewey’s observations that inquiry differs from problem solving, that it is collaborative, and that it begins with perplexing, even troubling, situations.    

Organizations that seek to generate productive, perplexing situations can work from this basic starting point.  Instead of enforcing a single principle of evaluation as the only legitimate framework, they recognize that it is legitimate to articulate alternative conceptions of what’s valuable, what’s worthy, what counts.  Such organizations have heterogeneous criteria of organizational “goods.”  To signal that this organizational form is a mode of governance that differs from a hierarchy of command and a conceptual hierarchy of cognitive categories, I refer to it as a heterarchy.  As my case ethnographies demonstrate, heterarchies are cognitive ecologies that facilitate the work of reflective cognition.

Where the organizational environment is turbulent and there is uncertainty about what might constitute a resource under changed conditions, contending frameworks of what is a resource, of what is valuable, can themselves be a valuable organizational resource.  Entrepreneurship then, in this view, exploits uncertainty.  Not the property of an individual personality but, instead, the function of an organizational form, entrepreneurship is the ability to keep multiple principles of evaluation in play and to benefit from that productive friction.