This thesis innovates on existing literature on the Transition movement by relinquishing stock academic definitions of its ends and means, which purportedly spell out what Transition 'is'. In its stead, it approaches Transition as phenomenon, namely as an evolving socio-material formation that proliferates a cultural repertoire to sustain a growing range of concerted everyday activities. This is the difference between an instrumental focus, whereby Transition is reduced to a strategy which is oriented towards an unchanging programmatic definition, and an orientational one; the latter attuned to the contingent process by which a movement expresses form and orientation in emergent fashion. The monograph and the introductory chapter contribute to this task in different ways. Everything Gardens and Other Stories undertakes a rich description of various practical realms of Transition and, to capture the coming into being of a phenomenon, it pays particular attention to its developmental trajectory. This entails focusing on the generative movement of the culture of Transition, as it emerges from the attempt to address embodied disquiets originally elicited by information about peak oil and climate change. That initial focus, however, forms merely a station along a path in which new sources of anxiety find validation and prompt further cultural production. The monograph also describes the tensions arising in the process, as a growing body of discursive and material resources have to negotiate an accommodation, in order to become reciprocally recognisable as participant parts enfolded in a common cultural milieu. The introductory chapter supports this account by fleshing out a methodological paradigm that helps direct attention to the unfolding of a socio-material phenomenon in its dilemmatic moments and continual negotiations. For this purpose, starting from canonical sources in phenomenology, it goes on to situate the 'unfolding' of a phenomenon in the proliferation of entanglements between actors, human and nonhuman. In the 'mattering' of a phenomenon so understood, dilemmatic moments call forth an ethical questioning and an ontological politics immanent to the very process of cultural production. This, it is submitted, is precisely how an orientational focus allows to access Transition as phenomenon, beyond the bounds of academic definitions.

This dissertation studies meetings from a process perspective. Such an approach, which can be labelled ‘process organisation studies’ is promising in that it directs attention to social processes continuously in the making. The thesis builds on the current development in process organisation studies in two ways. The first centres on an elaboration on key assumptions of approaching organisational life from a process perspective. I here bridge process organisation studies with Bakhtin’s work on dialogue into a dialogical becoming perspective. This perspective calls for a distinct way of understanding processes of becoming which makes it possible to explore meeting practices as situated, emerging and relational world-making activities. The second is a comprehensive processual account based on a collaborative field study with two owner families. Organised meetings held in a family that owns a business (or several) has proved to be of importance for family business longevity in that the family members can help to develop strong family relations and a healthy business. In this setting, where people are dealing with that which is often most important to them in life, such as their identity, work, family relationships and future wealth, a process approach is useful since it helps to understand the emotionally loaded, complex and intertwined issues at stake.What emerges as central in understanding movement and flow is the need to understand the here and now moments in meetings. I refer to these moments as ‘living moments’ as a reminder of the once-occurring, unique and momentary transformation that can take place between people in such encounters. Thus, the living moment is the moment of movement.