The Aston Studies have proved a seminal reference point for the development of mainstream organization theory. This essay examines and critiques the metaphysical underpinnings of positivism as well as attempts to show up the inadequacies of other recent alternatives such as epistemological realism for the development of organizational analysis. It maintains that common organizational attributes which positivists and realists claim to discover are in fact mirror images of their own deeply-entrenched thought structures. It therefore proposes that commitment to an alternative process-based becoming ontology opens up the possibilities for rethinking 'organization' as first and fundamentally a process of 'world-making'. The modem world that we find so immediately necessary and familiar is one such outcome of organization and it is the analysis of this logic of organization, rather than the current preoccupations of mainstream organization theory, which will provide truly useful insights to management practitioners and to leaders of society. Understood thus, organizational analysis becomes a form of metaphysical inquiry.
