Ann L Cunliffe

Professor of Organization Studies

University of Leeds, UK

The Embedded Nature of Leadership, Relationality and Ethics

How might we start thinking about leadership differently? I suggest we need to go back to the fundamental ontological questions about the nature of social reality and who we are in the world.  If we begin to think about everyday life as intersubjective, then leadership is embodied in who we are and embedded in our everyday conversations and interactions with others. I will propose that this form of leadership foregrounds relationality and the need to make morally-informed judgments through a form of ethics I have called relational integrity. We will explore what this might look like in practice and the consequences for leadership education.

You can go the University of Hertfordshire booking page here: http://tinyurl.com/crm734w

This is just to remind those of you interested in coming to the 2013 Complexity and Management Conference that there are just a few days left before the early bird discount expires on Friday 26th April.

You can find a copy of the agenda for the three days here: CMC June 2013.

And you can go the University of Hertfordshire booking page here: http://tinyurl.com/crm734w

Managers as hired hands, business schools in hock to corporations

Khurana takes a historical sweep, both wide and deep, of the relationship between management and the academy. He describes the way that management struggled to be accepted as an academic discipline in American universities more than a century ago when the idea of starting management courses was met with a good degree of scepticism from academics and business people alike. The initiative to start management courses in the academy reflected an aspiration amongst some business leaders and managers for the same respect and recognition afforded other groups of professionals. Khurana understands this project of the professionalization of management as a means to develop the discipline and combine a mastery of a specific body of knowledge as well as to develop particular formal and informal codes of behaviour, and an ideal of service, as with any other profession.

After many decades, two major developments radically altered the emerging project of management as an academic discipline, Khurana argues, and subverted the idea that managers have broader social responsibilities. The first development arose from some recommendations to raise the standards of management pedagogy initiated by the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, and the second event, almost coterminous with the first, was the ascendancy of neo-liberal economics and the emergence of investor capitalism.

Both the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation introduced a range of recommendations that management pedagogy needed to be more systematic and scientifically grounded based on their experience of running summer schools for business school academics. The appeal was to management as science, which recommended methods of disciplining what managers paid attention to based in the thinking of the natural sciences . Khurana has no particular difficulty with increasing the standards in business schools, except to point out that it had unintended consequences. It made it easier for economics to become the foundational discipline for the teaching of management in business schools, so that the kind of economics taught would obviously have a big bearing on how managers understood their role.

Meanwhile, the rise of monetarist economics in the 60s and 70s gave rise to enormous pressure to liberalise markets and make capitalism more dynamic, after Hayek. Company progress needed to be more hard-headed and demonstrably profitable. One manifestation of this way of thinking was the notion that the most reliable way of measuring organisational success was by increased company value, and thus the return to shareholders. The wider concerns of management social responsibility, with the manager as long-term caretaker of assets, employees and the broader social fabric, quickly began to be seen as rather soft and woolly minded. From the neo-liberal perspective, it was not only government regulation that impeded capitalist development, it was management as a profession, if management was taken to mean too much managerial autonomy and too many foci of attention. As the shareholders’ principal agent, the manager needed to concentrate much harder on making a good return to investors. Quantification and economic measures became a way of disciplining managerial performance on financial return alone.

Khurana understands both events to have been very subversive of the broader definition of management as a profession which continued to develop until the late 50s, and then became radically undermined. It was no longer reliable caretakers that the American economy needed according to the new orthodoxy, but swashbuckling iconoclastic champions of change. In the academic literature a distinction began to be made between transactional managers and transformational leaders, reintroducing Weber’s concept of charismatic authority, a distinction which persists to this day. And it is during this period of time that much closer links were made between the fortunes of top managers and the increase in value of companies, when senior managers began to be rewarded with stock options and bonuses linked to organisational performance. Broader notions of public responsibility took second place to concepts of individual utility maximisation. For Khurana the teaching of management became less about professional ideals, and more about turning out hired hands, mercenaries who would try to maximise in the short-term for huge personal reward.

Khurana has been deeply critical of the ways in which American business schools have surrendered their autonomy and academic independence to service the needs of large corporations. They continue to proliferate leadership programmes despite the fact that the concept:

…remains without either a widely accepted theoretical framework or a cumulative empirical understanding leading to a usable body of knowledge. Moreover, the probability that leadership studies will make significant strides in developing a fundamental knowledge base is fairly low. (2007: 357).

Leadership in the public sector

Martin and Learmonth note the way that the discourse of leadership, now some three decades old, has also captured and colonised the public sector. They argue that in the NHS, their object of study in this article, it is widely accepted as being an empirically distinct entity which is axiomatically good both for individuals and for organisations. It is the new panacea. The authors argue that they are less interested in what leadership is, however, and more interested in what it does. Also using a historical perspective, they chart the way that managers in the NHS used to denigrate the idea of administration as opposed to management, and now are scathing about management as distinct from leadership. Martin and Learmonth note the way that the discourse of leadership shapes people’s identities and self-esteem in their narratives about their own professional development.

In the article, referenced below, the authors point out how the concept of leadership has become both pervasive and distributed in the NHS, particularly during periods of constant ‘reform’. For example, they note that during a recent consultation on change a whole variety of stakeholders, managers, front line clinicians, patients, and the broader community were all described in government documents as having exercised ‘leadership’ in discussing changes to the service, which in the end are decided by central government. The appeal to leadership, they argue, could also be understood as a form of co-optation: despite the claim that decisions about the direction and shape of the NHS have been made participatively and in a distributed manner, the service has never been more centralised. Although it is claimed that everyone has been exercising ‘leadership’ the general nature of the changes are sketched out in advance. If everyone is a leader, then who is following? Has the concept become so flexible and extended that it has become meaningless, they ask?

Extending the idea of the appeal to leadership as a form of identity manipulation and co-option, the authors point out how some senior clinicians, usually relatively sceptical of notions of management and administration, have been more susceptible to taking a ‘leadership role’ in promoting government changes. The suggestion here is that the ability to call oneself a leader is an attractive self-narrative and both material and symbolic advantages accrue to those willing to identify with the discourse of leadership, which makes the process of marketising the NHS easier.

Leadership as critical performativity

Alvesson and Spicer identify three schools of leadership scholarship. By far the biggest tradition is what they call functionalist research, of which they make the critique as Martin and Learmonth: that leadership is understood as a distinct and coherent concept.

The second approach they consider interpretivist, which is concerned with the way that leaders attempt to frame and define the reality of others, and may understand leadership as a language game. The interpretivist school is interested in the way that leadership is constructed through processes of inter-subjective understanding but may, according to Alvesson and Spicer, be less interested in theories of power and domination. Interpretive studies are less concerned with underpinning social structures, but, rather, are aimed at getting close to meanings, experience and language.

Their own perspective, critical management studies (CMS), takes an interest in interpretations, but also how patterns of power and domination work out in practice. CMS tries to denaturalise leadership as a concept and tries to break away from attempts to optimise it. The authors are then reflexive about CMS reflexivity by critiquing the way that it can sometimes extend into a kind of anti-leadership discourse. This has a number of disadvantages, they argue: it can overestimate the power of leaders and the leadership discourse, it can lead managers caught up in this discourse feeling attacked, and it fails to recognise that subversive activity which challenges dominant leadership concepts can also demonstrate forms of leadership. According to the authors, not all attempts to exercise power in organisations can be deemed leadership, and not all forms of leadership are necessarily oppressive. Complex organisations involve many forms of control, and sometimes these are necessary.

In offering the concept of critical performativity, Alvesson and Spicer are attempting to make the critique of leadership more nuanced and more helpful to those who are seriously struggling with it. Rather than trying to optimise leadership, they are trying to improve the critique of leadership. They understand that critical engagement with the notion of leadership involves a struggle and ongoing discussions about the virtues and vices of the exercise of authority in the workplace. They are trying to offer intellectual support to critical judgement in this deliberative process.

Some similarities in the three critiques

In each of the three critiques of the current and ubiquitous leadership discourse we can notice some similarities of thinking which I will identify and add my own interpretation, giving the critiques an extra turn:

• Each of the three draws attention to the coincidence of the leadership discourse with the improved power positions of certain groups in society. In other words, it allows and disallows particular ways of proposing and disposing of organisations. Changes of discourse also reflect changes in figurations of power, which can lead to very widespread economic and social changes.

• That things have not always been as they are, nor need they have been – the rise of managerialism and then ‘leaderism’ emerged through the interplay of intentions of particular groups of people aspiring to recognition, status, reward and privilege, at particular times in history. The success of otherwise of certain ways of thinking depend on other movements in society and the way they reinforce or undermine each other. And sometimes social trends can go into reverse and bring about the opposite of what was originally intended. So, if we are to follow Khurana’s exposition, managers can change over time from aspiring to having broad social recognition for their professional and academic knowledge combined with an ideal of service, to becoming, in Khurana’s terms ‘hired hands’ and committed much more explicitly to maximizing shareholder value and through this increasing their own personal gain.

• Current trends will not inevitably continue the way they are, just as previous trends have changed over time – forms of social dominance also call out rebellion and subversion, which are more or less effective. In the 21^st century we are beginning to experience nascent resistance, in the form of popular protest and shareholder revolts, to what have become taken for granted assumptions about the heroic and charismatic legitimacy of some high profile leaders and managers. It is too early to tell whether this will be a lasting phenomenon.

• Ways of speaking, discourse, do not just represent social reality, but affect and create social reality.

• There is nowhere to stand outside the discourse –the invitation to become a leader is an attractive proposition which shapes identities and the way people understand themselves. If we are to be helpful in further developing a critique of the leadership discourse we need to support managers to develop nuanced insights into their daily reality, grounded in their experience and in ours.

If you are interested in hearing Professor Ann Cunliffe explain her research into relational leadership, and in exploring the perspective of complex responsive processes of relating by participating in lively discussions about your experience in organisations you can book for the conference here: http://tinyurl.com/crm734w

As usual, there is a discount of £50 for early-bird bookers up till April 26th.

We look forward to seeing you there.

In this year’s Complexity and Management Conference we will be calling into question this blind faith ubiquitously expressed in the notion of leaders and leadership. Some of the topics we may find ourselves discussing are whether the  assumption that leadership is distinct for management really holds; whether the necessary exercise of authority in organisations can always be understood in terms of what leaders are doing; whether the concept of leadership has been so widely stretched and differentiated (servant leadership, distributed leadership, self-leadership, leadership and followership, even upwards leadership) that it has become meaningless and unhelpful. Because it is so widely spoken about, yet so little understood,  it becomes a very important topic for critical reflection.

From the perspective of complex responsive processes, and from the insights offered by our guest speaker, Professor Ann Cunliffe of Leeds University, we will be trying to understand leadership as a highly social phenomenon co-created by people as they negotiate how to go on together.

The conference attracts a wide diversity of participants every year: academics from other institutions, consultants and managers, as well as graduates and current students from the Doctor of Management programme.

If you would like to book for the conference the payment page at the University of Hertfordshire site is now open and can be accessed here: http://tinyurl.com/crm734w

As usual, there is a discount of £50 for early-bird bookers up till April 26th.

We look forward to seeing you there.

• Trust as an optimistic individual expectation, focusing on expectations that others will perform in competent and morally correct ways.
• Trust as an interpersonal relation, focusing on the dependence of the trustors on the trustees to respect the trustors’ interests. The relationship is one of vulnerability for the trustor.
• Trust as a rational decision to  do with protecting one’s interests made after risk analysis or a calculation in terms of economic transactions costs (which I will not cover in this note).
• Trust and social structure.

Views on trust to be found in the management and organizational literature[ii]

A brief scan of how many management consultants refer to trust reveals that they view trust as the ability of people to be open and honest based on the belief that others are competent, open, honest, reliable, and committed to common goals, norms and values. Trust means confidence in the integrity, agenda, and capabilities of others, as well as their track records based on past actions. Trust is of importance to organizations because it is the basis of cooperation, which makes it more possible for employees to do more, so increasing efficiency and decreasing cost. Little or no trust creates a hostile, toxic work environment where productivity is limited and people cannot live up to good values. Building, developing and repairing trust is thought by many management consultants to be largely the job of the leader. To build trust, leaders must carry out their obligations and display competent performance that fulfils expectations based on a track record of achieving results. They must show integrity, consistency, honesty and make sure that their word is as good as gold, as well as developing positive relationships with workers. People need to have leaders who do right by them, not leaders they need to second guess. The leader needs to hold others accountable, establish boundaries, build a learning organization, practice tough love, walk the talk, and practice high touch.

Turning to a more academic view, for example, that of Robert Hurley, professor at Fordham University, we find that he regards trust as a form of social capital which enhances cooperation across organisations.[iii] For him, drawing on the large literature on trust in organizations, trust is ‘a willingness to make yourself vulnerable to someone else, based on positive expectations that the other person will either serve your interests or at least not hinder them’.[iv]  Trust is confident reliance on others and it is a decision that people make, one which they sometimes get wrong through a failure to understand the nature of trust. Getting it wrong has something to do with an inability to explain in clear, rational terms what trust is and instead rely on emotions and gut feelings which often come to outweigh the data. He presents a spectrum stretching from distrust, the suspicion zone where cooperation and commitment is low and anxiety high, to trust, where people flourish with feelings of commitment and comfort. He sets out the trust decision process which is activated when uncertainty and vulnerability are high – when outcomes are predictable there is no need for trust. The trust decision process is one where individuals make rational decisions about trusting another in a particular context. He distinguishes between relational trust which is interpersonal and organizational and system trust which is understood from an impersonal perspective and he provides a model to assess basic trust in people, teams and organizations. The model consists of three trustor factors (risk tolerance, adjustment and power) and seven situational factors (security, similarities, interests, benevolent concern, capability, predictability/integrity, and communication). The model enables people to identify where to apply effort to build trust through rational processes of identifying who the trustors and trustees are and targeting relationships where trust is needed. It involves carefully defining who the stakeholders are and conducting a thorough analysis of trust. The competencies required for building trust are a mindset of clinical pragmatism rather than emotion and a communication skill set enabling the conduct of difficult conversations. Leaders play a major role through showing care for others and communicating in straightforward, open ways so as to encourage others to be open too.

A brief scan of management journal papers by academics reveals claims that participation in decision making, feedback from and to employees, and empowerment of employees lead to increased interpersonal trust between supervisors and employees. These trust-building practices between supervisors and workers can lead to increased productivity and strengthened organizational commitment. It is often claimed that general trust evolves from a pattern of careful, rational thinking (cognitive-based) coupled with an examination of one’s feelings, instincts and intuition (affect-based). Generalized trust, which is an ideological belief about the trustworthiness of others in general, precedes institution-building and serves as a form of social capital.

In summary, it can be seen that the management and organisational literature primarily views trust as the belief and confidence individuals have in other individuals and also in other people in general. Trust, therefore is being understood from the point of view of personal expectations and interpersonal relations, generally making little reference to trust in terms of social structure and even when they do, as in generalised trust, it is still the role of leaders to build trust. There is a tendency to talk about trust as a relationship between managers / leaders and employees, rather than as general social interaction involving everyone. There is also a tendency to focus on individuals even when taking a relational view and to think of trust as either a rational process ideally excluding emotion or combing rational process with rather idealised emotions of a ‘good’ kind. Finally, as with almost with everything else in a largely managerialist literature, it is the role of the leader to build trust.

Views on trust to be found in the literature of sociology

The discipline of sociology takes a very different view of trust to that found in the dominant management discourse. Instead of focusing on individuals and their interpersonal relations, we find that attention is focused on social structure. For example, Piotr Sztomka, an academic sociologist, developed an influential sociological theory of trust based on his view of society, which he holds in common with commentator Francis Fukuyama[v] and sociologist Barbara Misztal,[vi] as a coalition of interests and moral bonds. Social ties are maintained not only by rational calculations around interests but also, more importantly, by ethical responsibilities. Common moral obligations define a group, an ‘us’, characterised by belonging, trust, responsibility and duties to others. The basic components of a moral community are trust as the expectation we have that others will conduct themselves towards ourselves in a virtuous manner; loyalty is defined as the obligation to refrain from breaching the trust others have in us; and solidarity which is caring for the interests of others in the sense of being prepared to take action on their behalf even when it conflicts with our own interests. So instead of treating trust as a personal attitude, the sociological view sees it as a trait of interpersonal relationships which reflect social structures. As society becomes more complex, uncertain and risky trust becomes more and more important. When we can predict with certainty (e.g. the sun will set at a particular time) then there is no need for trust. When we cannot predict with certainty we have to rely on trust and trust relates to people not objects. Trust is linked with uncertainty and the uncontrollability of the future because when we cannot predict the actions of others we have to rely on trust – trust is a bet about the future contingent actions of others. Trust is based on theories about how others will act and it makes the future relatively more certain and controllable.  Sztompka argues for moving from the sharp distinction between interpersonal trust, a face-to-face form of trust in which we undertake mutual commitments to those we know, and social trust when we do not know the others involved. Instead, like Fukuyama,[vii] he thinks in terms of expanding concentric circles of trust. The most abstract form of trust is that of trusting the social system, the social order, the regime in much the same way as Giddens[viii] does. Trust is more than a personal disposition or a rational choice; it is a relationship, a cultural rule. He argues that trust is neither intrinsically good nor bad.

Sztomka argues that:

The process of the emergence of trust is just an instance of a more general process through which cultures, social structures, normative systems, institutions, organizations and all other macro-social entities come to be shaped and crystallized.[ix]

The positive experiences of confirmed trust generate a culture of trust while negative experiences of breached trust generate a culture of mistrust. Sztompka identifies five macro-societal factors which are conducive to a culture of trust:

• Normative coherence, by which he means coherent laws, moralities and customs which make social life more secure, orderly and predictable.
• The stability of the social order by which he means the persistent, continuous and long lasting networks of groups, associations, institutions, organizations and regimes.
• The transparency of the social organization by which he means the availability of information about the functioning, efficiency, and achievements which create feelings of security.
• Familiarity of the environment in which people undertake their actions.
• The accountability of other people and institutions.

Barbara Misztal[x], another sociologist well known in the area of trust, conceptualises trust as the

… routine background to everyday interaction through which the predictability, legibility and reliability of collective order is sustained, while the perception of its complexity and uncertainty is restricted.’[xi]

She refers to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus which is systems of durable, transposable dispositions and so the structuring mechanism of trust.

We can see how sociologists regard trust as much more than personal expectations or interpersonal relationships and the much more is that trust is a quality that emerges in ongoing social interactions and as such cannot be designed by any individual or group of individuals. They move from rational choices of individuals to believe and have confidence in others to expectations in general, loyalty and solidarity. Instead of being an outcome of a rational decision, trust emerges in social interaction. From this perspective, trust is processes of relating which shape and are at the same time shaped by the habitus, that is, the world of habit in which we live. However, this literature does recognise personal and relational levels of trust in the same way as the organisational literature does.

Trust and mistrust

From time to management writers discussing trust mention its opposite, namely, mistrust or distrust. It is taken to be the role of leaders to move an organisation from states of mistrust, and the suspicion they generate, to those of trust. The sociologists have more to say about mistrust but I want to draw attention to the positive aspects of mistrust and point to the negative aspects of trust. There is a widespread view from all perspectives that trust enhances cooperation and it arises when people are committed to the same laws, morals and customs so establishing stable social orders which make the actions of others more predictable. The management writers also link these conditions to higher productivity, greater efficiency and lower costs. However, these very conditions of stability and greater predictability are not conducive to change. Social life is both stable and unstable at the same time and because of this there can never be an ongoing uniformity of trust. Different ideologies, different identities and differences in power relations will always generate conflict and so instability that generates mistrust. An important insight provided by the complexity sciences is that it is only when agents differ from each other and pursue different strategies that patterns of relationships and activities can evolve. High degrees of continuing trust would trap a group in a highly repetitive stuck state in which doing anything creative or innovative would be extremely difficult. It is only when people differ from each other that they can generate creativity but such difference is bound the generate mistrust as well. In organisational terms this means that mistrust, distrust and suspicion are as important as trust, commitment and belief in others. To go even further, it is clear that trust has a dark side which becomes evident when we reflect on the term ‘blind trust’. Blind trust is a striking feature of destructive cults where members have blind faith in one leader or even some idea. Cults, inevitably characterised by blind trust, lead people to kill those who fail to conform and in the end they are even prepared to kill themselves rather than abandon the cult.

The points I have been making in the above paragraph are illuminated by a provocative paper about ‘a stupidity-based theory of organizations’ developed by the critical management writers Mats Alvesson and Andre Spicer.[xii]

Organisational stupidity

In developing ideas around stupidity in organizations Alvesson and Spicer are reacting to the relentlessly positive interpretation of knowledge creating organizations, smart organizations and the repeated prescriptions to upgrade knowledge capabilities in today’s competitive world of knowledge-intensive activities. A taken-for-granted, grandiose picture is painted of organizations whose members strive to be smart and increase their knowledge in the interests of their organizations. In the actual experience of people in organizations this idealised picture is frequently far from what organizational members are doing. To capture what people are frequently doing the authors propose the concept of ‘functional stupidity’ in organizations. They define stupidity as processes of inability or unwillingness to process knowledge reflected in a lack of:

reflexivity, that is, inquiry into what people are actually doing and how they have come to do it in the way they do. The result is that people do not question dominant beliefs but simply take all the rules, routines and norms as given, natural and good;

• justification, that is, demanding reasons and explanations. The result is that people do not examine take-for-granted ways of acting but simply act out conformity;
• substantive reasoning, that is, inquiring into what the ends to be achieved are. The consequence is that people simply apply instrumental reasoning in myopic ways.

Stupidity is not due to a lack of knowledge, which is ignorance, and it may not be due to a lack of intelligence; it is due more to an inability or unwillingness to process knowledge in a particular situation at a particular time. Functional stupidity is organizationally-supported stupidity. In other words, the culture or habitus of an organization may be such as to block inquiry and confine the use of intellectual resources to a narrow range of topics. Members of organizations usually know what it is safe to say in the ‘public transcripts’ and what must be muttered quietly in the ‘hidden transcripts’.[xiii] Alvesson and Spicer argue that functional stupidity is not necessarily negative. A habitus which blocks inquiry and reflection spares members from experiencing the conflict, friction and doubt that these processes generate and creates instead a climate of certainty and unquestioned belief in the organization’s leaders. This can be very beneficial in terms of the smooth functioning of the organization and the progression of members’ careers but, of course, the price being paid for this is the trapping of organizational members in patterns of thinking that become increasingly ineffective as the world changes and people find that they are having to adapt and take actions which may be countercultural. Countercultural actions lead to a dissonance in members’ experience of what they find themselves doing and what they are supposed to be doing. This dissonance could provoke reflexivity. Returning to the positive aspects of functional stupidity, the authors explain how processes of functional stupidity remove contradictory experiences for people and enable them to maintain a positive worldview. These processes create the belief that managers are sincere and that they know what they are doing; both beliefs are thought to be beneficial for the organisation.

In other words functional stupidity has the same consequences as trust. Trust is often defined in popular management literature as confidence in the integrity and ability of others, particularly managers and leaders, and development and encouragement of trust is taken to be the job of the leaders. This literature presents prescriptions for developing trust which call for openness and honesty between organizational members. In other words, the management literature suggests that trust will be developed if people act in ways which are not functionally stupid. The concept of functional stupidity therefore serves the useful purpose of making us aware that trust is not simply good, a quality to be secured by open dialogue and communal commitment to honesty and reliability. Trust, as confidence in leaders and others, can be developed, for a time at least, by processes which are the exact opposite of openness and honesty. So how does functional stupidity constitute trust?

Alvesson and Spicer point to how stupidity management and stupidity self-management create the conditions of confidence which is normally taken to be trust.

In sum, stupidity management involves a wide range of actors seeking to restrict and distort communicative action through the use of power. This can occur through direct interventions, agenda setting, propagating broader ideological beliefs, and creating subject positions.[xiv]

Some of the ways in which managers and leaders restrict communication are by asserting that employees should only criticise if they have a better suggestion and asserting an ideology in which people are required to be positive and not complain. Stupidity management constrains individuals from using their cognitive capacities in processes that amount to stupidity self-management.

Negative aspects of organisational life, including doubts about the meaningfulness of work and production, are marginalized. This encourages a relatively coherent and positive self-narrative that generates a sense of faith and optimism on the part of organizational members. It means also that individuals are likely to avoid interaction and communication when there are doubts or critique, or when justifications are called for. This ultimately creates a sense of certainty and consistency.

It is striking how closely the definitions of stupidity management and stupidity self-management are to the most commonly found definitions of trust but the way in which trust is achieved is the direct opposite of that proposed in the dominant management discussion. The dominant discourse calls for openness as the means for generating trust but the concept of organisational stupidity points to how these conditions of openness are just as likely to produce the effects of mistrust while refusing to be open and to think could well generate conditions usually claimed for trust.

Complex responsive processes of trust and mistrust

In terms of the theory of complex responsive processes both trust, which can take the form of organisational stupidity or a cult, and mistrust, which can lead to social breakdown, are patterns of interaction emerging across a population. As with all other population-wide patterns of relating, emerging patterns of trust and mistrust arise in many, many local interactions. Such local interactions take the form of conversation, figurations of power relations expressed in the dynamics of inclusion, exclusion and identity formation, and ideologically based intentions and choices. These responsive processes are expressed in ordinary everyday organisational politics which is the way in which get done everything we do. It is in these political activities that we make practical judgments, make both useful and foolish decisions, exercise both insightful reflexivity and organisational stupidity, act selfishly and altruistically, express emotions and defend against anxiety.  All of these complex responsive processes of local interaction are formed by the habitus while at the same time they form the habitus. The habitus is the evolving world of habit in which we live. Habitus and related concepts of game, social background, lifeworld, generalised other, social object, culture and social structure are dynamic phenomena in which continuity, stability, tradition and social order are continually iterated in somewhat repetitive ways but also always, at the same time, in slightly different ways which have the potential for escalating as creativity, change, instability, disruption and social disorder. Trust and mistrust are key patterns of relationship in these dynamic social processes and we all participate in their emergence through our ways of relating to each other. Leaders, toward whom power ratios are always titled, have relatively more impact on our ways of relating because they are more powerful, more visible and have particular symbolic importance for us. However, such impact may turn out to be beneficial or highly destructive and no matter how powerful no leader can simply create a culture of trust.

The theory of complex responsive processes draws on the views of George Herbert Mead and Norbert Elias to move away from the ideas of individuals, groups, organisations and societies being at different levels. The distinction made in both the management and sociological literature between individual, relational and general trust therefore fades away. Instead we have Elias’ concept of a society of interdependent individuals where the individual is the singular form of interdependent individuals and the social is the plural of the same phenomenon. For Mead, individual mind and self are social phenomena in which every individual has similar tendencies to act in similar situations. Mead expresses this by saying that in all our interactions with each other we try to take account of the responses to our gestures might evoke in others and this means taking account not simply of specific individuals but of the group or society in which we live. Every individual act is therefore expressing the generalised other or habitus. Trust and mistrust are aspects of the habitus emerging and being dynamically sustained in many, many local interactions. This is a very different view to that which thinks of trust in terms of autonomous rational individuals choosing to trust or mistrust. From the complex responsive processes point of view it is highly misleading to think of trust in terms of rational, or even highly emotional, choices which independent individuals make.

The theory of complex responsive processes recognises the fundamental uncertainty of organisational and social life and explores how people cope with this. Since we cannot determine outcomes in advance of acting we cannot provide universal, general prescriptions for securing trust or even mistrust. Instead we have to rely on practical judgment developed through experience to choose particular actions in particular situations at particular times in the hope that we will be helping to generate good enough degrees of both trust and mistrust. We place our trust or mistrust in the habitus in which we live. We express this habitus as we act and we expect that others will also do so. So it is not a requirement for the existence of social order that individuals trust or mistrust other individuals. We can cope with the inevitable uncertainty of how specific others may respond to us if we can rely on social institutions to constrain all of us from enacting contraventions of the habitus. Trust and trustworthiness are not individual decisions but are patterns emerging in our interactions in which what we do is constrained by guilt, shame, threat of exclusion, prospects of punishment if we contravene the customs and laws, and many other institutional factors. It is the disciplinary society in which we live that keeps us in check and relieves us from having to continually calculate whether to trust or not particular individuals. It is only when widespread mistrust of social intuitions emerges that we sink into anarchy. So general prescriptions for leaders to be open and honest are unlikely to have much effect and leaders will not be able to create trust since they cannot design the habitus.

References

Alvesson, M. & Spicer, A. (2012) A Stupidity-Based Theory of Organizations, Journal of management Studies, 49:7, pp1194-1220.

Cook, K. ed. (2001) Trust in Society, New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Greiling, D. (2007) Trust and Performance Management in Non-Profit Organizations, The Innovation Journal: Public sector Innovation Journal, 12: 3, 1-23.

Fukuyama, F. (1995) Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, New York: Free Press.

Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self Identity, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.

Hardin, R. (2008) Trust, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Hope, J., Bunce, P. & Roosli (2011) The Leaders dilemma: How to build an empowered and adaptive organization without losing control, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Hosmer, L. (1996) Trust: The Connecting Link between Organizational Theory and Philosophical ethics, Academy of Management Review, 20(2), 379-403.

Hurley, R. (2012) The Decision to Trust: How Leaders Create High-Trust Organizations, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Misztal, B. (1996) Trust in Modern Societies, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Scott, J. C. (1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Sztompka, P. (1999) Trust: A Sociological Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

During the past 10-15 years there has been a proliferation of leadership programmes run by business schools, consultancy companies and training organisations. Leadership development is routinely offered to employees throughout organisations, private and public, irrespective of whether staff lead, or intend to lead others or not. It is a prerequisite to have had leadership training and to aspire to leadership positions for organisational advancement, or even to take up an ordinary career. Many of these programmes draw on a host of contradictory books and journal articles which continue to be produced in large numbers. In the UK and throughout North America and Europe, and even in the developing world, there is no avoiding the discussion of leadership in contemporary organisational life. Leadership, and aspiring to be a leader, have become a cult value.

And yet the more that is furnished in the way of leadership literature and development programmes, the less clear it is what we are actually talking about. Current discussion of leadership tends to veer between depicting failures of leadership, often attributed to weak individuals or failing ‘systems’, or idealising conceptions of the leader-as-hero.  The first approach covers over what people are actually doing with each other at work, while the latter calls out the possibility of a commensurate degree of disappointment when our leaders are revealed to have feet of clay. As the Harvard professor Rakesh Khurana (2007) put it when he reflected on the sorry state of leadership scholarship in his book From Higher Aims to Hired Hands:

‘From a scholarly perspective, then, leadership as a body of knowledge, after decades of scholarly attention under the social sciences research lens that the Ford Foundation found so eminently promising, remains without either a widely accepted theoretical framework or a cumulative empirical understanding leading to a usable body of knowledge. Moreover, the probability that leadership studies will make significant strides in developing a fundamental knowledge base is fairly low.’ (2007: 357)

As an alternative the 2013 Complexity and Management Conference will provide opportunities for exploring the way that leadership is exercised in everyday social activity involving power relations and practical judgement, often in conditions of high uncertainty and politics. We are delighted to be joined for the weekend by Professor Ann Cunliffe who has written extensively about leadership from a critical perspective and we will be comparing and contrasting Ann’s interest in what she terms relational leadership with our own perspective which draws on the natural and social sciences to try to understand complex interaction.

Ann L. Cunliffe is now Professor of Organization Studies at Leeds University. She joined Leeds from the University of New Mexico, USA. She is also Visiting Professor at the Universities of Strathclyde and Hull, UK. Her recent publications include the books A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Management (2009) and the co-authored Key Concepts in Organization Theory with John Luhman (2012). She has published articles in Organizational Research Methods, Human Relations, Management Learning, Journal of Management Studies, and Organization Studies. In 2002 she was awarded the Breaking the Frame Award from the Journal of Management Inquiry for the article that best exemplifies a challenge to existing thought.

As usual there will be parallel sessions following the keynote addresses, where conference participants will be able to explore themes which have struck them as being important in conversation with others. Between now and June we will be uploading posts on this blog  to talk to the theme and to provoke discussion in advance of the conference. Anyone wishing to put forward ideas for parallel sessions, including discussion of ideas for pieces of writing that people are doing, is welcome to do so.

We will develop a more detailed programme early on in the New Year and we will let you know when a payment page appears on the University of Hertfordshire website. As usual there will be concessions for early bird bookings.

I want to expand further on how the processes of domination and resistance are mediated by power relations and will draw on some of Foucault’s thinking to inquire into the social relations of ‘truth telling’. That is to say, as well as considering the way that orthodoxies dynamically maintain themselves by excluding and denying, it is also important to think about how resistance is mounted, and by whom. Having done this I will question whether the discussion pattern that Ralph points to between systems theorists and their critics could ever thought to be ‘stuck’, although it may feel that way from a synchronic perspective, what I referred to in a previous post as the perspective of the swimmer.

One of the quotations Ralph takes from Fleck’s book refers to what ordinary people think of as the ability of classical physics to produce stable facts. In everyday and perhaps naive views of science, physics is usually considered the principle scientific domain in which law-like generalisations are developed which help us to understand a world which is ‘already there’ to be discovered. It is this naïve view of science that sometimes gets replicated in the evidence-based management movement, where scholars are in search of stable paradigms of management which they assume can be taken up irrespective of context or time.

This reference to the supposed stability of physics put me in mind of Manjit Kumar’s book Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the great debate about the nature of reality[i], which tells the tale of the development of quantum theory from the beginning of the 20^th Century, and which is anything but an account of a stable thought collective. It supports Fleck’s point that the development of scientific thinking is often bumpy and contested, and in this case there is no attempt to smooth over the disagreements. In interpreting the conceptual development of quantum physics Kumar draws on contemporary reportage, biographies of some of the leading figures, their autobiographies and their personal letters. One of the things that I notice in Kumar’s book is the way in which scientific ideas developed in intense discussions between people who were competing and co-operating to get things done. In this case physics is no exception. These disagreements did not just concern the major figures of Bohr, Einstein and Heisenberg, who all radically disputed each others’ findings at various stages of the development of their ideas and had unresolvable differences, sometimes till the end of their lives. Nor did their disagreements just revolve around concepts. There were also deep personal rivalries and jealousies between the players which both constrained and enabled scientific activity. For example, the German physicist Wolfgang Pauli had a formidable reputation as a mathematician and was prone to sarcasm and cruel humour at the expense of others. He advised the American-German physicist Ralph Kronig not to publish his developing thesis on the spin of electrons because he told him it couldn’t possibly be true. Because Kronig was younger than Pauli and was in awe of him, he didn’t publish, although his theory has subsequently become widely accepted.

This is a very good example of what Fleck is referring to when he insists that scientific facts are forged in the cauldron of everyday messy realities of social life and what it is possible to think at any point in time. The development of practical physics experiments and calculations are also constrained and enabled by rivalries provoked by ambition and competition, disruptions, political game-playing and surprises. This is why the thought collective may take many years, even centuries to become more stable, and may reach back to ideas which were developed in previous centuries and were abandoned as dead ends. There is  no ‘end point’ in science. The theoretical physicist Karen Barad[ii] argues in her book Meeting the Universe Half Way that although some of the disputes about quantum physics have moved on to the degree that most physicists accept what is known as the Copenhagen interpretation (i.e. mostly Bohr’s interpretation) of the complementarity of particles and measurement, it would be a very difficult matter to get any group of quantum physicists to agree on precisely what the Copenhagen interpretation means for what we take reality to be:

The physicists who contributed to the Copenhagen interpretation displayed significant philosophical and interpretative differences in their    specific contributions, so that what is taken to be the Copenhagen interpretation is actually a superposition of the different views of a group of physicists who include Bohr (complementarity), Hesienberg (uncertainty), Born (probability) and von Neumann (project postulate), to name but a few key players. (2007: 414-15).

What Barad is pointing to is a continuing degree of indeterminacy about the concepts being investigated and what they might mean even amongst scientists engaged in the same intellectual project. It is these areas of indeterminacy and ambiguity through which new research becomes possible and the stability of the ideas is undermined both from within a thought collective, and from without.

It would be wrong to understand this constant probing of indeterminacy as necessarily being a peaceful social process of quietly collaborating scientists. Only last year we were reminded of another example of the struggle that ensues over challenges to scientific orthodoxies by the investiture of the Israeli chemist Daniel Schectman as Nobel Laureate for chemistry for his work on quasi-crystals. When he first published his results he had to endure an ad hominem attack from the double Nobel prize-winner Linus Pauling who launched what Shectman has described as a ‘crusade’ against him. The head of his own research team handed him a basic textbook on crystallography and recommend that he re-read it since what he was claiming was simply not possible. Ultimately his boss dismissed him for bringing ‘disgrace’ on the team.[iii] Sometimes the challenge to a thought collective from within can result in exclusion from the collective. This is similar to the observation made by Norbert Elias about the way that established communities police the behaviour of their own members, as much as they do the infringements of the outsiders.

I have chosen these examples from the natural sciences because I think that they illustrate Fleck’s point well in a domain where the ‘facts’ are supposed to speak for themselves. In contemporary society there is often a rhetorical appeal to science, sometimes as a way of covering over contestation and discussion. We are constantly reminded that we should be governed by evidence-based policy, politicians remind us that we should be guided by ‘the science’ in our determinations about the environment, and some management scholars insist that we should aspire to evidence-based management.  Concealed in the appeal to what is an exacting and serious practice is also an invitation to self-silence in the face of incontravertability. The further we enter the realm of the social the more this becomes impossible where there can be less recourse to mathematics or electron microscopes as a way of resolving differences of interpretation.

In the previous post Ralph points to the ways in which thought styles are sustained and potentially transformed by social activity of the members of the thought collective and how they participate in sustaining it. I also want to consider challenges to orthodoxy from a social perspective and think about the implications this has for power relationships between adherents to thought collectives and their opponents. I will do so by drawing on the idea of critical engagement, an idea that Foucault locates in the ancient Greek concept of parrhesia or fearless speech. One way of thinking about this engaged criticality is as the opposite process of what Fleck points to in the way the thought collective moves to screen out views which contradict the prevailing and dominating orthodoxy of the thought collective. A critical perspective calls into question the prevailing orthodoxy and in doing so also threatens to destabilise the relationships of power between people and groups. It opens up the possibility of reframing the current regime of truth and provokes questions of identity, status and practice.

In his book Fearless Speech[iv], Foucault traces the development of the concept of parrhesia, or fearless truth-telling,in the Graeco-Roman tradition. He does so he says, because he became interested in truth telling as a social activity, rather than because he was particularly interested in the problem of what we take to be the truth. The question of what we consider truthful, he argues, is the basis of analytic philosophy, while the question of who can ask about truth is the basis for the critical tradition:

One side is concerned with ensuring that the process of reasoning is correct in determining whether a statement is true (or concerns itself with our ability to gain access to the truth). And the other side is concerned with the question: what is the importance for the individual and for the society of telling the truth, of knowing the truth, and of having people who tell the truth, as well as knowing how to recognise them. (2001: 170)

The book is an enquiry into the relationship between the truth-teller and the communities of which they are part in the Graeco-Roman tradition; who is able to tell the truth and about what, and what are the consequences of truth-telling? Parrhesia, argues Foucault, was a form of reflexive speech activity that described a relationship between the speaker and what s/he says, as well as the speaker and their community. It was considered an example of courageous speech because it challenged the majority view and thus involved a good deal of risk-taking, since the views of the parrhesiast were unlikely to be welcome to the majority and may well have been resisted, perhaps resulting in the expulsion of the truth-teller or their death, as in the case of Socrates. The parrhesiast always had status in the community of which s/he is a member, otherwise what they say would not be recognised. However, in order to be considered a parrheisiast their status would need to be less than the people they challenge, or there would be no rupture, no risk involved, and no courage needed.

The fearless speaker did not spend time sugaring the pill by drawing on rhetorical flourishes in order to convince and persuade; Foucault draws a stark distinction between rhetorical formalism and unadorned parrhesia, which was a form of  speech activity where the speaker tried to show as directly as possible what it is they actually believe. For the Greeks there was a close connection between moral character and truth-telling, a conjunction between what the speaker takes to be true, and the truth. Foucault notes that what would trouble us living in a post-Descartian world as to what evidential basis we would use to know whether the speaker is actually speaking the truth, would not have troubled the Greeks. The ‘proof’ of the parrhesiast is the conviction with which s/he speaks, and the courage s/he demonstrates in speaking out against the majority.

The parrhesiast felt a duty to speak out although no one compelled them to do so; in this sense it is also ethical activity. It is because parrhesiasts felt they had a duty to themselves and to others that they could no longer go on living with the discomfort of being true to neither. Parrhesia was a form of public criticism as well as self-criticism, and required self-knowledge as well as knowledge of a particular community. In this sense the idea of parrhesia, in Foucault’s terms,says something about the care and development of the self and its relation to the community of which it is part. The reflexive recultivation of the relationship between self and others in the rediscovery of what ‘we’ take to be the right and the good and is a prerequisite for a democratic community to function. Another interesting aspect of parrhesia that Foucault finds in the Graeco-Roman tradition is that it was considered a form of phronesis requiring practical judgement and timing about what to say and when to say it. For the parrhesiast, timing is all.

There are some similarities between what Foucault describes in Fearless Speech and the account that James C Scott gives in his book Domination and the Arts of Resistance[v]although the latter is more concerned with resistance to political domination on the broad scale.

One way of thinking about Fleck’s Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact is an act of fearless speech, a critique of what at the time was a dominant and majority positivist account of scientific discovery, and one by someone who had significant standing in the community which he was critiquing. Although at the time it attracted negligible attention (his monograph was published in an edition of 640 copies of which only 200 were sold) it has had considerable impact since. It made a delayed contribution to what we might think of as a counter-thought collective, which was in turn amplified by Thomas Kuhn[vi] and others, who read and admired Fleck’s work and further developed the tradition of thought which is usually now referred to as Science and Technology Studies. Historians of science in the critical and constructionist tradition are still in a minority, but nonetheless have grown to be a vocal and respected group and include Foucault himself.

Returning to what Ralph referred to as the ping-pong of the critique of systems theory from the perspective of complex responsive processes, and the reply from a dominant systems perspective, we can notice how there is an attempt to re-establish the orthodox narrative. This is inevitable but I am suggesting not terminal or necessarily stuck for the long term. Even a game of ping-pong, as Norbert Elias observed about tennis,[vii] requires each player to adapt and respond to the counter-attacks of their opponent. And in the to-ing and fro-ing between one position and another the ambiguities and uncertainties of each argument may become more visible and may offer opportunities for the emergence of different conceptions of what we take to be ‘truth’. If we are to borrow from Foucault’s account of parrhesia, this will involve continuous reflexive attempts to reimagine the relationship between ourselves and the communities of which we are part, it will depend on who we are and how we recognise each other, and it will depend on timing and courage, since calling into question orthodoxies involves risk. It will involve a struggle over and  negotiation of power relations and will call into question who we are and what we think we are doing.

On this site, and in most of our work encounters, colleagues and I are seeking to present a way of thinking about organizational life which departs radically from the mainstream or dominant discourse. We want to do this because we take the view that dominant ways of understanding organizations have failed to account for the glaringly obvious inability of leaders and managers to determine their futures, which the dominant discourse argues is what they are there for. The alternative way of thinking we are trying to articulate involves moving completely away from thinking of human interaction as constituting, or as if constituting, a system of any kind which it is then the role of leaders and managers to control. Any/every form of systems thinking is conducted in terms of spatial metaphors with parts forming wholes within boundaries. We argue against this way of thinking about human interaction / organizations because the spatial metaphor of systems abstracts from direct experience by positing an entity outside our relationships with each which is then easily reified and anthropomorphised. Systemic ways of thinking lead to separation in thought of individual and group and locates them at different levels, another spatial metaphor. We are articulating an alternative way of thinking which avoids abstracting completely from our experience and focuses our attention on the temporal responsive processes of our in interacting with each other as we deal with uncertainty and our inability to control. We argue that this complex responsive processes way of thinking is incompatible with systems thinking because in the former we are seeking to understand our experience from within our participation in that experience and in the latter people are seeking to observe and manipulate something outside of themselves. Moving from one of these ways of thinking to the other has important implications for what we do and how we think about what we do to deal with not knowing and it is this that we are seeking to inquire into.

One common response to the position we take is for a commenter to welcome what we are saying but then they go on to agree that some forms of systems thinking exhibit the drawbacks we identify (for example, first order systems) but that there are other forms (for example, second order  systems) that do not display these drawbacks. While agreeing then, the commenters present their own brand of system thinking as an exception, usually without explaining why it is an exception. The commenter may then proceed to talk about people drawing boundaries around their experience. In other words the commenter simply proceeds to rearticulate the dominant discourse without acknowledging any of our arguments against it.

Another commenter may then return to the message of the blog and point out that defining the boundaries of an organization involves us thinking of an organization as some kind of system that exists outside of us and that when we do this we are moving more and from our own actual experience of what is happening around us in the conversations we are engaged in. In other words the second commenter repeats the argument being presented in the blog.

The first commenter may then reply that the ability to see multiple, non-contradictory boundaries, or containers, is essential to making meaning and taking action; useful boundaries can be created and transcended at will. Here then, we are into the second repetition of a reply which simply repeats once again the basic tenets of the dominant discourse without engaging the argument.

And so the ‘ping pong’ goes on. The pattern is one of a commenter presenting the argument of the responsive processes view which elicits a rearticulating of the dominant discourse of systems thinking which calls forth another comment now simply repeating the responsive processes position which evokes a comment simply repeating the systems position. We are together co-creating repetitive patterns which are rather stuck and which block inquiring into the argument. This is a pattern which I frequently encounter in other forums too and I notice that leaders and managers in organizations  also often get stuck in repetitive patterns of this kind. So how are we to make sense of this kind of pattern that we so often co-create in which we each make claims about reality and the facts but do not really argue them through? I think a very useful way of understanding what we are getting into together is provided by an important book called Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact by Ludwik Fleck which was published in 1935.

In the years leading up to the publication of his book, Fleck, a bacteriologist approaching the age of 40, had acquired a considerable reputation as a scientist for his research in the areas of the serology of typhus, syphilis and a variety of pathogenic microorganisms. Fleck starts his book with a question: What is a fact? In answering this question, he goes on to say:

A fact is supposed to be distinguished from transient theories as something definite, permanent, and independent of any subjective interpretation by the scientist. … Epistemology often commits a fundamental error: almost exclusively it regards well-established facts of everyday life, or those of classical physics, as the only ones that are reliable … [this] is inherently naïve … [as a consequence] we feel a complete passivity in the face of a power that is independent of us; a power we call “existence” or “reality”.[i]

He is arguing that in taking the common sense view of what a fact is we lose sight of our own role, collectively and historically, in constructing a fact and developing a fact and this leads us to regarding a fact as simply something we have no alternative but to accept: it cannot be questioned. The purpose of Fleck’s book is to take a particular medical fact, namely syphilis, and explore how such an empirical fact originated, how it has evolved and what it consists of. He shows how before the end of the 15^th century syphilis was not differentiated from other skin diseases such as scabies. It was not an independent fact. Around the end of the 15^th century syphilis was identified as a new disease, labelled ‘carnal scourge’, which had arisen because of the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter under the sign of Scorpio which rules the genitals. Added to the astrological explanation was the religious one that the disease was god’s punishment of sinful lust. Syphilis was now the fact of carnal scourge. Fleck argues that any explanation of a phenomenon, including this one, can only survive and develop if it is ‘stylized in conformity with the prevailing thought style’[ii] and that it took centuries before developments in other sciences led to different ways of thinking about the disease. He concludes that:

Such entrenchment of thought proves that it was not the so-called empirical observations that led to the construction and fixation of the idea. Instead, special factors of deep psychological and traditional significance greatly contributed to it.[iii]

The special factors he is referring to have to do with the interaction of this idea of syphilis with other ideas arising in different social strata. It is through cooperation and opposition of ideas that modern ideas of syphilis have emerged. Another special factor had to do with developments in medical practice in which syphilis cam to be distinguished by the ‘fact’ that it could be treated with mercury. The fact of syphilis was moving from carnal scourge to medical condition. Others doubted this kind of differentiation and in the late 19^th century one researcher published a paper denying the existence of syphilis as it had come to be defined as a medical condition and arguing that the better explanation was the earlier one of a carnal scourge. Fleck argues that scientists are not as free to choose between one explanation and another as we might assume. Perhaps the most powerful factor conditioning such ‘choices’ is their dependence on cultural-historical conditioning which constrains us from choosing between concepts. For Fleck this conditioning constitutes a thought style and those reflecting a particular thought style constitute a thought collective. Challenges to thought styles lead to fierce arguments and the potential for exclusion from a thought collective.

It seems to me to be helpful in understanding the repetitive pattern I have described earlier to think of this pattern as arising in an encounter between two very different thought styles and thought collectives, both of which have a long history.

In coming to understand how thought collectives and their styles evolve, Fleck points to the difference between experiment and experience and argues that experience has an important impact on thought style evolution. An experiment can be interpreted in terms of a simple question and a simple answer but experience ‘must be understood as a complex state of intellectual training based upon the interaction between the knower, that which he already knows, and that which he has yet to learn’.[iv] The complexity of such experience cannot be regulated by logic. The history of a concept, of a fact, emerges in the rather messy interaction of developing strands of thought which are afterwards simplified into idealised accounts of a main line of development, constituting a “structurally complete and closed system”.[v] Is this, perhaps, what systems thinking has evolved to? Could the same be said of the theory of complex responsive processes?

Fleck then goes on to explore the tenacity of thought styles:

Once a structurally complete and closed system of opinions consisting of many details and relations has been formed, it offers enduring resistance to anything that contradicts it.[vi]

He argues that this resistance is not simple passivity or mistrust of new ideas but an active process which can be divided into several stages:

• At first, contradictions of the prevailing though style are unthinkable;
• So, what does not fit into the style is not seen;
• Or if it is noticed, it is kept secret;
• Or laborious efforts are made to explain an exception in terms that do not contradict the thought style;
• Then despite the legitimate claims of contradictory views, there is a tendency to see only that which corroborates current views and therefore gives them substance.

Thought styles spontaneously emerge but then become preserved as enduring, rigid structures in a kind of harmony of illusions. It is these that constitute thought styles. For  Fleck, cognition, recognition, thinking and knowledge are social activities and therefore thought styles are particular to particular communities, which he calls ‘thought collectives’ and a thought collective is

… a community of persons mutually exchanging ideas or maintaining intellectual interaction … it also provides the special “carrier” for the historical development of any field of thought, as well as for the given stock of knowledge and level of culture. This we have designated thought style.[vii]

The thought collective, not the autonomous individual, is the carrier of thought styles and we as individuals express those styles in our interactions with each other. We are not objective observers outside thought styles able to operate on or manipulate them. Instead, in our interactions we iterate and so both sustain and potentially change those styles, but always from within our participation.

Of valuable experiments Fleck says:

 They are all of them uncertain. And when experiments become certain, precise, and reproducible at any time, they no longer are necessary for research purposes proper but function only for demonstration or ad hoc determinations.[viii]

Experiments are based on assumptions already incorporated in the choice of the object of investigation – there can be no observations without assumptions. Since an observation cannot encompass all characteristics of a phenomenon there has to be a focus of attention and this reflects the thought styles of the thought collective the observer is a member of. New discoveries cannot be made following the mechanistic rules of experiment. Instead, the new emerges in vague, unstylized perceptions, confused partial themes and rivalry between fields of thought so that nothing is factual or fixed.

This is how a fact arises. At first there is a signal of resistance in the chaotic initial thinking, then a definite thought constraint, and finally a form to be directly perceived. A fact always occurs in the history of thought and is always the result of a definite thought style.[ix]

A fact provides a resistance to free, arbitrary thinking and facts are related to thought collectives in that they are consistent with the intellectual interests of the thought collective. A fact conditions how members of the collective may think and it is expressed in the thought style of the collective.

It seems to me that when leaders, managers and others in organizations claim to be presenting the facts to back what they want to do, they simply expressing the thought style of their thought collective and if there is no reflection on this process they are highly likely to become trapped in repetitive patterns of stuck communication.