from 7pm on 8th June to 2.30pm on 10^th June 2012

AT ROFFEY PARK MANAGEMENT INSTITUTE

(For location see Roffey Park website)

About the conference

The ninth annual Complexity and Management Conference will take place at Roffey Park starting at 7pm on Friday 8^th June 2012 and ending after lunch on 10^th June. This event is a very informal conference where prepared papers and presentations are minimal and serve the purpose of introducing themes for discussion amongst conference participants.  In organising this conference we seek to maximise the possibility of conversation. The purpose is to provide an opportunity for leaders, managers, consultants and academics who are interested in our work on complexity and emergence in organisations, as well as past, present and possible future participants on our MA/Doctor of Management programme, to discuss their experience and ideas with one another.

This year’s theme

The financial crisis has provoked a great deal of discussion about fairness, reward and the ethics of management. This is a welcome change from the usual focus on managerial instruments, tools and techniques which can often crowd out ethical concerns. But at the same time as the inadequacy of the way our organisations have been run has been made very stark, so has the inability to engage in ethical discussion. It is clear that leaders and managers are largely at a loss as to what to do and how to behave, and sometimes even how to begin discussing ethical questions. Everyone is feeling their way forward in the struggle over whose narrative of events predominates, and are relearning how to engage with each other in discussions of the good and the right. There are very few models which will be of any use to help navigate unique and highly uncertain times. This makes a complexity perspective, complex responsive processes of relating, particularly relevant to this theme.

In this year’s conference we will be drawing on both complexity and critical management traditions in trying to make sense of the situation we find ourselves in, particularly in relation to the theme of ethics. We are delighted to have Professor Hugh Willmott from the University of Cardiff, (Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies (with M. Alvesson and T. Bridgeman), Oxford University Press; Critical Management Studies: A Reader (ed. with C. Grey) Oxford University Press; Introducing Organization Behaviour and Management (ed. with D. Knights) London: Thomson) accept our invitation as  keynote speaker, who has chosen as his topic:

The Financialized Corporation: Moorings Lost and the Crises of Legitimacy

There will be parallel sessions following the keynotes, 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 site to talk to the theme and to provoke discussion in advance of the conference. Anyone wishing to put forward ideas for parallel sessions is welcome to do so.

We will be posting more details about the conference soon including how to pay.

Aside from the difficulties arising from this loose interpretation of the complexity sciences, as usual with these matrices and frameworks it is assumed that it is the rational, autonomous, choosing manager standing outside the situation they are evaluating, who determines which quadrant s/he is in and takes the appropriate action. Under the guise of being rationally purposeful, this way of thinking appears to me to be radically subjective and splits thinking off from action, and the manager/leader off from those they manage. We have not moved very far from assumptions of predictability and control which are present in much contemporary management literature.

From the perspective of complex responsive processes I am assuming instead that the relationships between engaged, feeling human bodies are always complex and have the potential for both stability and change at the same time. I am also assuming that there is nowhere to stand outside the activities under consideration. Rather than choosing how to behave in a particular context, managers and leaders are instead caught up in a game with others, and may come realise how much they have become invested in it, and so will find themselves highly constrained in their choices. They are very unlikely to be able to choose a ‘leadership style’, or to decide which quadrant of a particular framework they are in and act accordingly, but will be obliged to respond to others with a similar investment in the game. They are played by the game as much as they play the game.

In taking this point of view, rather than contributing to the proliferating literature on tools and techniques, or systematising complexity, our attention is directed instead to the importance of the cultivation of reflexive judgement in leaders and managers. This is not a form of choosing, or presuming a god’s eye view of what is happening, but is a way of paying attention to how we are already immersed in the game and how we are responding to others in the living present. It is an attempt to become more detached about our involvement. So we are not assuming that we think and then act, but are assuming instead that we are helplessly social, and that our taken for granted sociability precedes our ability consciously to notice what we are doing. The kind of noticing I am pointing to in the discussion of reflexivity, is an increased ability to draw attention to the patterning of how we are involved together with others, learning better to think about how we are thinking and acting, which may create greater possibilities for behaving differently. It also brings with it its own risks.

How might grids and frameworks, tools and techniques get in the way of the kind of reflexive attention that we are pointing to in these posts?

Firstly, I am assuming that there are regularities in social life, but that these are irregularly regular. The situations we encounter with others are likely to be both similar to and different from previous experience; they will be unique. Developing phronetic judgement over time is precisely aimed at enhancing the ability to notice the similarities and differences, and to decide together whether and how the latter may be important. Rather than bludgeoning experience into categories that we already bring to it, an invitation to reflexivity is concerned with questioning to what degree our categories, and even our previous experience, prepares us for current experience. This is what the political philosopher Hannah Arendt referred to as ‘thinking without a bannister’, being prepared to kick away the intellectual supports that we might want to take into a situation so that it conforms to what is familiar to us. There is no necessary guarantee that previous ways of thinking and behaving will continue to serve us well as encounter the new, and the potentially radically different. Leaders and managers can be more radically open to experience and to bring their intelligence to bear on what they are experiencing.

Secondly, I am assuming that leadership and management are social undertakings, and that the social act is a complex group activity. So even if we were to assume that the leader/manager does decide on their own in private, closed off from everybody else, the way their ‘decision’ will be taken up by others is beyond their control. Of course, I am not suggesting that the manager/leader is not capable of having their own private dialogue about what is happening or of forming their own point of view. But one of the capacities that marks out a credible leader/manager is the ability not just to take up the point of view of the generalised other to themselves, but also the views and actions of the particular others with whom they are engaged. This will mean involving oneself with differing, usually conflicting interpretations and valuations. There is no recipe for doing this, and it can be very anxiety-provoking as one tries with others to widen one’s circle of concern. In many ways it is easier to follow the prescriptions in a framework, than it is to struggle over the ‘life process of the group’. As a consultant involved in organisations I have encountered people so committed to the scheme of work that they have planned, or the tool they are adopting that they begin to blind themselves to the reactions of others. Following the rules becomes more important than exploration and potentially closes off options and possibilities that were not previsioned by the grid or framework.

This points to another important difference between the notion of the adoption of tools and techniques and intelligent, reflexive action. Where the former is an attempt to impose coherence and order from outside experience with a certain rigidity, with the latter what I am privileging is the attempt to regulate experience from within experience itself. Experience and reflection on experience become objects for further reflection and reflexivity: patterning simply leads to further patterning, and activity becomes regulated by paying attention to the activity itself. I think this is what is meant in the body of thought called complex responsive processes by ‘transformative causality’. Rather than assuming that we need to ‘apply a tool’ to the experience of organising together, our joint struggle over the difficulties we are encountering and the means at our disposal to take a step forward together, and the way we can notice, take this seriously and find ways to talk about it, is the way that experience evolves. Rather than assuming that we can engineer experience with a ‘tool’ possibly based on other people’s experience, we may attempt instead to generalise from our particular experience taking seriously the potential for radical creativity in what we are doing. Sometimes our intentions only become clearer to us once we have acted, and this may throw up further alternatives, which we had never imagined.

Reflexive management, then, does not depend upon designing instruments which promise to get us from here to there. It is instead a social activity involving struggle and the exploration of difference, and the patient attention to the creative possibilities of everyday interaction with others.

I do not think there is anything mysterious about the exercise of practical judgment and we can inquire into the exercise of practical judgment and explore whether it is possible to identify any ‘techniques’ of practical judgment.

The first point to note is that if we are to continue using the term
‘techniques’ then we have to accept that it cannot mean what it means in the
mode of instrumental rationality. In instrumental rationality, the tools and
techniques take the form of simplifications and generalizations, or in other
words, second order abstractions that are context free. These tools and
techniques are algorithmic in nature and take the form of models, frameworks,
rules and step by step procedures. However, none of them can address
uncertainty, unpredictability, ambiguity and complexity. The exercise of
practical judgment is highly context-related, it is exercised in highly uncertain and unpredictable, unique situations. It cannot, therefore, be generalized or dealt with in the manner of second order abstractions.

The exercise of practical judgment calls for a wider awareness of the group,
organizational and societal patterns within which some issue of importance is
being dealt with. This requires a sensitive awareness of more than the focal
points in a situation but also of what is going on at the margins of that which
is being taken as the focus. Practical judgment is the experienced-based
ability to notice more of what is going on and intuit what is most important
about a situation. It is the ability to cope with ambiguity and uncertainty, as
well as the anxiety this generates. The second point to notice is that
expertise is largely unconscious and difficult to articulate, as became clear
when those trying to develop Artificial Intelligence found that experts could
not formulate what they did in terms general enough to be simulated by a
computer. Clearly practical judgment has to be acquired and exercised in ways
that cannot easily be generalized.

This does not mean, however, that there is nothing further to be said about practical
judgment. The capacity for practical judgment in relation to some activity is
gradually developed through actually performing the activity in question. So
the technique is to do the work, ideally under the supervision of another who
is already an expert. The technique, then, is one of doing the work alongside
others who are more experienced, so learning by doing. For thousands of years,
in most cultures, pupils or apprentices lived and worked with masters or
craftsmen to acquire, for example, the expertise of cloth maker, weaver,
butcher, scribe and teacher. Schön gave an analysis of this kind of
relationship, when he described how, for example, artists, medical
practitioners, teachers and others learn their craft in a studio or other
workplace where they work with, and are supervised by, those who already
display expertise. In fact, it is part of the role of a manager in every
organization to supervise the work of those reporting to him or her. In many organisations
today, relatively inexperienced managers are formally allocated a mentor and
even if this does not happen, inexperienced managers may informally find a
mentor. Schön described the expert as a reflective practitioner, that is, one
who thinks in the action of practicing.

Reflection-in-action, or more importantly, reflexivity-in-action, can be
thought of as ‘techniques’ of practical judgment as can supervision and
mentoring. However, it is important to note two points about these
‘techniques’. First, supervisors and mentors must themselves be experts if they
are to guide others on the route to expertise and supervising and mentoring is
also the exercise of practical judgment. It follows that supervising and
mentoring cannot be reduced to rules, procedures and models. Second,
supervision and mentoring are at their most effective in sustaining and
enhancing capacities for practical judgment when they take the form of
reflexive inquiry into what they and those they are supervising and mentoring
are doing together and why they are doing it in the way they are.

Furthermore, the previous paragraph makes it clear that practical judgment is not an individual possession, competence or skill set. Practical judgment is, rather, social processes. Interdependent individuals can only develop and sustain the
skills of practical judgment through participation with each other. When senior
leaders and managers withdraw from the hurly burly of organizational life to
live in an isolated world of privilege, they simply lose the capacity for
practical judgment. This has been made clear again and again, for example by
the failure of the CEO of Lehman Brothers to make practical judgments about
exotic financial products – he had very little awareness of what they were and
no interest in them. More recently, a UK House of Commons Select Committee
examining the phone hacking perpetrated by News of the World, questioned Rupert
Murdoch, CEO of News Corporation, and his son, James Murdoch. It became very
clear that they were completely out of touch with what is actually going on in
their company, or they were not telling the truth.

Since leaders and managers can only become experts through experience, it follows
that some form of mentoring is a very important way in which to foster the
development of leadership and management expertise. It also follows that some
form of ongoing or periodic supervision is highly important in sustaining and
further developing this expertise. Management and leadership coaching might be
a ‘technique’ of fostering practical judgment. However, a distinction should be
drawn between the kind of instrumentally rational, step following, forms of
coaching which focus on goals and tasks in a narrow way, and the kind of more
discursive and exploratory forms that coaching, understood as a kind of work
therapy might take. A coach who follows rules and step by step procedures when
working with leaders and managers is in fact using the tools and techniques of
instrumental rationality and while these may foster competence, they cannot
develop proficiency and expertise. The problem with coaching is that the coach
will probably not have the kind of expertise which the client needs to develop,
while a mentor who is an expert leader and manager in the client’s organization
will have that kind of expertise. However, a coach who is an expert in
discursive forms of work therapy may assist the client to greater awareness of
his or her roles in the organization. In other words, the contribution of a
coach could be to encourage the development of exploratory reflexivity. Coaches
who work in a discursive way with groups of leaders and managers may help to
widen and deepen communication in a group and so produce greater meaning and
again this activity cannot be reduced to rules and procedures. The coach’s work
in the development of more fluid and complex conversation involves curbing the
widespread pattern in organizations where leaders and managers focus on the
future and move immediately to planning and solving problems.  This can be done by exploring narratives of
what those in the group have done in the past in order to develop some insight
into what they have been doing and why they have been doing it in a particular
way. Such conversation grounds group members in the present as they make sense
of the past in the present and opens up more varied and grounded ways of taking
account of the future in the present. Another ‘technique’ which can be used in
discursive, narrative forms of coaching is that of writing. It is very helpful
for leaders and managers to write short narratives of troubling events they are
currently experiencing and then inquiring into these narratives in the group.

We might think about ‘techniques’ that foster and sustain the capacity for practical
judgment in a number of ways. First, practical judgment requires ongoing
reflection on the judgments made and the consequences they produce. Mindless
action does not yield practical judgment; instead mindful action is required in
which the actors reflexively think together about how they are thinking about
what they are doing. I think, then, that we can understand the first
requirement of ongoing practical judgment to be an ongoing inquiry, one that
takes narrative, reflexive forms. Secondly, practical judgment relies on
ongoing participation in the conversational life of an organization in ways
that widen and deepen communication. Thirdly, practical judgment involves some
degree of spontaneity and improvisation and there are ‘techniques’ which can
make people more aware of this, such as working with theatre. Fourthly,
practical judgment is essentially the ordinary politics of everyday life where
the techniques of rhetoric play a part and the matter of ethics becomes of
major importance.

So I was struck by a quite ordinary intervention by Iver Drabaek in the final plenary of the weekend. This was a session convened to explore what different conference participants were doing in their work and to ask whether insights drawn from the complexity sciences, or from complex responsive processes were proving helpful in what people found themselves trying to do. There had been a number of diverse observations about what was going on in the group: that the discussion didn’t seem to be leading anywhere, or that it wasn’t easy to speak into the big group, as we struggled to make sense of this particular way of meeting together. As Nick Sarra has pointed out, there often is a struggle in big group discussions, and sometimes this struggle is about avoiding the discomfort of recognising each other in this kind of context.  Iver pointed out that for him it was different. It wasn’t that he was holding back but that every time he went to speak into the group he found that he had changed his mind about what he wanted to say, depending on what the last person had said. This for me was a very good example of what we are trying to describe on the faculty at Hertfordshire when we are drawing attention to the transformative potential of everyday interaction. Iver was displaying a patient attention to everyday experience, his own experience of the group, which then raised ideas of recognition, mutual recognition, identity and ideology for me. In drawing attention to the way that he was responding, to what was going on for him in the moment and articulating it, he provoked me (without of course realising it) into recognising myself in what he was saying. I would expect that for others it called out an entirely different response, or perhaps no response at all, but in that moment I came to understand my own participation in what was going on, recognising myself in the other, differently.

What I began to notice was the way I had been responding to what people were saying, and making assumptions about what they had said. This had led me to leap to conclusions in my conversation with myself about what they might mean by what they said. I was entirely caught up in my own reflective responses to what was going on in the room. The reactions I was experiencing were an articulation and rearticulation of who I was in the group, and were an expression of my ideology. In trying to explore what I might mean by ideology I want to go back to two things Doug Griffin said during the conference. So one way of thinking about ideology would be as the way that I have stopped asking questions about my encounters with others and the world. To understand the world ideologically, which is not something we can choose to do or not do, implies a degree of certainty that the world is the way I think it is. And in taking the world to be the way I think it is, so I am leaping to an imagined whole, what Doug, calling on Adorno, referred to as an ‘untrue whole’ (das Ganze ist das Unwahre). In the group, I could not help myself extrapolating from what people were saying and countering it with my own understanding of the world. This was a dialectical process of negation, the negation of my self by what people were saying, and the negation of that negation, what Hegel referred to as Aufhebung. As I continued to engage in the group, and especially after this particular incident, I began noticing how sometimes the encounter with others, particularly the one I am describing above, continued to puncture this untrue whole, my negation of my negation: I noticed how what people were saying and the way that they said it, sometimes made more complex and inadequate my spontaneous ‘whole’ understanding of what was happening. One of things I was bumping up against was my ideological understanding of what was being said, and Iver’s remark had made the process more explicit to me. He provoked a moment of reflexivity, a more detached realisation of myself in relation to other selves.

Another way of exploring the same phenomenon, how we cannot help ourselves in our ideological responses to whom and what we come up against, was provided in the previous session led by Karen Norman, Henry Larsen, Chris Chipolina and Prebin Friis. Karen and colleagues showed video clips of sessions conducted in Gibraltar where staff from a health service and a group of actors had worked together to dramatise every day encounters between health professionals, patients and their families. These encounters provoked very strong reactions from the health professionals and led to rich, complex and sometimes difficult discussions about their assumptions about what was going on, and what was important to value. Equally, they stimulated some strong responses in the audience at the conference, even though they were separated in time and space from the workshop in Gibraltar. Dramatising every day encounters is a very good way of demonstrating how we are each likely to have strong reactions even when we have an experience in common, and that these reactions themselves become objects of discussion, provoking more reactions, and so on.

The extent to which we can voice our reactions to what we are experiencing, and an explicit theme of the conference, was the power relationships of which we are part. So some participants narrated incidents at work where power relationships constrained what they felt capable of saying, and others drew attention to the same dynamic in the conference. This was addressed directly by both Ian Burkitt and Ralph Stacey in their key note talks, when they discussed the ways in which power, and in Foucault’s terms, disciplinary power, constrains and enables what it is possible to know and say. Power relationships, in Elias’ terms figurations, both produce knowledge and define what is acceptable as truth. In Ian’s keynote he drew attention to the ways in which his own institution had attempted to promote diversity, which had led to both expected and unexpected outcomes. Celebrating diversity and opposing inequality, which the institution had formulated as strapline, had proved difficult to functionalise, as people within groups, and between groups struggled over who they thought they were, and who they were becoming in the discussion.

Equally, one of the things we were working with in the conference was the negotiation over what is and what is not discussable as we tried to develop richer and more fluid ways of communicating together. In the conference, and in organisations, there is sometimes a tendency to suggest that everything should be made ‘transparent’, that hidden transcripts in James C Scott’s terms, should always be made public. In my view this is another idealisation, which if realised, might threaten our ability to communicate at all. In the conference we were noticing and negotiating the movement of the hidden towards the public, and it is in this movement that identity is potentially transformed.

So is it possible that somehow we might get on top of these processes of reflexivity, so that we could develop techniques for ensuring that we had a radical encounter with others and with ourselves? Can we ensure transformative ways of working? I do not think it is possible to do so, although I would say that some of the ways that we choose to work in the large group, in smaller groups, starting with, and taking seriously every day experience, perhaps have more likelihood of encouraging the possibility than other ways of meeting. Many meetings in organisations, which are convened around a strong anxiety about generating ‘outcomes’, or being ‘effectively’ run, seem to me set up to bring about precisely what John Dewey was pointing to when he said: Zeal for doing, lust for action, leaves many a person, especially in this hurried and impatient environment in which we live, with experience of an almost incredible paucity, all on the surface. No one experience has a chance to complete itself because something else is entered upon so speedily. What is called experience becomes so dispersed and miscellaneous as hardly to deserve the name. Resistance is treated as an obstruction to be beaten down, not as an invitation to reflection. So in the weekend conference, and in the large group, we gave ourselves permission to meet with no particular end in view, and in Dewey’s terms as an invitation to reflection and reflexivity, to take the time to pay attention to, and find ways to talk about, what was going on for us in our places of work, and at the conference.

Since the 1990s, there has been an increasingly rapid growth in the provision of leadership development programmes, provided not just by the elite business schools and consultancies but even more by the education and development departments of most organisations. Leadership academies and programmes have been established by governments and others to provide for leadership development, for example: the International Leadership Association, the Institute of Leadership and Management in the UK, and programmes for the military, defence, health and higher education. Even academic researchers at universities are invited to go on a leadership programme. This trend is not confined to the UK but is as much in evidence throughout Europe and North America. Such programmes are now common throughout the developing countries too. Participants on these programmes are introduced to one or more of the leadership theories indicated in the previous section, usually presented in a ‘model’ claimed to be specific to the sector mounting the programmes. It is quite common for participants to be presented with: exercises using various games; experience of the theatre, for example, actors and directors may interpret the leadership qualities of, say, Shakespeare’s Henry V; conducting an orchestra; engaging in various outdoor activities such as trekking through the wilds and dealing with hazards such as mountains and river crossings. The aim is for participants to have the experience of leading teams in addition to understanding the theories of leadership so that they will be more likely to apply them in practice. Also participants are often asked to identify the leadership qualities of great leaders, such as Mahatma Ghandi, Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa, so that they might imitate them in order to improve their own leadership skills.

Consider the nature of the leadership models that are being provided as the basis for leadership development. An example is provided by the model of leadership used in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) Leadership Programmes. The model is depicted as a circle. The top of the circle lists the activities required for leaders to set the direction, which are: broad scanning, intellectual flexibility, seizing the future, driving for results and displaying political astuteness. The bottom half of the circle lists the leadership activities required to deliver the service and these are: leading change through people, holding to account, empowering others, effective and strategic influencing and collaborative working. The middle of the circle represents the personal qualities required of leaders: self-belief, self-awareness, self-management, drive for improvement, and personal integrity.

The first point to note is that although developed specifically for the NHS, it is fundamentally not all that different to any others and all are immediately recognisable as reflections of the dominant discourse on leadership and strategy in the literature. It is immediately apparent how abstract, idealised and edifying these models all are. It is also interesting that these lists of activities and traits are presented in a simple rational sounding manner as if each item on the list is well understood. However, I would argue that there is not one item on these lists that is well understood – all continue to be the subjects of debate.

Furthermore, it is taken for granted that the activities identified in the models actually are what ‘leaders’ normally do in their daily work lives. Alvesson and Sveningsson argue that the leadership literature pays little attention to the more mundane tasks that leaders and mangers carry out. In their interviews with leaders and managers, however, they found that those interviewed themselves drew attention to the more mundane aspects of their work. These mundane tasks include ‘administration, solving practical and technical problems, giving and asking for information, chatting, gossiping, listening and creating a good working atmosphere . They argue that what leaders actually do does not differ all that much from what non-leaders do – they problematize the notion of leadership being something extraordinary, constituting a distinct and special kind of work. In another study the same authors reported how managers as leaders describe their work in terms of visions, values and strategies, claiming to refrain from directing the details of the work those reporting to them carry out. However, when asked to be specific, these same manager-leaders talk about administrative tasks and how it is necessary for them to be directive with regard to the work of those who report to them. When they talk about leadership they dismiss micro-management as bad leadership but when they describe what they do the description indicates that in actuality leaders and managers do engage significantly in micro-management. The authors conclude that the rhetoric employed therefore does not describe what managers and leaders actually do. I would draw attention to this finding that managers make one statement, micro management is bad but then later in another context claim that it is something they have to do and so something good. This is a neat example of Georg Orwell’s 1984 Doublethink where people hold two contradictory statements but do not notice the contradiction.

Finally, there are no leaders anywhere who are unconstrained – every leader has to deal in some way with a higher leader or some group to which they are accountable. The tight constraints on leaders are ignored in the edifying, idealised models of leadership in the dominant discourse.

So are managers and leaders being put thorough all these leadership programmes because they are not doing what the models define as the ‘best’ way to lead? Are they to leave behind the more mundane activities they find themselves spending time on and shake off the constraints? It seems clear that the programmes aim to produce some kind of personal change in participants so that they willingly carry out what is required to be an effective, good leader. And once they willingly start acting according to the new values of leadership, just how will they inspire others to commit to their visions and planned directions? Not surprisingly, there are rather different views on what is involved in these change processes.

One answer to this question is typified by the learning organisation theory of Senge . Leaders inspire people by inviting them into dialogue where they suspend assumptions and so learn and change. Well intentioned rational people, engaged in dialogue under inspiring leaders with vision will willingly change. The contention here is that double loop , or generative, learning takes place if leaders develop the right capacities for such learning. These capacities produce voluntary learning which people find pleasurable and inspiring. The problem, however, is that this view of learning is a highly idealistic and simplistic view of human nature taking no account of threats to identity, power relations, conflicting ideologies, conflictual politics and anxiety. The influential leadership scholar, Schein , whose ideas were briefly mentioned in a previous section, takes a very different view and thinks that leaders can only bring about generative learning and change cultures through processes of coercive persuasion.

In 1961, Schein published a book on his research into the interrogation and indoctrination of military and civilian prisoners in China during the Korean War in the 1950s. These prisoners included significant numbers of foreigners and he noticed that when they were repatriated, there was one group who had submitted to the interrogation and indoctrination, and amongst other things signed confessions of crimes they had not performed. In order to avoid being subjected to unbearable pressure, they collaborated and allowed themselves to be used for propaganda purposes. However, they never really accepted their guilt and as soon as they were free, they abandoned the compliant, collaborative ways of thinking they had feigned. They were coerced but had not been persuaded; they had simply engaged in superficial, adaptive learning. However, there was also a significant group of freed prisoners who continued to believe that they had been guilty of betraying the people and were grateful for the way the Chinese captors had treated them. Schein claims that these people had undergone a significant learning process, although an undesirable one from our point of view. They had not engaged simply in adaptive learning but in double loop, generative learning in that they had been persuaded to change their beliefs though coercion. Schein describes the process this group went through as coercive persuasion, popularly known as brainwashing, which he likened to a conversion process. He then goes on to argue that all culture change requires generative learning, which people resist, so it will only come about in a process of coercive persuasion. It is the leader, the one whose role it is to bring about generative learning and change cultures, who must instigate and organise this process. Efforts to empower people and make them generative learners so that they become more productive and creative requires a major move in the thinking of organisational members who are used to bureaucratic norms and top down control systems. They have to be coercively persuaded to change the way they think – this is what generative learning is according to Schein.

Coercive persuasion is conducted using a number of techniques of power:

1. Those who are to be coercively persuaded are prevented in some way from leaving the learning experience, for example, through a feeling that they will lose their livelihood if they leave. It is very difficult for anyone in an organisation to decline an invitation to a change or leadership programme and nearly impossible to leave once one is there.
2. The learners must be subjected to intense interpersonal and psychological pressure to destabilise their individual senses of self and disconfirm current beliefs and values. The level of survival anxiety must be high so that people surrender psychologically and put themselves into the hands of those providing the learning experience. Many people find the prospect of attending some compulsory training programme highly anxiety provoking. They fear exposing themselves and often feel that their performance on the programme will be judged and their managers informed. Also many of the games and exercises people on programmes find they must engage in are infantilising and create intense dynamics of dependency.
3. The learners are put into teams so that those at more advanced stages of moving to the new culture can mentor those at less advanced stages. Peer pressure plays a part in shifting doubt and also in creating feelings of safety. The emphasis on teams and team work is apparent on most programmes and this applies particularly to leadership development programmes where participants must learn how to be team members and how to run effective teams as team leader. The pressures team members place on each other clearly produce compliance but the feeling of belonging that goes along with this also produces feelings of safety in anxiety provoking situations.
4. The team is rewarded if all its members demonstrate that they have learned the new collective values. For example, it is widespread practice on leadership programmes for some admired senior executive to attend the end of the programme to listen to team presentations. Teams demonstrating that they have learned what they were supposed to learn and so have supposedly become more creative are rewarded with the praise of the admired senior executive.
5. The new values or points of view are presented in many different forms such as lectures and informal discussions among team members, or games and exercises.

As these techniques are applied, Schein holds that people experience cognitive redefinition as concepts and values are semantically redefined and standards, or anchors, of judgment are altered. The techniques are all used on many leadership programmes and at least some of them are used on most. The question, however, is whether they do produce changes in what people believe.

Richard Ofshe argues that reform programs operating according to the techniques of coercive persuasion have a very poor record of actually changing the beliefs of individuals, so that on this criterion they are abject failures and a waste of money. But on the basis of other criteria, he says they are impressive. They are impressive in their ability to re-socialise people (who he calls targets) so preparing them to conduct themselves in an appropriate way for the roles they are to take up in their organisations. For him, reform programs are role-training regimes.

So, what programmes of coercive persuasion accomplish is not what Schein seems to claim. He argues that generative learning requires coercive persuasion. However, what he discovered in his study of prisoners subjected to coercive persuasion was that only some people succumb to it. Most adapted on the surface and waited for freedom. I would argue that the same pattern occurs in leadership and other change programmes. The participants show all the appearance of making the change in public but in private they display well developed skills of resistance . I think Ofshe’s observation is insightful. The programmes do not really change the beliefs of many people but they do train them in the public display of willing acceptance. Ofshe is correct, I think, in regarding them as role-training exercises and I will suggest, in the next section, that the roles people are trained for in leadership and many other types of training programme are those of the agents of disciplinary power.

Taking account of these points on coercive persuasion leads one to a very different conceptualisation of what role leadership and leadership training actually plays in our society. Despite leaders being presented as bringers of change and leadership development as the process of acquiring the skills necessary to bring about change, in fact what is actually happening is that leaders are bringers of order and continuity and leadership development programmes are training them in the kind of conformity required to sustain order and continuity. Foucault analyses the evolution of the modern disciplinary society and identifies the techniques of disciplinary power: hierarchical observation, normalising judgments and corrective training. I would argue that today’s leaders are the agents of discipline in society and processes of training large number of managers as leaders is a key activity sustaining the disciplinary society. Leadership and leadership development programmes are far more about order and discipline than they are about change and creativity.

The CMC conference offers a £50 discount for early-bird participants: the joining fee is £450 rather than £500, if you book before the 25th April.

If you would like to come at the reduced rate, please download, complete and return the booking form here: Complexity and Management Conference brochure

About the conference

The eighth annual Complexity and Management Conference of the University of Hertfordshire’s  Business School will take place at Roffey Park starting at 7pm on Friday 3rd June 2011 and ending after lunch on 5th June. This event is a very informal conference where prepared papers and presentations are minimal and serve the purpose of introducing themes for discussion amongst conference participants.  In organising this conference we seek to maximise the possibility of discursive conversation. The original purpose of the conference was to provide an opportunity for past, present and possible future participants on our MA/Doctor of Management programme to discuss their experience and ideas with one another, but over the years leaders, managers, consultants and academics who are interested in our work on complexity and emergence in organisations have also attended the event making it very vibrant and diverse.

This year’s theme

Much contemporary organisational literature is highly abstract and is replete with tools and techniques. There is very little acknowledgement that organisations arise from the interactions of thinking, feeling bodies engaged in conflict and co-operation in a particular context at a particular time. Somehow this central aspect of human experience is covered over, or denied. Does this partly arise because of the appeal to scientific method and the idea of management as science, with the assumption of the detached, objective observer? What has contributed to our suspicion of subjective experience and how possible is it to talk of ‘embodiment’ without in turn mystifying what we are talking about, or perhaps instrumentalising the body as a tool of management, in effect reaffirming Cartesian subjectivity rather than challenging it?

In this year’s conference we have decided to address what we consider this neglect of this core aspect of human relating and have invited Dr Ian Burkitt of Bradford University (Social Selves: Theories of Self and the Body, London: Sage, 2008; Bodies of Thought, London: Sage: 1999) to help us initiate our discussions on Saturday morning 4^th June. In the afternoon Professor Ralph Stacey will respond to Dr Burkitt’s keynote with some reflections of his own. On Sunday morning Dr Karen Norman and Professor Henry Larsen will talk about a piece of work they have undertaken together using theatre and improvisation with groups of managers.

There will be parallel sessions following the keynotes, 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 is welcome to do so.

You can download the conference brochure here: Complexity and Management Conference brochure

Contact Chris at  c.mowles@herts.ac.uk or Angela Digby a.m.r.digby@herts.ac.uk  for payment details.

Systems intelligence (SI), according to the authors, is when a subject engages ‘successfully and productively with holistic feedback mechanisms of her environment.’ SI is exhibited by an individual operating in ‘systems settings’, and is influenced both by the positive psychology literature and by systems thinking. Thus SI ‘looks for positive opportunities and personal improvement actions’. According to the authors a system does not have to be an abstract ‘thing’ with a boundary. It might be ‘the context’, ‘the situation’, or ‘the environment’, amounting to ‘an integrated whole on a time axis in the process of becoming’. ‘System’ for the authors, is a meaningful unit of analysis worthy of attention, which calls out intelligent engagement. The authors claim a ‘liberal, broad and general interpretation of the notion of a ‘system’’, and not one that necessarily conceives of the subject in any way ‘outside’ the system. The broad notion of system is a helpful conceptual tool and human beings are natural systematisers: indeed, being able to systematise makes us human, according to the authors.

In their critical appraisal of the body of thought known as complex responsive processes of relating, the authors of the paper consider that it is very helpful at explaining the ‘process’ aspects of organisation, particularly at the local level. It is unnecessary to dismiss systems approaches as being unhelpful, however, because they are useful learning tools. No entities called systems need to exist for systemic thinking to prove useful, and the helpfulness or otherwise of any approach can only be judged by the consequences of that approach. To abandon systems thinking is to throw the baby out with the bath water. The authors argue that humans are capable of adopting several perspectives at the same time, so complex responsive processes and systems thinking could both be used. Complex responsive processes shares a similar starting point with SI since both are concerned with ‘soft, subjectivistic, first person aspect of the human endowment as fundamental to the human systemic engagement.’

The differences that the authors perceive between the two theories is that SI is concerned with the ‘logic of what makes things work’ and takes the form of ‘actual productive actions as the most important goal.’ They conclude the ‘effective management action is likely to involve processes of systems thinking’. Complex responsive processes are best suited to understand power and values in social interaction, while systems thinking would better equip a manager to look at the long term consequences of a plan. For the authors it is intelligent to approach one’s environment and context in terms of systems, but to do so flexibly and with multiple perspectives. In the end though the authors believe that management is the search for actions that lead to results.

In appraising this critical assessment of complex responsive processes it might be helpful to start with areas of agreement. So I would agree with the authors that in local interactions between managers, they will often be forming and discussing abstractions using systems thinking. Ralph dealt with this point comprehensively in chapter 6 of his most recent book Complexity and Organisational Reality in the section on immersing and abstracting: immersed in their local interactions managers will be using first and second order abstractions to communicate about the process of organising. It is impossible to avoid using abstractions. I agree with the authors that humans are capable of great feats of systematisation, which have been enormously helpful in our development and it would not be possible or helpful to abandon systematising forms of thought. But it is helpful to think about when they are useful and when they are not.

Here I am moving into areas of disagreement: it is not true that human beings are only capable of systematisation, or that this is necessarily their most important human quality. To privilege our capacity for systematising is to assert that abstract representations are more important than and prior to the experience from which it is drawn. It is this move that the body of thought we in the Complexity Research Group call complex responsive processes of relating is challenging fundamentally. Drawing on Mead we are pointing to human beings’ equally important and paradoxical capacity for the constant orientation and receptiveness to other selves and otherness, to the flux, change and the continuous evolution of our interactions with others and our surroundings. It is precisely this orientation that a fixation with systems thinking is in danger of covering over. This is what we see as being largely absent in what we are calling the dominant discourse of management, which is mostly concerned with what is static, fixed, reified and subject to further abstraction, manipulation and instrumenatlisation. Indeed, I would argue that this is exactly what the authors have done with the theory of complex responsive processes of relating: they have re-presented a complex set of ideas as a sub-set of systems thinking. Instead of encountering and staying with the difference the body of thought brings, the experience of otherness, the idea that patterning leads to more patterning, the authors are at pains to restate it in terms familiar to them, as another manifestation of systems thinking, and in doing so they lose much that is paradoxical and radical.

The authors constantly split out what we in the Complexity Research Group try to hold in dialectical tension. While SI is exhibited by an individual oriented to their positive and results-oriented engagement with a system, complex responsive processes enquires into the emergence of self amongst other selves in interactions that hold the potential for both positive and negative experience. Where the authors claim that taking a complex responsive processes perspective might be helpful for thinking about local interaction, but systems thinking is most appropriate for longer term strategising, we would argue that managers are constantly reinterpreting the past in the present in anticipation of a radically uncertain future: the past, the present and the future are present at the same time. Where SI is concerned for an individual manager to focus on improvement and actions that lead to results, whatever results might mean, from the perspective of complex responsive processes a manager would be interested in finding better explanations of what she and others are doing together. These explanations would lead to further enquiry and more explanations, where ‘results’ might be a by-product but could only be understood retrospectively. Where the authors understand complex responsive processes as being a process-oriented body of thought, thus suggesting that process is somehow a dynamic separable from what managers are doing, we would argue that what are generally understood as task and process are two aspects of the same phenomenon. Where the authors argue for managers to adopt both systems thinking and complex responsive processes as various methods a manager might choose, we would argue that managers’ ability to choose is limited because for the most part they are absorbed in the game they are playing with others. From the perspective of complex responsive processes of relating we recommend that rather than reaching for systemic tools to make sense of what is happening, managers ask each other what they think is going on right now between them in the living present. Why is it necessary, and how is it helpful to understand everything as a system?

In privileging the individual manager and the ‘intelligence’ she ‘has’, and in claiming that she is free to choose a variety of different tools to understand organisations, in arguing that she should be oriented to results, improvement, and the positive, there is little in SI that I recognise as different from mainstream management thinking. Additionally, there is very little basis to reconcile this way of thinking with complex responsive processes of relating which is concerned with the social, the paradoxical, the emergent and the uncertain.

In making the case for systems thinking the authors extend the boundary of their own definition of a system to make it almost meaningless. If a ‘system’ can mean a situation, a context or an environment, need not have a definable boundary, and can be imagined in what way is it helpful to continue to call it a system? It seems to me that the insistence that every aspect of human experience can be represented in systems terms covers over the very human interactions that the authors claim is best understood using systems thinking. Take the example of the mother/baby dyad which the authors describe thus: ‘Already in infancy, SI involves nonverbal and implicit ways of relating to the system’. This highly abstract way of describing the embodied, affective, dialectical communicative interaction between a mother and her infant, as both relate to each other, gives the best example of the shortcomings of systems thinking of which complex responsive processes of relating offers a radical critique.

On the one hand there is something very important about the appeal to affect and ideals. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt noted, collective promise-making is a very powerful way of disposing of the future as though it were the present, of beginning things anew and imagining a better world. Unfortunately very often the appeal to the religious imagination in turn becomes schematised and reduced and is understood in a highly individualised way as a ‘tool’ of management. There is a great potential for manipulation. For example, there are training courses on visionary and inspirational leadership and endless management books offering advice on the same. Currently it would be impossible to apply for a job in many fields without claiming to be ‘passionate’ about whatever the job on offer is. Although being passionate and visionary are regarded on the one hand as exceptional requirements, they are demanded routinely in everyday situations. Noble sentiments have become banal, another tool in the toolkit of aspiring managers and leaders. The proliferation of advice on how to be authentically passionate and succeed in management testifies to the fact that authenticity is difficult to fabricate – you have to practice quite hard at it.

I was reminded of confluence of passion, inspiration and business by Steve Shapin’s most recent book The Scientific Life: a Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation . The book is a contemplation by Shapin, a historian of science, on the degree to which ‘the personal equation’ has disappeared from science and industry. In late modernity, he argues, many would argue the whole swathes of social life have been brought under the sway of impersonal reason. Planners and bureaucrats, with their tools and techniques, can plan the future rationally, can plan for innovation and spontaneity and can close the reflexive circle by giving rational accounts of ourselves as social beings and how we function. However Shapin gives some very good examples of how affect and idealisation persist, particularly at the interface between science and business. For all those concerned in the undertaking of making money from scientific ideas, moral claims are as important as economic ones. The quality of scientific thought and rigour are not sufficient for a scientist eliciting investment from Venture Capitalists (VCs). The scientists are encouraged by the supposedly hard-headed VCs themselves to offer visions of transformation:

‘…public displays of the personal virtues of passion, commitment and vision are looked for as signs that entrepreneurs have a chance of success. Asked about money motivation among entrepreneurs, a VC responded: ‘The guy who wants to do it for money? He’s going to bail on you when the going gets tough and everyone’s going to have tough going. These things are built by people who have a passion. You need people who want to change the world.’

Shapin visited one of the universities which host scientists seeking capital as part of his research. University staff were coaching potential entrepreneurs to convey passion and excitement about what they are doing, with staff advising them to abandon dry and academic language and translate their nervousness into bodily gestures of excitement as they give their PowerPoint presentations to potential investors. Presenters are not just required to describe vision and commitment, they are asked to perform it.

Alongside being offered grids, tools and frameworks, it seems to me, contemporary managers and leaders are schooled in the art of artlessness, they are trained to be authentic. How might we think about this persistence of what George Bush senior referred to as ‘the vision thang’ and the fluency with idealisation and affect that contemporary managers and leaders are supposed to have?

In his book A Secular Age, the Candadian philosopher Charles Taylor argues that increased secularism which began with the Enlightenment has not lessened our imaginative desire to be part of something greater than ourselves, to the degree that we are now living in what he calls a ‘culture of authenticity’ where everyone is expected to commit to personal development and self-expression of our inner nature, where nature is taken to be a source of truth. Earlier, in his book Sources of the Self Taylor dates this tendency which he calls ‘expressivism’ to the Romantic period. The Romantics had a reaction against the radical implications of Enlightenment thinking with its ‘classical stress on rationalism, tradition and formal harmony’ and instead accentuated ‘the rights of the individual, of the imagination and of feeling.’ To give imaginative expression to something inchoate, like a feeling or a sense of things, is to draw on an idea of some kind of inner unity with nature, with things as they really are:

Fulfilling my nature means espousing the inner élan, the voice of impulse, And this makes what was hidden manifest for both myself and others. But this manifestation also helps to define what is to be realized. The direction of this élan wasn’t and couldn’t be clear prior to this manifestation.

Taylor notes the strong influence of biological models on the expressivist turn, where the movement is organic rather than mechanistic as each organism is called upon to unfold what is already enfolded in unity with nature. He sees this as something of a rebellion against a world described by cold formulas and calculations, where the world is understood as operating like a machine. He also draws attention to expressivism’s strong appeal to individualism, whereby we can each fulfil our individual destiny which is unique to us by getting in touch with our true nature.

In his enquiry into what has become of our religious imagination in, Taylor puts forward the idea that the call to passion has arisen as a reaction to an age dominated by disengaged reason:

Now it appears to many that desiccated reason cannot reach the ultimate truths in any form. What is needed is a subtler language which can make manifest the higher or the divine…Deeply felt personal insight now becomes our most precious resource.

If we were to take up Taylor’s argument we may better understand how the professionalization of management and the appeal to the religious imagination may go hand in hand. The contemporary management discourse on the importance of passion, belief, excitement and faith in the organisational mission as revealed through prophetic insight by the leader, or the top management team is a way of resacralising the workplace as a site of spiritual engagement. It is a foil to understanding the process of organising merely as an activity realising targets and outcomes, placing this activity in the expression of a higher truth. Employees are invited to imagine their efforts as contributing to a greater, truer, noble undertaking.

At the same time, leaders who are able to articulate this immanent vision are clearly very special people who need to need to be highly rewarded for their ability to articulate their true nature, which is aligned with Nature itself. Equipped with tools and techniques, leaders are also prophets and seers offering ‘change we can believe in’.

Since they do talk about using tools and techniques and since they do believe that certain prescriptions lead to success I am interested in trying to understand the nature of this talk. After all, we know that in organisational life we strike a strategic pose and talk publicly in particular ways while actually accomplishing what we accomplish in ways different to our public transcripts. So the interesting question becomes one of understanding what people are doing when they apply or use a management tool and what the organisational consequences of doing so are. I am also arguing that it is a false dichotomy to split thinking and doing since thinking is action and doing reflects past patterns of thought modified by a little or a lot of current thinking. What I am trying to do is hold the paradox of thought and action, theory and practice. I am exploring how it is to avoid dualities in thought and hold the paradox. However, I do agree there is an implicit prescription in advocating reflection instead of application. So what I want to do in this blog is explore a more complex understanding of organisational life and then look at what tools and techniques actually are and what part they play in organisational life.
The French sociologist, Bourdieu, makes a distinction between two modes of experience and thought. In the first mode, human agents are thought of as acting on the basis of reasons so that once the reason is found, the coherent set of principles governing a series of actions becomes apparent and it is possible to see pattern in what might have looked like random actions. Bourdieu contrasts this notion of the reasonable agent with one in which agents act on the basis of interests. He relates this to the notion that in their ordinary activities, agents are engaged in a game which they take seriously and regard as worth the effort because they have an interest in it; they are invested in it and they participate in the game, recognizing the game and the stakes. In this mode, they are pre-occupied by the game rather than acting rationally to achieve goals. We acquire our interest in particular social games through our living in the society we are born into. Our minds are structured by this social experience which is imprinted in our bodies as a feel for the game and to talk about mapping and measuring of our minds is to immediately obscure our understanding of the thoroughly social nature of mind and self. Agents are caught up in various social games and have the dispositions to recognize the stakes at play. They are invested in the stakes and play the game with each other through enacting the habitual social customs and ways of thinking into which they are born which some call habitus. People acquire their interest in particular social games through living in the society they are born into. Their minds are structured by this social experience which is imprinted in their bodies as a feel for the game.
Of course, much of this is unconscious as agents embody schemes of perception on the basis of which they act rather than setting objectives for what they do. Agents are absorbed in their affairs and act in ways which are inscribed in the game itself. A feel for the game develops in a history of developing the skill of anticipating the moves of others, so achieving some mastery over the unfolding game. Social agents have “strategies” which only rarely have a true strategic intention.
This is a very different way of thinking about what we are doing in organisations where we usually think it is all about projects and the pursuit of aims and objectives. What is actually going on is far more complex than simple notions of using tools and techniques or naïve notions of following simple rules. It makes no sense to talk about applying anything to the action of participating with others in the game. The dominant discourse on change in organizations focuses attention almost entirely on the design and the plan, the tools and the techniques, so encouraging us to ignore how we are actually pre-occupied by the organizational game. We are absorbed in the affairs of the organization in our local interactions, conducting skilful performances which give us some mastery of organizational continuity and change. However, we could be covering over the limitations to such mastery by focusing attention only on the design, the aims, the tools and the techniques. While the individual with the capacity for powerful individual agency exercised in a rational, detached way is what is publicly presented, the reality of ordinary interaction is that of participating, largely unconsciously, in games, in the habitus in which we live. So what is the nature of this participation in the game?
We can only interact with each other locally and that local interaction always reflects population-wide generalizations and idealizations most of which we are not conscious of. I use the term immersing to describe what we are doing as we interact locally, pre-occupied in the game, in ways which unconsciously reflect the generalizations and idealizations, the habitus, of our society. The word immerse means to be absorbed in some interest or situation where one devotes oneself fully to some interest or situation, throwing oneself into that situation and to engaging others to be so immersed. Immersing is an activity of bringing together, filling in, expanding, elaborating, complexifying and taking into account greater detail and diversity. It is our pre-occupation with the game, our experience of the habitus in which we live, our direct involvement in our ordinary, everyday local interactions. Such activity, essentially ideology-based acts of choice, inevitably generates conflict.
Immersing, therefore, refers to activities taking the form of:
• the ordinary, everyday politics of life. This is our ongoing negotiation with others, including our attempts to persuade and manipulate those others using ‘techniques’ ranging from the use of rhetorical ploys to the use of emotional blackmail and the ‘techniques’ of domination.
• the patterning of the power relations between people. Patterns of power relations between people reflect the dynamics of ideologically-based group inclusion and exclusion which establishes individual and collective identities.

• acts of politeness and face-saving. Politeness is essential to maintaining good social relations and takes the form of political acts required to gain the cooperation of others, especially powerful others. Civility requires us to smile and exchange routine pleasantries, especially when the other has the power to harm or reward us, even if we privately despise that other. In local interaction people are testing, challenging, supporting and undermining so as to shift or sustain patterns of power relations. Mostly we do this by avoiding direct confrontational challenges but use instead socially acceptable, polite ways involving humour, irony, sarcasm and social banter. How to do this will depend upon the evolved habitus, the generalizations and abstractions across a population.
• practicing the arts of resistance . Subordinate groups of people in organizations often have to adopt a strategic pose when dealing with the more powerful in which they express compliance in the ‘public transcripts’ (legitimate themes in the dominant discourse) couched in terms of abstractions. But they also find other ways of expressing what they think and feel amongst themselves in ‘hidden transcripts’ (shadow themes) in which they block, subvert and countermand the abstract categories imposed upon them. The contradictions and tensions expressed in the hidden transcripts, and between them and the strategic pose, have a major impact on what happens.
• denial, scapegoating and blaming as defensive ways of living with the anxieties of ordinary, everyday life. Talking in terms of second order abstractions may serve the purpose of providing social defences against anxiety in organizations;
• the spontaneity and improvisation required of us if we are to respond appropriately in the unique contingent situations we so often face.
• the attachment to others, as well as the empathy with, and trust in, those others, which enables us to find fulfilment in what we do and also aggression, competition, rivalry, mistrust and hatred.
• the creative imagination of alternative ways of living and doing and the inevitable destruction of others’ ways of living.
• altruism and generosity as well as selfishness and meanness.

So in the local interaction of making the general specific and the ideal functional in conversation with each other, in their pre-occupation with the game, people are negotiating their next actions in ways that have emerged and continue to emerge and evolve as narrative and propositional themes of power, identity and ideology.

However, we also have the capacity to become aware of our preoccupation with the game, to reflect upon our practical action, which expresses the habitus in which we live, in an effort to make conscious sense of what we are doing. To live simply immersed in the above ways would be to live a life devoid of all thought, reflection or meaning making. Thought, reflection and meaning-making are all activities of abstracting, the opposite of the activities of immersing. The most common understanding of abstract is that it denotes theory as the opposite of something practical but in its original sense, it means ‘to draw away from, to separate from’. All forms of thinking about and reflecting upon experience necessarily involve abstracting or drawing away from that experience which becomes an object of perception, not simply the subject of experience. Abstractions are articulations of both local and global patterns of interaction. They are attempts to describe habitus and the game rather than just participate in them. However, such activities of articulation always occur in local interaction and it is in such local interaction that the meaning of these abstractions emerges. Experience is thus an inseparable interplay between the activities of immersing and abstracting, of participating and reflecting, in which each is simultaneously forming and being formed by the other.

Since humans have always sought to make meaning they must also always have been paradoxically immersing and abstracting from experience in explorative forms of reflecting on the generalization and idealization of experience and articulating them in narrative and philosophy. People made, and continue to make sense of the population-wide patterns of interaction they lived in through the stories they told and the myths they recited from generation to generation. We still articulate the general / ideal in stories, rumours, and fantasies about distant powerful figures despite the social and individual evolution of the past centuries. The point about the narrative forms of our articulations is that they stay close to our experience of local interaction in that they provide descriptions and accounts of that local interaction itself, even in mythical form. Articulations of these generalization and idealizations in narrative form involves selecting and simplifying and in that sense, abstracting from experience. However, the selection is not only simplification but also elaboration. Narrative articulations of experience require interpretation in particular contingent situations. Their aim is not simplicity, standardization and uniformity, as we shall see below it is in later forms of abstracting, but rather their aim is the opening up of accounts of experience for greater exploration in order to develop deeper understanding.

However, the conscious simplifying generalization of narrative does amount to abstracting from, that is, simplifying and generalizing, the detail of each uniquely experienced situation. Insofar as the characters and situations in stories are stereotypes’, narratives abstract from and categorise the detail of experience. Furthermore, thought is essentially an act of categorizing and generalizing. So people do not think entirely in terms specific objects such as this table or that table but instead they think in terms of a general and so abstract category of tables. There were always philosophers and theologians who articulated formal simplifications, generalizations and categories of experience concerned with perceiving, knowing and acting ethically. Metaphysics involved abstracting from unique experience to signify hidden causes. Philosophy sought to explain the experience of perception, of knowing and relating in abstract modes that opened up exploration and interpretation so elaborating further reflection on experience.
Human thought, therefore, has always been paradoxical acts of immersing and abstracting at the same time and for most of human history it is the narrative form of abstraction that has been most prominent. It is only over the last few centuries, however, that social evolution has produced modern agents who engage in a kind of generalizing about their experience, articulated primarily in propositional forms, which was not available to pre-modern individuals. What emerged we could say was a particularly rigorous form of simplification, a stronger form of abstracting from the experience of local interaction than before. In addition to generalizing through the identification of categories of experience, articulated in narratives and philosophical arguments, which we might call first order abstracting from the experience of local interaction, there was an added generalization expressed in the mapping and modelling of relationships between the categories, which we might call second order abstracting. This is a form of simplification by abstraction which manipulates the categories of first order abstractions and therefore operates at yet another remove from direct experience. This abstraction from the abstraction of categories of experience makes it easier to split the second order abstraction off from the experience through reification and so lose the sense of the paradox of immersing and abstracting at the same time. Second order abstracting activity seeks to simplify, standardize and measure so reducing elaboration, multiple interpretations and mystery. The consequent clarity and uniformity makes it much easier to exert some control on the activities of others from a distance.

In our ordinary, everyday local interaction with each other, in which we accomplish all our joint activities, we always have been and still are immersing ourselves in the experience of such interaction and at the same time we are abstracting from that experience by simplifying, generalizing and categorizing in the forms of narrative and philosophy as first order abstracting, and also in the modern world we are frequently articulating generalizations / idealizations of the categories of experience as maps and models which can be described as second order abstracting. Local interaction in the modern world, therefore, necessarily includes the formulation and interpretation of second order abstractions as one aspect of what we are doing together in organizations. Certainly, to be included in groups of managers one must be a skilled participant in the dominant discourse conducted in terms of second order abstractions. In our immersion, our pre-occupation in the game of ordinary, everyday organizational life, we are together meaningfully patterning our interactions by drawing upon both the first (narrative) and second order (models and maps, tools and techniques) abstractions which have evolved in our community and in so doing we are together changing the abstractions in our local interaction. We are largely unconscious of how we are relying upon abstractions and find it difficult to notice just how readily we reify them and so cover over our pre-occupation in the game.

This activity of second order abstracting involves:
• Objectifying and categorizing. Here phenomena from celestial bodies down to social patterns, modes of thinking and individual human feelings are placed in well-defined bounded ‘spaces’ where differences within categories are obliterated and all difference is located at the boundary.
• Measuring the quantitative aspects of these categories (and nowadays the qualitative too by means of quantitative proxies) using standardized measures.
• Averaging out differences within categories and interactions between categories.
• Analysing the data so produced using mathematical, statistical and other analytical techniques.
• Selecting regularities and stabilities and forming hypotheses about relationships between entities, particularly causal connections often involving, by deduction, some hidden mechanism or whole.
• Modelling, forecasting, specifying probabilities with given distributions of variances, mapping, articulating rules and schemas.
• Prescribing rules, laws and moral norms.
• Setting targets, planning, monitoring and envisioning.

The scientific method is the paradigmatic example of the activity of second order abstracting. It is also an essential activity for governing the modern state and modern organizations because its aim to standardise and so remove diversity to make activities legible to people at some central point, so enabling some degree of central control.

However, standardising, mapping and modelling inevitably leaves behind real people, replacing them with simplified averages. So the activity of second order abstracting produces articulations of generalizations and idealizations in relation to hypothetical wholes which have the effect of focusing on what is believed to be important across a whole population and this could and often does render invisible the experience of local interaction. This is by no means a criticism because without the activity of second order abstracting there could be no modern state or policies of improvement, nor would it be possible to govern large organisations. In reflecting an ideology of order, rationality, harmony, design, control and improvement, the activity of second abstracting does change the world and is essential for the kind of lives we live in modernity. However, second order abstracting does render rationally invisible the disorder, diversity, deviance, conflict, compromise, manipulation, cheating, trickery, power plays, concealing and revealing of ordinary everyday experience which also changes the world and so also needs to be understood.

The activity of second order abstracting necessarily involves the postulating of an entity outside of our local experience and we easily come to believe that it actually exists, that we can be outside of it, observe it and then ‘move’ it around using various ‘tools and techniques’. This kind of belief in second order abstractions is the foundation of today’s dominant discourse about organizations and management. What is striking about such formulations is just how thoroughly people disappear from view. For example, I recently made a contribution to a program aimed at developing the strategy competence of senior managers at a major international corporation. I listened to the session just before I was due to talk. The session took the form of a report back by small groups on their discussion of a number of case studies of strategic success and failure in other large companies. The conversation ran entirely in terms of abstract entities. Toyota was said to have decided to enter the Chinese market and an intense discussion followed on why Toyota had done this, what China expected in return and whether it had been the ‘right’ strategy or not. The whole discussion was purely speculative since none of the discussants, including the presenter, had any involvement with Toyota and few if any had actually been to China. When a particular decision looked puzzling, discussants looked for rational reasons for Toyota having made it and if they could find none they concluded that it had been a mistake. No one ever suggested that we might need to understand the figuration of power relations amongst senior groups of managers at Toyota or that the special interests and private agendas of senior managers and their Chinese counterparts might have had something to do with the decisions.

Second order abstracting is a major activity in organizations today. It is also a major aspect of organizational research and management education. Economic, industrial, and organizational trends are abstractions. Strategy discussions are abstraction. Vision and mission statements are not only abstract generalizations but also idealizations of those abstractions. Targets set for public sector organizations, or any other organization for that matter, are abstractions. The tools and techniques of management are abstraction. However, to label as second order abstractions so many of the activities that take up peoples’ time in any organization is not to denigrate or dismiss such activities. Large scale change and improvement does require second order abstraction but taken on its own, it cannot accomplish change or improvement. The second order abstraction must be interpreted in terms of local contingent situations in the everyday practical activities of people in local situations if they are to have the potential for beneficial effect. Many organizations create climates of fear which suppress local interaction. We have a tendency to become so immersed in the abstractions of models and plans that we collapse the practical art of local interaction into a stereotypical activity called ‘application’ and ‘implementation’ and as a result, we lose sight of what is happening until it is too late. It is not difficult to see the strength of this point in modern corporations. For example, major banks do have systems of regulation and control which should prevent rogue traders taking financial positions which jeopardize the whole organization. However, these regulations can easily be re-interpreted, ignored or circumvented as we repeatedly see. To think that it is enough to set up an abstract system is to be in constant danger of unpleasant surprises. What is called for then is a renewed attention to everyday forms of experience and how particular first and second order abstractions are being taken up in ways which might be helpful but also in ways which might be harmful. Shifting the focus to local interaction will open up the possibility of reflecting on the usefulness or otherwise of the abstracting activity we now so blindly undertake in completely taken-for-granted ways.

Second order abstractions, especially those claiming to accord with science, are very powerful rhetorical ploys in the modern world and can certainly be used as techniques of domination but they do also create greater ‘visibility’ from a distance and so make some forms of improvement possible. The ability to express and utilize second order abstractions, which reflect powerful modern ideologies of control and improvement, is of major importance in the inclusion-exclusion dynamics of modern organizations.