Organizational Thinking

In reading Burke on organizational change I am struck once again by the need for clear epistemological foundations in thinking about organizations. For me the foundational questions to ask are: what is an organization and how does our role as 'observer' affect this perception?

What is an organization? And to answer this question we have to ask questions about observation, objectivity, and the possibilities for reasonable interpretations. So it seems we have to settle on two matters. First - what of the 'ontological' fact of an organization? Second, what is the role of the observer in this regard? In my view a great place to start is with the work of Maturana and Varela. However, their interpretation is best applied in the realm of biology and there is much to consider in translating it to the world of organizations in general.

The central point here is that we think about the organization as problematic in terms of its 'objective' existence. As individuals we see the organization through the lens of a story or narrative. I use these terms with much more confidence than I have in the past as I am more familiar with the idea that our perceptions and ideation about the world is an ongoing process that keeps itself going through a self-referentially grounded narrative. We talk (and think or feel) our way through the complexity of our ongoingness.

This then gets us into the realm of the 'observer'. As storytellers we take a stance toward our experience (of which the organization at whatever level is a part) and cast and recast it as an object or 'story element - character or setting' in our story. This narrative is partial as we can only take our perspective. Now it is true that experience and the absorption of others' experience through reading and other media can 'fill out' our perspective and help us a get a more ecologically valid view of our story element but it still remains partial.

This brings me to the issue of how we learn about, for example, a theory of change in organizations. We typically read about or hear this 'story' and may or may not take it as a definitive or valid model of that which we want to know. This makes me think of the whole notion of dimensions, levels, and categories. The literature on organizations and on change are full of 'models' that contain 'levels' or 'dimensions' that purport to represent some crucial aspect of an organization’s structure (e.g., organization chart) or process (process flow map). This literature (narratives) and the narratives flowing out of it have been until relatively recently grounded in realist and empiricist ontology and an epistemology holding the observer as unproblematic (as long as he or she conducted their experiments appropriately). That is changing however but not quite at the level of most of our individual stories about the world. Most of us are still comforted by models that contain dimensions, levels, and categories that map nicely to theories of causation in a straightforward (and I mean linear!) way. Myself included. It is mostly the way I see the world.

So what does this mean for scholarship or the exercise of curiosity?

Clearly the narrative is changing - and the change (oddly) is coming out of the very bastions of conservative thought (e.g., Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Yale, etc.) whose rank and reputation have been built on the edifice of these same ontological and epistemological certitudes. However, I may just be projecting here. The point I am making is that the 'new' science is in the air and beginning to have it affect on individuals. To wit my emphasis on Maturana and the 'Observer' issues.

What is required to conceptualize the 'organization' (in my view) is a relatively strong background in both the natural and the social sciences as well as a huge capacity for ambiguity and confusion. This is so because of the need to translate certain techniques from the domain of the 'hard' sciences to the 'new', and still 'soft', social sciences. So instead of importing Cartesian & Newtonian science methods into a social sciences framed as a machine or mechanism we now are understanding that non-linear dynamics modeling organizations as 'organisms in an ecology' gives us a better read on what is happening at work! And of course within this new social science the notion of the person and of subjectivity has become a central preoccupation. We participate in the story that we tell!

So, the issue for me is to come to grips with this to the extent that I can tell and hear the story as interesting, entertaining, and meaningful.

What I didnt' get into here and I probably should have is the question of the 'model'. Right off the bat I think of a representation or a Jamesion 'percept' - or what Bohm wrote of as a thought disguised as a perception. So our 'models' present to us what is familiar and reasonable as a likely picture of what things are really like. And the model 'model' does that before we even know that we are doing it! And this is changing too... our models of models have to change.