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Social Constructionist Challenge to Representational Knowledge
Implications for Understanding Organization Change
The field of Organization Development and Action Research emerged in the 1940s at the height of the Industrial Age. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the mindset of those who designed the foundational OD interventions was part of the larger ethos of Industrial Age thinking inherited from the Enlightenment tradition. This chapter will outline the precepts of modernist thinking that grew out of the Enlightenment and how the legacy of several of these notions informed the early practice and theories associated with OD. Having established the influence of those ways of thinking on mid- twentieth-century managerial and organizational thought, the chapter next explores how many of those Enlightenment beliefs have been challenged since the 1960s from several perspectives that have come under the umbrella term “social constructionism.” The chapter concludes with a discussion of how more recent tenets of social constructionism challenge the earlier premises and practices, while proposing new vistas for the theory and practice of Organization Development and Change, particularly as these ideas are embodied in dialogical practices.
Enlightenment Tradition: A Representational Theory of Knowledge
Many of the assumptions we have inherited and still operate from regarding knowledge and learning today are products of the Enlightenment tradition that began in the mid- to late seventeenth century in western Europe. Enlightenment thinkers claimed that genuine knowledge is valuable for its own sake; objective knowledge could be obtained through experience and individual reason. That is one of the reasons the Enlightenment is also referred to as the Age of Reason—a far cry from the previous Scholastic thinkers who insisted that only the ordained (priests, royalty, guild masters) were mediators of true knowledge. This shift in philosophical thinking made possible a radical egalitarianism—the notion that using the appropriate methods of experience and reason makes truth available to each person—a clear precursor to Action Research as it came to be developed by the early OD pioneers of the last century.
Largely regarded as the father of modern philosophy, René Descartes (1596–1650) is also usually credited with initiating the Enlightenment through the publication of his Meditations on First Philosophy (1647) where, among other topics, he articulated a “logic of mathematics” that would be the bedrock of the appropriate method to attain objectively true knowledge. Descartes had heard of Galileo’s new discoveries about the universe using a telescope, and became interested in understanding the methods by which one can extend knowledge. He began by questioning how one differentiates between appearance and certainty. He famously posited a dualist (mind/body), rationalist epistemology wherein individual minds are capable of “knowing” the external world. This was the beginning of the scientific age and the natural light of reason. For Descartes the most important skill necessary for developing knowledge is rational thought. Knowledge is the outcome of pure reasoning and careful observation; individuals accumulate objective knowledge when they have access to “facts” and vigorously reason about the observable effects of facts in the external world.
In the Enlightenment tradition, barriers to objectivity, such as desire, bias, motivation (i.e., the body), are to be eliminated. Individuals learn, grow, and develop as they accumulate objective knowledge about the world. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) picked up this thread from Descartes and continued to inquire into the nature of individual reason (Kant, 1781). Kant postulated that when a person has an experience, he or she applies understanding to sensations. Consequently individuals construct their world, but not freely. Instead, individuals draw upon universal categories that form the basic structures of the mind, categories such as constructs of space and time that precede experience. An individual is a transcendental ego that imposes categories on received sensations, which are then recognized and called “experience.” Kant’s influence on subsequent and contemporary thought has been enormous, and from his thinking we have inherited a view of individuals as self-contained, detached, and able to be unbiased, unemotional, independent agents.
Related to these ideas is an important but implicit theory of knowledge that continues to influence the field of organization studies. In the tradition of Descartes and the Enlightenment, it has been termed a representational theory of knowledge—the belief that knowledge occurs when objects in the world are apprehended in the mind and represented through some symbol system (words, images, numbers, etc.). The representational theory assumes the existence of an objective world that is separate from a perceiving subject. Knowledge is therefore predicated on correctly apprehending and then objectively representing what has been observed. Some also refer to this as the “mirror image” theory of knowledge, in which observers seek to reflect an external, objective universe in undistorted ways.
Influence of Enlightenment Thinking on Social Science: Emphasis on Permanence and Accumulating Facts
The social sciences emerged out of the Enlightenment tradition. The philosophers Auguste Comte (1798–1857) and Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) called for a positivist “science of society” that emulated the natural sciences (Comte, 1853). The task of this positivist science was to explain the relationship between the various parts of society as it evolved in progressive stages toward a new social order. By “positivist” they meant that only knowledge derived from applying logical representations to sensory experience was valid. The new social order they imagined was the newly evolving industrial society. Human beings, particularly social engineers, could achieve mastery over natural and social forces in order to create better social worlds. Other thinkers in the Enlightenment tradition became strong proponents of this positivist approach to knowledge building. They extolled the notion of linear and incremental scientific progress that draws upon past experiences and discoveries. Because humans have biases, emotions, and varying skills of perception, techniques for capturing observations independent of the observer (objective, empirical data) were required, and any such data would have to be measured mathematically. These assumptions are summarized in Table 3.1.
The task of social science, then, as of the natural sciences, was to accumulate knowledge from empirical data, to identify recurring, unmalleable, systematic patterns and transhistorical, valid principles to explain permanence amid flux. Thus, the basic orientation of the positivist approach to social science that grew out of the Enlightenment was the search for stable, enduring, predictable relationships, to capture snapshots of social life.
Table 3.1 Key Assumptions of Modernist Thinking
Assumption 1: The internal mind and the external world are separate entities.
Assumption 2: Things need to be observable independent of any particular human agent, and documented in the language of mathematics. (This is taken for granted and undeniable as to the way to uncover the true nature of the way things are.)
Assumption 3: It is possible to know the objective world when we are able to correctly measure and represent things.
The social sciences in the twentieth century significantly expanded these ideas and ways of thinking by advancing the underlying assumptions that studies should build upon prior knowledge to formulate hypotheses and use quantitative methods to measure social and psychological processes. This led to researchers using surveys and questionnaires to uncover aggregate differences between classes of individuals, groups, and organizations. The findings were then used to emphasize the importance of persisting structures of mind, group, organization, or society as a whole.
Organization Studies: Structural-Functional Orientation
As part of the social sciences, the field of organization studies has inherited and legitimized the Enlightenment approach to knowledge. Researchers often use empirical methods such as surveys and questionnaires that uncover aggregate differences between classes of individuals and groups. The assumption is that below the surface of appearances and individual particularities, there are deeper permanent structures—regularities that can be explained in terms of cause and effect. The search for enduring structures, regularities, and patterns among the contingencies of observable events has led social scientists to pursue programs of research that seek to provide the last word, to solve problems once and for all, to find the answer. Researchers assume there are objective facts that are waiting to be discovered, an assumption that will be challenged by social constructionism.
For example, building upon the sociology of Durkheim (1938, first published in French in 1895), Talcott Parsons (1937), arguably the father of the field of organization studies, furthered the ideology of functionalism, later to be termed structural functionalism. This is the view that social structures are patterns shaped by imperatives to adapt toward the maintenance of social order. Parsons proposed that social organizations should be understood in terms of self-maintaining, homeostatic systems with specific mechanisms that support the internal stability of society. Parsons acknowledged that humans are capable of voluntary action that might change structures, but the structures tend to persist. Parsons’s and structural functionalism’s influence on the field of organization studies remains very strong. As Gouldner (1970) argued, this orientation has led to an implicit, if not explicit, favoring of stability and order, a value that resonated in the post–World War II western world.
It is easy, then, to see why the measurement-based methodology advocated by F. W. Taylor at the beginning of the twentieth century to help manage and organize the great industrial factories of that era, which he called “scientific management,” was so influential (even if “Taylorism” was controversial in labor-oriented circles then and now). Taylor’s (1911) approach using time and motion studies presumed that human behavior can be translated into mathematics without losing anything significant in the translation. In that regard humans were like extensions of the mechanical tools they employed. For Taylor and his followers, like some in the reengineering movement (Hammer and Champy, 1994), behavior can be captured in mathematics and once it is codified, its legitimacy is unquestioned. Finally, it is worth observing that Taylor was the first modern change theorist, the misgivings of many in OD notwithstanding. Many would argue that Taylor and Taylorism are much more influential in the field of management than Kurt Lewin and his followers (e.g., Weisbord, 2012).
To sum up: the bedrock assumption underlying the Enlightenment-based approach to social science is that there are objective facts that are waiting to be discovered by proper techniques of observation that ensure the mind can see clearly what is external to itself without biases. In the next section we will see that this assumption, and everything that is built upon it, is being challenged by social constructionism.
Challenges to Enlightenment Tradition
Several different challenges to the Enlightenment tradition emerged during the twentieth century from a variety of fields. A few of the most important challenging theorists will be highlighted here. These voices all concluded that it is impossible to document “objective facts” without prior beliefs and theoretical understandings and assumptions (commitments) that link one to others who hold similar understandings and assumptions. What is considered “truth” is historically and contextually contingent. The truths of one era often become the myth of a later one—even when those truths are “scientific.” “Facts” are products of relational processes of agreement among interacting people and “objectivity” is a rhetorical achievement (Gergen, 1994). Objectivity does not stand up for itself, but has to be argued for by proponents using the rhetorical techniques of presentation, persuasion, and documentation that are accepted within the “community of discourse” one is trying to persuade.
In his classic text, Richard Rorty (1979) pointed out the limits of the modernist world view that began with the Enlightenment. He explicitly discusses the impacts of assuming an objective world that can be apprehended and communicated to others in an unbiased fashion (ideally mathematically). He refers to this assumption as the previously mentioned “mirror theory of knowledge,” a variant of the representational theory of knowledge, since accurate knowledge means that the mind accurately reflects characteristics in the world, like a mirror. Others have referred to this view of objective knowledge as the “conduit theory of knowledge,” or the “container theory” (see Reddy, 1993) because it assumes that words actually contain and are the carriers of meaning. In this view, the function of words is to accurately capture the meaning of one’s intention or to represent objective facts about oneself and the external world—in short, to mirror the world. Words and sentences function as conduits that actually contain meaning. We say, “I tried to get my ideas across in words” or “I’ll try to put this into words” as if ideas were things that are packed into a container that will be sent across space to another recipient who unpacks the container and whose mind then receives objective meaning.
One impact of this view of objectively packing and transferring knowledge is apparent in the description of learning as occurring when the riches of knowledge are transferred from the knowing holder and deposited into the empty vault of the learner’s mind. Paulo Freire (1970) called this the “banking theory of education.” The effect of such theories in classrooms can be that teachers see students as blank slates or empty vessels and students see teachers as holders of all knowledge and wisdom. As John Dewey (1938) noticed, this view lends itself to upholding memorization as a primary indicator of learning. Knowledge is received by students and regurgitation from memory is proof that it has been deposited. Students receive, file, and store deposits of knowledge for later use. The learning experience continues to be framed in this way, even with the advent of e-learning and distributed learning; e-learning is depicted in metaphors of commerce and capitalist exchange. Education becomes a commodity that is “delivered”; skills, like objects, are “acquired.” Evaluators measure learning outcomes, knowledge, and skills to see if they have been properly deposited and used in the correct way they had been packaged.
The following section traces the historical roots of social constructionism, outlines a few core tenets, and suggests how it has influenced approaches to organizational change.
Roots of Social Constructionism: The Seminal Influence of Martin Heidegger
We begin with the work of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), acknowledged by many as the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century. Heidegger argued that the Enlightenment thinkers were prisoners of a Cartesian dualism that separates subject and object; because of them (and by extension Plato and Aristotle) we have inherited a misrepresentation of the nature of knowledge and the nature of existence (being) itself. The Enlightenment view of knowledge separates the self-sufficient subject from the independent object, but for Heidegger, existence is holistic. Heidegger (1962, first published in 1927) contends that for any object to show up as salient, both the person and the object must exist against an integrated background context. The background context is a taken-for-granted world of beliefs, tools, and other beings that allows any object to appear as meaningful. A chair is only recognizable and meaningful when observed in the context of all our underlying experiences, beliefs, and assumptions about “chairs” and other tools such as tables, stools, benches, sofas, loveseats, car seats, and footstools. What we take to be knowledge, then, is grounded in a whole set of background assumptions and practices, a preunderstanding that makes any knowing possible. We are “beings-in-the-world,” not distant and detached, but beings always already involved, absorbed, coping with an entire referential totality of equipment, signs, and other beings. When one is absorbed in an activity, one is “being in the world” and barely notices background practices and assumptions. Only when there is a breakdown of some kind does one shift to a detached mode of reflection that typified Descartes’ famous dictum, cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”).
Heidegger calls attention to the importance of our preunderstandings. Preunderstanding is the set of holistic background concepts and skills that gives us familiarity and of practical coping capacities that hang together in coherent, coordinated ways without our consciously thinking about them. These holistic coping skills enable us to get around in the world so as to make sense of what we encounter. Heidegger writes: “Any interpretation which is to contribute understanding, must already have understood what is to be interpreted” (1962, p. 194). This affects all knowing, even that considered “scientific.”
What is the role of language in this way of thinking? Contrary to the conduit or container theory of language, ideas do not exist in the mind prior to being formed (packed) into words and sentences to be sent to another. Instead, we inherit the language (words, metaphors, symbols, etc.) that provides us with the concepts we use to communicate, but that are taken for granted. How does one talk about something if one’s culture or context does not already possess the word? We become part of, join in with, are “thrown” into a way of talking and being that precedes us. One is already embedded within a tradition of being. We inherit a vocabulary that is a way of being, so that our language speaks us rather than us speaking our language. Contrary to the conduit theory of language, ideas do not exist in the mind prior to being formed into speech. The language we inherit is the context that allows concepts to become taken for granted.
Gadamer and Language as Bringing Forth Meaning
Heidegger’s student, Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), considered the founder of modern hermeneutics, extended Heidegger’s thinking by arguing that all knowledge is interpretation. His primary metaphor for knowledge is reading—knowing is like understanding a text. To understand a text is like entering a dialogue with a conversation partner seeking to achieve an agreement on some common ground. Understanding a text is not unlike translation, taking something foreign and articulating it in familiar terms. Like Heidegger, Gadamer challenged the Enlightenment ideal of detached stance. Since knowing is interpretation and translation into familiar words, it is impossible to get outside of one’s prejudice. Prejudice in fact is a condition for understanding. One cannot ever get outside of one’s words in order to grasp a meaning of a text:
We are always already embedded within an historical tradition and cannot get outside of it in order to get a “truer” picture of a text…. There is no place to stand outside of history and/or culture to get a better grasp of things. Even becoming aware of this doesn’t help: the standpoint beyond any standpoint … is pure illusion. (Gadamer, 1960, p. 379)
For Gadamer (1960), every act of perception involves interpretation. There is no objectively intrinsic meaning tied to anything. Interpretation is made possible because of the prejudice and bias that we bring to any encounter. These interpretive biases are the constructs and language forms we inherit from prior social experiences. Because it is the forms of language at our disposal that trigger us to project one interpretation rather than another, Gadamer challenges the rationalist separation between mind and world. The subject’s biases bring forth meaning by anticipation, expectation, and projection. The subject’s interpretation is a retrospective form of sense making in that perception and understanding involve fitting data into familiar patterns of understanding. We “recognize” things that seem to fit our preconceived ideas and categories. Further, these biases are culturally embedded, so that there is no direct access to reality unmediated by language and preconceptions. For example, would it be possible to perceive people practicing tai chi if no such word was in our vocabulary? Without such a word (and, as Wittgenstein would put it, its family resemblances), we might propose various interpretations to construe their activity (could they be dancing?). Each interpretation would carry certain action implications. For example, if we construe them as signaling for aid, we might be drawn to act differently than if we construe them as practicing a martial art. The point is that we meet the world with forms of language already in use and it is these forms that determine what we notice, how we interpret, and how we coordinate action with one another. Without this culturally inherited language, there would be no means by which to make the world intelligible. Gadamer put it succinctly: “It is not so much our judgments as it is our prejudice that constitute our being … the historicity of our existence entails that prejudices, in the literal sense of the word, constitute the initial directedness of our whole ability to experience. Prejudices and biases are our openness to the world. They are simply conditions whereby we experience something—whereby what we encounter says something to us” (1960, p. 9).
Wittgenstein and Language Games
Heidegger and Gadamer present an important challenge: it is language that makes thought possible, not the reverse as the Enlightenment thinkers claimed. There was one other important challenger to the Enlightenment tradition whose contribution must be recognized because of the emphasis on language—Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein (1889–1951) argued that meaning cannot be achieved by isolating the correspondence between word and object free of context. Rather, the meaning of words depends on their context within sets of different patterns of communicative interactions or “language games.” In this view, a word achieves a specific meaning depending on its usage within a systematic pattern of activities. This is why the very same word can have different meanings depending on its placement within a wider network of activity. The word “automobile” has no inherent specific relationship to the concept “automobile” without context. In one case, to utter the word may be useful if I want to get a friend to go for a drive with me. To a mother whose son was killed by a drunk driver, “automobile” signifies a potential weapon. To a nature conservationist, it signifies a threat to the environment. The meaning of the word changes depending on its use within the activities and language patterns that different discourse communities engage in. Chapter 4, on Organizational Discourse, picks up on and extends these more recent ideas about the nature of reality, knowledge, and the role of language.
Gergen and Relational Being
The most recent advances in the field of social constructionism are found in the work of Kenneth Gergen (1935–), a proponent of the strongest form of social constructionist theories. Social constructionism asserts there is no meaningful reality independent of social interactions and agreements. Hence communications (language) and social interaction create what is considered reality, facts, and so forth (Gergen, 2000). The glass contains a certain amount of liquid, but is only half full or half empty by social agreement.
For some, Gergen takes the notion of the social construction of knowledge to its furthest conclusion. He argues that it is impossible to document “objective facts” without some a priori theoretical commitment that links one to others who hold similar commitments. He began his work exploring the constructionist nature of social science discourse, first in the field of social psychology, demonstrating that the language forms and theories generated by social science help to shape the very world under study (Gergen, 1978).
Drawing upon several of the thinkers mentioned above, especially Wittgenstein, Gergen (2009) emphasizes the relational nature of being. Instead of being independent, autonomous beings, who we are and what we know of the world results from relationships; therefore it is impossible to know what anything is outside of the context of a community of beings. Objects of knowledge are not what they are due to the nature of the world, but acquire meaning and salience when one participates in communities, and through the social agreements that occur through time. Since communal agreements make knowledge possible, as we converge and coalesce in relationships, objects in the world take on meanings depending on relational exchanges. So whether something is “true” or “false” depends on the community of discourse in which that question is asked. From such a perspective, looking for “evidence” to “prove” a point of view is of little value. Instead, social constructionists would ask different questions: Who is served by this way of looking at the world? What are the practical consequences of this discourse?
Gergen asks us to consider the practical consequences of operating from the most entrenched of all the Enlightenment assumptions: that individuals are separate beings who create their own experience, and are able to think and feel separately from the relationships, past and present, in which they are embedded. It is not about whether such a point of view is true or false; rather, he argues that the assumption of a “bounded self” creates a world of too much separateness, too much self-oriented and anti-social behavior. He proposes that we think of ourselves, instead, as “relational beings.”
My hope is to demonstrate that virtually all intelligible action is born, sustained, and/or extinguished within the ongoing process of relationship. From this standpoint there is no isolated self or fully private experience. Rather, we exist in a world of co-constitution. We are always already emerging from relationship; we can never step out of relationship; even in our most private moments we are never alone. Further, as I will suggest, the future well-being of the planet depends significantly on the extent to which we can nourish and protect not individuals, or even groups, but the generative process of relating. (Gergen, 2009, p. xv)
Through this lens, Gergen challenges existing structures of knowledge and calls for a radical reimagining of various forms of dialogue in all forums of social life, including the practice of therapy, family life, community governance, and organizational change. This way of knowing or talking about the world is in service of helping a community achieve certain goals. This perspective coalesces with and supports a dialogic framework because the emphasis is on the communal construction of meaning and the open-ended nature of knowledge; it eschews the notion that by using the appropriate diagnostic method one can discern the social dynamics of organizations and change with greater accuracy.
Pillars of Social Constructionism
Taken together, and building on the work of Gergen (1982), Sarbin (1986), and Shotter (1994), the following are key social constructionist ideas.
Meaning Is Created through Social Interactions
The tenets of social constructionism propose that the social and cultural worlds are not given; meaning is created in and through social interaction. Furthermore, there is nothing about the nature of the world itself that determines what is real, authentic, and essentially meaningful. Knowledge is a communal production, not the product of accurate diagnosis or representation. All that is deemed “real” and true emerges in the context of relational exchanges and communities. Even seemingly neutral descriptions are products of relational processes. One might protest: “You mean that table in the corner is not real?” An object may be there, but the meaning of the object is not intrinsic to the object itself. What is in the corner could be a ritualistic place for family gatherings, an altar, a desk, a doorstop, a depository for boxes. It seems that the world exists independently of us, outside of us, waiting for us to see and understand. However, the world we perceive as real is a social achievement reached through what people agree is there to be noticed. Through communication we construct the world in which we live. To say that knowledge is historically and culturally produced means that forms of social life create the conditions that make the world show up in one form rather than another. For practitioners of OD, then, it is important to keep in mind that knowledge depends on perspective; there is no immaculate perception, no direct perception of reality that is unmediated by social and cultural forms. There is no objectively true world apart from some historical-communal perspective.
What Is Good/Right/True Is a Social Agreement
Even the most fundamental notions of good and evil are relationally defined. It is not nature that determines what is “good” or “true.” Rather, what anyone thinks is “good” is a social creation. What is held up as “right” and “moral” always results from social agreements (see MacIntyre, 1981; Bernstein, 1983). Values and ideologies are the creation of community. Even our most benign or neutral descriptions contain some hint of what is considered “good” or “acceptable.” Our descriptions of the world are always embedded in some tradition that prioritizes some version over others. Within any tradition, some versions are favored, some are marginalized. This has implications for OD practitioners, since we must ask ourselves which perspectives are implicitly favored and held up as “good,” and which are marginalized by those we interact with as well as by ourselves.
Our Language and Interactions Are Central to Social Construction
A social constructionist orientation celebrates the dynamic power of language. As Chapter 4 will discuss in greater detail, organizations are made, sustained, and transformed through discourse. Our discourse upholds or challenges forms of practice and ways of life. What is taken to be true and normal is embedded within a set of linguistic practices of a community that create the taken-for-granted way of life. Meaning does not exist independently inside people’s heads; rather, meaning is a matter of coordinated activity among interacting people. At a fundamental level, in our conversations we are always furthering cultural understandings that both facilitate and constrain possible ways to be human. There are givens, but also “social facts” that are really social agreements created and re-created by community. For example, the categories “male” and “female” are genetic givens. On the other hand, the specific meaning of maleness or femaleness, the “social facts” of what is possible or permissible for each, as well as their relationships to each other, are gendered based on the social interpretations and agreements of a particular community. Further, as these interpretations change over time practical consequences ensue. As Wittgenstein wrote, “the limits of my language are the limits of my world” (Wittgenstein, 1922, sec. 5.6). We create the world we later discover as real, and we construct it through our conversations. Our modernist inheritance thinks of language as picturing the world, but a social construction perspective suggests that we think of language as tools that enable practices.
Knowledge and Action Are Linked
Plato and the Enlightenment philosophers held that the highest form of knowledge is contemplation. In that view, we contemplate and then we act. But social constructionists propose that the arrow is reversed. We act into the world, we engage with things we care about, and then reflect or contemplate. Knowledge is an activity rather than an internal representation. Knowledge is not a matter of passive receptivity as suggested by the banking theory of education, but an active social achievement. Knowledge is actively constructed as we relate to others through processes of social negotiation, shared discourse, and the creation of social structures. Knowledge and activity are thus intimately linked. This proposition raises questions about what learning is and how it takes place; it also seriously challenges the idea, central in Diagnostic OD, that diagnosis should always precede action.
Implications for the Field of Organizational Development and Change
These ideas have implications for the field of organizational development and change, particularly challenging the way we make sense of efforts to intervene in organizations. From a social constructionist view, changing a system is a matter of changing a conversation. For OD practitioners, this suggests that perhaps the most powerful tool at our disposal is to propose a new way of talking. Since words create worlds, new vocabularies are invitations to new possibilities. If organizations are constructed through social agreement, they can be reconstructed in innovative, desired ways by changing the conversations that take place at work. This suggests that we pay attention to new voices, new action possibilities at the margins that can suggest new worlds of meaning.
A social constructionist orientation suggests a number of shifts in how we think about and practice organization development. Below I look at four. The first is a shift away from trying to change individual thinking to changing collective thinking. The second is to think of change as constant, rather than something that happens between periods of stability. The third is to think of change agentry more like interpretive translation than intervention, and the fourth is to shift our focus from individualism to relationality.
From Mental Models to Relationships
One of the inherited ways of speaking and writing in the field of organization studies is the notion of mental models, popularized in the field of OD by Argyris and Schön (1978), Senge (2006), and others. We often hear of the importance of assessing and changing stakeholders’ mental models as if people have content inside their heads—a linguistic holdover from the Cartesian and Kantian notions about mental substances that assume that mental constructs are contained inside a person’s head. This way of talking is challenged by the social constructionist perspective that all knowledge is an interactive, social achievement and not a private accomplishment.
A social constructionist perspective also challenges the notion of “beliefs” as some foundational inner possession of an individual held up by foundational logic. Instead, the social constructionist revolution encourages us to put emphasis on relational interactions or the “inter-person” (to borrow Shotter’s 1994 term). In particular, it encourages us to attend to discourse. Following Rorty (1979), Gergen (1994), and others, meaning and belief systems are not objects privately held inside the head. In particular, the social constructionist view encourages us to notice how the ways we think and act are shaped by our communal discourse. This raises a different set of questions. Rather than seeking to change the mental models of organizational members, we might ask how this organization’s discourse-in-practice enables or constrains interpretive repertoires and ways of relating. How can the discourse be altered to invite new and different practices?
Rather than focusing on decisions as if they are rational, isolated events that occur at a moment in time, a social constructionist orientation would focus on the discursive processes that surround decision activities and make it possible for some ways of talking to be taken as normal background practices. Rather than focus on such moves as overcoming decision biases and cognitive barriers to rationality, a constructionist orientation would suggest, for example, that we focus on inclusion of multiple voices in considering alternative scenarios.
From a Structure Orientation to a Process Orientation: From Change as Episodic to Change as Continuous
As mentioned earlier, the field of organization studies has inherited and legitimized an approach to knowledge dating back to Plato and Aristotle that favors stability over process. Researchers emphasize the importance of persisting structures of mind, group, organization, or society as a whole. These modernist approaches to knowledge tend to focus on permanence and structure and treat change as discontinuous, unusual, and dramatic. Practitioners in this tradition would see change as infrequent, novel, and a disruption of stasis. This way of thinking assumes that organizations are inertial and need to be disrupted by external interventions to create the disequilibrium required to adapt and adjust to some demand. Kurt Lewin’s (1947) three-stage model falls into this tradition (unfreeze-transition-refreeze), with the assumption that the organization is in a state of equilibrium or stability and needs to be unfrozen (disrupted) to be motivated to change. John Kotter’s (1996) model of change management also assumes that organizations slip into complacent states of stasis and that leaders need to create a sense of urgency, essentially to unfreeze them, in order to start the change process.
As discussed in Chapter 1, in a dialogical model change is constant and cumulative; organizations are in a permanent state of unfolding. This is a view consistent with the recent interest in process theory. Drawing on pre-Socratic philosophers such as Heraclitus, who claimed the world is an “everlasting fire” in a state of constant change, and nineteenth/early twentieth-century philosophers such as Henri Bergson (1859–1941), Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), and William James (1843–1916), process theory calls attention to the importance of attending to social life as a continual process of temporary confluences of semistability in the midst of continuous change. From this perspective organizations are in perpetual motion, continually in the process of becoming, not as things made, but as processes in the making (see Tsoukas and Chia, 2002). Note that other cultural traditions, especially Confucian and Taoist philosophy, have long described a universe in constant flow in contrast to Lewin’s three-stage theory (see Marshak, 1993).
A dialogical view of change encourages practitioners to attend to opportunities for improvisation and action in the moment rather than only after diagnostic study and reflection. As described in Chapters 7 and 17, when one views change as continuous, the change agent becomes a sense maker who notices emergent dynamics and redirects the flow of interactions and conversations. This contrasts with someone who “unfreezes” a stable state by diagnosing it and then injecting something from outside the system. A “process continuous” approach to change implies that change can occur on the margins, that new language or combinations of established language alter meaning and action repertoires. The change agent in this view is not one who diagnoses and presents an accurate picture of the present state; rather the change agent’s main contribution is to release opportunities for learning and improvisation (Barrett, 2012).
An emphasis on becoming, change, and flux offers a unique take on creativity, disruption, indeterminism, and dialogue. The challenge for researchers and practitioners is not to deny the existence of entities, discrete events, or states, but to unpack them to reveal the complex processes involved in their patterning.
From Change Agents as Interventionists to Translators/Interpreters
How we view ourselves as change agents shapes everything that we do. From the perspective of diagnosis in the modernist tradition, an “objective” outsider has a more accurate view of the system and intervenes with expert knowledge, whether of content, process, or both. From a dialogic perspective grounded in social constructionism, social systems are always in flux and the change agent’s role is to name, label, frame, or otherwise enable the ongoing process in order to encourage the emergence of new possibilities and novel repertoires. The change agent is not a diagnostician who stands outside and apart from the organizational context, but someone who is part of the context acting as a supportive, interpretive translator. An interpretive translator helps to create processes and events that allow people to recognize and understand how they are creating their current social reality and discover new and emergent possibilities. In so doing, it is important for practitioners to be reflexive and aware of their own interpretations and contributions to the social context. In short, constantly aware that there is “never a possibility of extrication” from interpretation, there is no way to be “untouched and unseduced” by patterns of interpretation (Heidegger, 1962, p. 213).
From Self as Unitary Being to Self as Dialogical Being
From the Enlightenment we have inherited a way of talking about the self as an autonomous, unitary entity, about selves as beings who are capable of making detached, impartial decisions. We assume that the inner self is the true, authentic self. Sampson (2008) calls this “possessive individualism,” as if individuals “have” independence and autonomy, as if these are qualities that some individuals possess and others do not. And of course, this is connected to discourses about “the good,” so that individuals who do not “have” independence and autonomy are categorized with clinical labels, such as “codependent.”
With the dialogic turn of constructionism and its emphasis on the central role of social interaction and context in meaning making, we are exposed to another possibility. We can begin to imagine “celebrating the other” (see Sampson 2008) as the conversational and relational quality of human life. Once we see ourselves as relational and conversational beings we begin to appreciate that what we take to be the essential nature of human life occurs between people. We are relational creatures whose lives are created in and through relational exchanges. The way we think, reason, and know is sustained and transformed through conversations.
Conclusion
I have reviewed the fundamental assumptions that we have inherited from the Enlightenment that emphasize knowledge as re-presentation, presenting to the others what one has uncovered of the aspects of the world within the mind’s eye, as if there is an objective world that exists independent of the knower. These assumptions are still operative in the field of organization studies. The social constructionist challenge to the Enlightenment tradition suggests that we create the world we think we discover as real and this occurs through relational exchanges. What we take to be common-sense knowledge is actually an ongoing construction. This turn has powerful implications for the way we approach organizational change and development.
It can be challenging to realize that so much of what we take for granted as “real” is actually constructed in the contexts of communities. The way we construct the world and the way that the world shows up to us as “normal” is rooted in social relationships. This puts a new emphasis on communication because it proposes that as we communicate, we are constructing the world in which we live. Speaking brings worlds into being. This suggests that constructionist ideas have enormous potential for innovation and directly contribute to the Dialogic OD assumptions and practices that assert we can make and remake the world by introducing new ways of talking. By inviting new voices, alternative metaphors, novel vocabularies, and so forth, we can challenge traditional ways of knowing and be open to new worlds of meaning and possibilities.
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