PeterSmith: Journal

Des­pite being “per­vas­ive”, tech­no­logy is some­what absent from organ­iz­a­tion stud­ies lit­er­at­ure (Orlikowski, 2007, p. 125). This is rather odd given the import­ance of tech­no­logy in (mod­ern) every­day life (Orlikowski, 2007). It’s absence from the lit­er­at­ure is also strik­ing given that most con­cep­tu­al­isa­tions of prac­tice include an acknow­ledge­ment of the role of ‘things’ in prac­tices. For example, that Reck­witz (2002, p. 249) describes prac­tice as being:

a rou­tin­ised type of beha­viour which con­sist of sev­eral ele­ments, inter­con­nec­ted to one another: forms of bod­ily activ­it­ies, forms of men­tal activ­it­ies, ‘things’ and their use, a back­ground know­ledge in the form of under­stand­ing, know-​​how, states of emo­tion and motiv­a­tional knowledge.

Although there are a num­ber of approaches to under­stand­ing how the mater­ial (tech­no­logy) and the social are con­stitutively entangled Orlikowski argues that it is neces­sary to “give up on treat­ing the social and the mater­ial as dis­tinct and largely inde­pend­ent spheres of organ­iz­a­tional life” (p. 1438). Instead, in acknow­ledge­ment of that entan­gle­ment, she puts for­ward the ideas that pratices should be seen as ‘soci­o­ma­ter­ial’. Such an approach:

chal­lenges the deeply taken-​​for-​​granted assump­tion that tech­no­logy, work, and organ­iz­a­tions should be con­cep­tu­al­ized sep­ar­ately, and advances the view that there is an inher­ent insepar­ab­il­ity between the tech­nical and the social (Orlikowski, 2007, p. 434).

Indeed, Orlikowski pro­poses “that we recog­nize that all prac­tices are always and every­where soci­o­ma­ter­ial, and that this soci­o­ma­ter­i­al­ity is con­stitutive, shap­ing the con­tours and pos­sib­il­it­ies of every­day organ­iz­ing” (p. 1444).

Within the com­munity using strategy-​​as-​​practice, the work of Kaplan (2011) is cited as an exem­plar because of its adop­tion of soci­o­ma­ter­i­al­ity. In her paper, Kaplan con­siders both the dicus­ive and tech­no­lo­gical com­pon­ents evid­ent in the use of Power­Point¹, or as she says “this study ana­lyzes Power­Point as part of the epi­stemic machinery that under­girds the know­ledge pro­duc­tion cul­ture in one organ­iz­a­tion” (p. 342).

The research shows how the pro­duc­tion of know­ledge, through an ‘epi­stemic machinery’ “serve to sta­bil­ize and nat­ur­al­ize facts and define accept­able courses of action” (Kaplan, 2010, p. 343).

So, what is at stake in this paper—and is it truly an exem­plar in its use of sociomateriality?

The answer to both ques­tions is that Kaplan clearly demon­strates the entan­gle­ment of the social and the mater­ial, and in doing so she demon­strates how ‘things’ can be a (neces­sary) com­pon­ent of a prac­tice. Her main find­ing is that strategy prac­tices are about col­lab­or­a­tion and car­to­graphy².

What is unclear to me is the dif­fer­ence between the creation/​production of knowledge–by epi­stemic machinery–versus the cre­ation of dis­course. Are these two thing really different?

1. As Kaplan points out, Power­Point is a registered trade­mark of the Microsoft Cor­por­a­tion. [↩]
2. For Kaplan, car­to­graphy is the draw­ing of bound­ar­ies as to what is in– and out-​​of-​​scope [↩]

Last year, I atten­ded a prac­tice work­shop at the Uni­ver­sity of Sydney. After­wards, there was an inter­est­ing present­a­tion by Paula Jar­zbakowski” called “Towards a the­ory of coordin­at­ing: Cre­at­ing coordin­at­ing mech­an­isms in prac­tice”. At the end of the present­a­tion, I was left won­der­ing what these coordin­at­ing mech­an­isms add to our exist­ing understanding–do they really go bey­ond what Lewin (1994) said.

Paula’s on-​​the-​​spot response was that Lewin’s model was static, inas­much as it pre­sup­posed there were stable con­di­tions (for the unfreez­ing, mov­ing, re-​​freezing to occur). In other words, her con­ten­tion was that Lewin’s model didn’t handle con­tinu­ous change well–in mod­ern life there are no peri­ods of sta­bil­ity. How­ever, I seem to recall that Lewin’s model assumed quasi-​​stable con­di­tions, and not actual stability.

It then occurred to me that many (most) people have not read Lewin in the orginal; they rely on oth­ers inter­pret­a­tions. Over the years, this may have res­ul­ted in a overly simplistic under­stand of Lewin and his work. It also reminded me that it had been a long time since I read Lewin myself. So, I thought I should briefly revisit his work.

My start­ing point turned out to be a Man­ford Kuhn’s (1951) review of a col­lec­tion of Lewin’s works. Kuhn argues three things.

1. Field the­ory has not advanced much since it was first artic­u­lated in the 1930s (recall, the review was done in 1951).
2. Many of the con­cepts from field the­ory have coun­ter­parts in sym­bolic inter­ac­tion­ism (i.e., the social). How­ever, it is not the case that all of sym­bolic inter­ac­tion­ism can be read­ily trans­lated into field theory.
3. There has been con­sid­er­able more impact by field the­ory on the con­sid­er­a­tion of the indi­vidual (e.g., the psychological).

Over­all, Kuhn seems to argue that Lewin and his field the­ory can span both the micro (indi­vidu­al­ist) and macro (soci­et­ist) approaches in the cre­ation of a “gen­eral school of social psy­cho­logy” (p.147).

And now I need to re-​​read Lewin’s work …

It’s been over two years since I star­ted this journal, and I’ve done little with it. I’d like to blame it all on the work I put into my PhD thesis, but that would be unfair.

So, as part of my New Year’s res­ol­u­tions, I plan to post here at least once a month.

For a num­ber of months, Lisa Calla­gher and I have been talk­ing about the­or­ies of prac­tice. We have both found the dis­cus­sions pro­duct­ive in sharpen­ing our indi­vidual under­stand­ing of the­or­ies of prac­tice. How­ever, I’ve not taken the time to note the insights those dis­cus­sions have pro­duces. And so, the fol­low­ing few entries are my attempt to crys­tal­lising into words what I’ve come to under­stand. In other words this is my ‘take’ on our con­ver­sa­tions, and so all the biases, errors of logic, and so on are mine.

For the past few weeks we’ve been talk­ing about learn­ing and know­ing; what they are and how they relate to one another … and how they are con­nec­ted to the­or­ies of practice.

Learn­ing and know­ing; why use ger­unds (-ing)? Per­haps it comes from from Weick’s (1969) admon­ish­ment to so do. How­ever, for me, it reflects an under­ly­ing view that things can be learnt or known, rather they are dynamic and con­tex­tu­ally depend­ent, and so learn­ing and know­ing only exist in the doing. Such a stance prob­ably owes some­thing to the notion of social becom­ing (Sztompka, 1991), but it is hard to judge exactly what has influ­enced ones thinking.

What has, spe­cific­ally, influ­enced my think­ing is the work of Kelly (1955) and his notions around per­sonal con­struct psy­cho­logy. Although not as widely read/​popular as other the­or­ies of per­son­al­ity and think­ing, 50-​​years on, I find his work com­pel­ling and largely con­sist­ent with what we know from neur­os­cience. This prob­ably means that I should do a small entry on PCP as it is known.

The desire to ‘go back’ to earlier prin­ciples is some­thing of a habit with me. I recall that when I was doing elec­trical engin­eer­ing, in exam­in­a­tions I could never remem­ber the neces­sary for­mu­las. So I would always quickly work them out at the start of the exam; it just seemed easier than recall­ing a rather abstract pat­tern of sym­bols, let­ters, and num­bers. Lisa has read some of my writ­ing and com­ments that I’ve a tend­ency to do a lot of ‘defin­i­tional work’. I do tend to build up to things. I also like to have the his­tor­ical con­text of things too. I rarely accept an idea without look­ing at where the idea came from. It can make read­ing a slow pro­cess … and writ­ing even slower. Such an appor­ach is prob­ably why I’m drawn to notions of situ­ated action (Such­man, 1987) and the like.

Any­way, back to PCP (eventually).

Ref­er­ences

I’ve decided to sep­ar­ate out my ‘aca­demic’ and ‘non-​​academic’ jot­tings.