In the excellent Complexity and Organizational Reality, Ralph Stacey argues that people are “simultaneously immersed in the experience of local interaction and abstracting from it at the same time”. That is to say, abstraction is fundamental to the ways in which people make sense of their own and others’ experience and take action. This begs the question as to what extent, and in what ways, abstraction is congruent with the complex, self-organizing and emergent, dynamics of organization. And this is one of those very rare occasions in which my perspective differs, in one important respect, from that which he sets out in this book and elsewhere.
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