This is the third post on the parallels that I see between Etienne Wenger’s writing on communities of practice and Ralph Stacey’s “complex responsive process” view of organizational dynamics. This has been prompted by comments made by Stacey himself, in Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics, where he brackets Wenger’s perspective with others that are based on more mainstream conceptions of organizational theory and practice.
Earlier, I looked at Stacey’s comments on Wenger’s use of systems-based language, as expressed in his Communities of Practice. Here, I will focus on a second criticism of Wenger’s take on organizational dynamics, in which Stacey argues that “… he moves away from the daily lived experience and talks in terms of abstract (in the sense of removed from direct experience) macro processes …”. To avoid doing so is a touchstone of the complex social process approach to practice. This emphasizes the importance of actively engaging in the ongoing conversational reality of organizational life; focusing on the detailed local interactions between people in “the living present”, without recourse to abstract models and concepts.
Abstraction and the sensemaking process
This is one of the areas in which I have most difficulty with ‘the Stacey view’. For me, it does not follow that, because continuity and change happens through the micro-exchanges of everyday conversations, ‘abstract conceptualization’ (to use David Kolb’s “learning cycle” phrase) has nothing to contribute to the sensemaking process. Indeed, I find it difficult to see how thinking and meaning-making can progress without it.
Stacey’s criticism here hinges on Wenger’s use of such concepts as “the negotiation of meaning”, “reification” and “participation” to make sense of organizational practice. However, Stacey describes this process in terms of other concepts, such as “complex responsive processes”, “polarization”, Mead’s “I-me dialectic”, Elias’s “civilizing process” and so on. It seems to me that gaining an understanding of these dynamics that is useful beyond the immediacy of here-and-now interactions between specific participants is only made possible by abstracting from the “daily lived experience”. This might take the form of people reflecting on other people’s stories, to distil what they see as implications for their own practice. Or, as here, it might extend to the development of specific concepts to enable more widespread sense to be made of the experience. Either way, abstraction seems to me to be an essential component of the complex social process of organization (or complex responsive process, in Stacey’s terms).
Reification
Perhaps it is Wenger’s use of the word “reification”, to describe the abstraction process that forms part of his own explanation, which causes most difficulty here. Stacey has always cautioned heavily against the tendency for people to reify (I treat as if they were real) ‘things’ (such as organizations, cultures, systems, etc) that are merely social constructions. This has also led him to shy away from the use of models, frameworks, schemas and so on; arguing that people can too readily treat them as ‘the real thing’, rather than merely an abstract and necessarily simplified representation of the complex reality of organizational life. Wenger, though, uses reification in a much broader and less pejorative way; recognizing the ‘false concreteness’ that reification can imply but arguing that, in the way he defines the term, it “is central to every practice”.
Stacey's forthcoming book - a shift in emphasis?
Interestingly, I understand that in his own forthcoming (and, for my part, eagerly anticipated!) book, Complexity and Organizational Reality, Stacey is likely to introduce the concepts of “immersing” and “abstracting” into his discussion of organizational dynamics from a complex responsive process viewpoint. It will be interesting to see how these processes differ from those of participating and reifying (in the way that Wenger describes it). Hopefully, the book will arrive next week and I can check this out for myself.
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Other posts in the 'series':
#1 - Stacey's "Complex Responsive Processes" meets Wenger's "Communities of Practice"
#2 - Ralph Stacey and Etienne Wenger #2: On systems v processes
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