After reading Fritjof Capra's book, Hidden connections: Integrating the biological, cognitive, and social dimensions of life into a science of sustainability, I vacillate between hope and despair. He offers a provocative look at our world today.
Chapter 4 on Life and Leadership in Organizations provides a wealth of useful constructs to use in my paper on shared governance in the community college. He maps his previous discussions of the features of living systems more directly to organizations in this chapter.
He cites the dual nature of human organizations as the reason for their difficulty with change. First, organizations are designed for specific purposes (most for making profits). At the same time, organizations are made up of communities of people who build meaningful relationshps within their everyday work. He argues that change cannot be externally designed for living systems. The nature of systems is that they can only be "disturbed". "Meaningful disturbances will get the organization's attention and will trigger structural changes" (p. 112). Change cannot be mandated from the top, but needs to emerge from the natural processes of living systems.
We need to involve people in the change process from the very beginning, so it is meaningful.
The mechanistic approach to management is considered by Capra to be a major obstacle to organizational change. Even though this approach has increased productivity and efficiency, it does not allow for the flexibility and adaptations needed in today's global environment. Capra points to two key features of companies with a long history: a strong sense of community and common values and acceptance of new ideas in order to learn and adapt.
He distinguishes between the formal structures of the organization and the informal structures - both are needed. The creativity and adaptability within the organization is housed in its informal networks of communications.
An important idea of living communities is their self-generating nature; they create share meaning which shapes the identity and rules of conduct within the organization. Capra calls this shared meaning and knowledge along with the rules of conduct as the "dynamics of culture". The explicit knowledge of the organization can be communicated easily, but the tacit knowledge of the organization can only be learned through experience. Capra says that tacit knowledge is "created by the dynamics of culture resulting from a network of (verbal and nonverbal) communications within a community of practice" (p. 115) . Consequently, we cannot treat knowledge as something separate from the people and organization in which it exists.
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LR>>One could argue that 'constructionism', cognitive and social, is an integral feature of Capra's thinking. Hidden Connections, then, is a theory of learning that emphasizes constructed realities created through interactions. While each new interaction might contribute new meaning (innovation/creativity), significant meaning already exists in previously set institutional arrangements -- patterns/processes of interaction.
I'm making this connection to pick up on Ken's reference to article by Turner and Pinkett. Pinkett is MIT grad. Much of his work was done through MIT Media Lab. (He was also The Apprentice couple years back.) MIT was Piaget's academic home. So, social constructivism is specialty area for many working at the Lab. Alan Shaw was Pinkett's comtemporary at MIT, though a couple years ahead of Randal. The literature review section of Shaw's dissertation, Social Constructionism and the Inner City: Designing Environments for
Social Development and Urban Renewal, has good intro and background on social constructionism. Turner finished at Northwestern, and the Turner/Pinkett research was conducted at a public housing development in Chicago.
LR>>Wrong on Piaget! It's Seymour Papert.
Papert developed Turtle and the logo computer language. Both were used to introduce kids to computers and programming.
The idea that community development must be organic is an important feature in my work on intranet implementations. Freie points out that authentic community cannot be contractual or artificial. An authentic community must be adopted and grown by its members.
I think Freie’s work on counterfeit community is interesting: Freie, J. F. (1998). Counterfeit community: The exploitation of our longing for connectedness. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
I found this chapter very interesting, but didn't have a way for it to resonate with me/my goals for this course as I read it. My notes are consequently skimpy, and I'm glad for your more engaged take on the concepts.
One thing I remember tying this chapter to was an article I read years ago about a German businesswoman who was on a crusade to stop idle chitchat in the office. Of course, on paper, it makes sense that if office culture doesn't condone not working, productivity would go up. But this ignores the dual nature of organizations (even corporations). And one lesson we've learned over and over during this semester is that if you sacrifice upkeep of the community for any reason (profit obviously the most common reason in corporations), it will cease to be sustainable unless there are mitigating factors allowing hyper-resilience. No wonder I haven't heard anything more from this "business genius" lately.
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