1. Strategic Management Chapter 14 28 th Nov. 2013 The link between the local communicative interaction of strategising and the population-wide patterns of strategy

2. Main topics Thinking of organisations as social rather than physical objects. Thinking of organisational strategies as generalised population-wide patterns of activity that emerge in many, many local interactions. Thinking about the interplay of intentions as the connection between local interactions in organisations and population-wide patterns of activity called ‘organisational strategy’. The meaning of emergence in human activity. Control as social processes rather than anyone being ‘in control’.

3. Lecture Plan

4. Chapter 12 & 13 follow-up Chapter 12: Responsive processes thinking - The interplay of intention Chapter 13: The emergence of organisational strategy in local communicative interaction - Complex responsive processes of conversation

5. Chapter 12 & 13 follow-up Questions? Reflections? Thoughts? Experiences?

6. Emergence (1/3) The population-wide patterns of activity will always emerge in the interplay of the desires and intentions of all of them. The interplay of intentions is an essentially conflictual process. No one can be ‘in control’ of the interplay of desires and intentions or even fully understand that interplay. No individual person or grouping of persons, no matter how powerful, can choose the population-wide patterns The pattern that emerges is not the pattern that anyone planned, although what they were all planning is clearly crucial to what actually emerges.

7. Emergence (2/3) That emergent pattern is caused by the ongoing responsive adjustment of the individual plans and actions of persons to each other. The realised strategy is caused, not by any individual or collectively shared desires and intentions, but by their interplay. This is in no way to diminish or downplay the importance of individual or collective desires and intentions, because without them there could, obviously, be no individual or joint actions and so no interplay with the individual or joint actions of others. Meaning, or knowledge, emerges in these iterated social processes of gesture and response: that is, conversation.

8. Emergence (3/3) There is nothing mysterious or inexplicable about the emergence of population-wide pattern in local interaction, nor is it due to chance. Emergence is caused by what agents do as they impose conflicting constraints on each other in which their diversity, the small differences between them, is amplified. While each person or group may, perhaps, be more or less able to control their own desires and intentions

9. Population-wide patterns These population-wide patterns are present in all current actions as generalisations and idealisations, also referred to by Mead as social objects In other words, in local communicative interaction, local patterns of interaction are being formed by population-wide patterns – generalisations and idealisations – while at the same time forming them. Pattern is emerging locally and globally at the same time, all in local communication in which the interplay of intentions means making particular to a particular situation that which is general and idealised.

10. Population-wide patterns To say that both local and population-wide patterns emerge at the same time is to say that both are arising and evolving into the unknown without any plan or blueprint. In other words, the emerging patterns are paradoxically predictable and unpredictable at the same time and over the long term fundamentally unknowable in their important detail. If the world of experience we create in our interactions is paradoxical and fundamentally unknowable in the long run, as the perspective being discussed here claims, then foresight cannot be equated with prediction.

11. Taking the attitude of the generalised other (1/3) Humans have developed the capacity to generalise the attitudes of many. In acting in the present, each individual is then taking up the attitude of a few specific others and, at the same time, the attitude of this generalised other, the attitude of the group, the organisation or the society The generalised other is the taking of the attitude of all other participants in general.

12. Taking the attitude of the generalised other (2/3) Mead: No predetermined way that ‘I’ may respond to the ‘me’ In CRP: The I/me cannot be separated and equally social The Self is understood as an ongoing process (Inner private conversation), where the ‘I’ is responding to the ‘me’ – No true self!

13. Taking the attitude of the generalised other (3/3) It is important here to note what Mead means by ‘attitude’. He does not mean simply an opinion; he means a ‘tendency to act’. In taking the attitude of the generalised other we are therefore taking into account the established tendencies to act towards us and each other of people in general in our group, organisation and society. However, we are always having to interpret what these generalised tendencies to act might mean in the specific, contingent situations we find ourselves in. We cannot simply, directly apply the generalisation [It is the] process of particularisation that makes possible the further evolution of the generalisation as tiny variations in the particular way the generalisation is taken up are amplified across a population over time.

14. Conflict (1/3) A common problem encountered when strategy requirements conflict as they inevitably do. It will be necessary for those involved to make particular decisions about these generalisations. This perspective, then, brings conflict to the fore. It is not just that the generalisations may conflict with each other but that the particular people involved in the particular, contingent situation may well conflict with each other on how to interpret the generalisations and how to take them up at this particular moment. We will differ from each other on just how to make the generalisation particular in each present time period and situation. Such conflict requires us to carry on exploring with each other just what our differences are and negotiating the meaning of the generalisation

15. Conflict (2/3) Groot (2005) draws conceptual distinction between explorative conflict and polarised conflict When Mead is emphasising conflict he does so in its explorative sense. Explorative conflict is conversational, negotiating processes in which people explore how to interpret generalisations and negotiate different interpretations with each other to make them particular. Such explorative conflict always has the potential, but not the necessity, of polarisation.

16. Conflict (3/3) - Ralph D. Stacey: The Stacey Matrix

17. Social objects (1/4) A social object is the proper object of study in the social sciences and this object exists only in human experience. A ‘social object’ is yet another formulation of the generalising and particularising processes discussed We seem to have a strong tendency to reify patterns of acting and this makes it important to emphasise that Mead’s social object is not a thing It is important to notice how Mead used the term ‘object’ in a social sense as a ‘tendency to act’ rather than as a concept or a thing, which are meanings appropriate to physical objects.

18. Social objects (2/4 Mead, therefore, defined a social act as one involving the cooperation of many people in which the different parts of the social act undertaken by different individuals appear in the act of each individual as a social object. The tendencies to act as others act are present in the conduct of each individual involved and it is this presence that is responsible for the appearance of the social object in the experience of each individual. A social object is only to be found in the conduct of the different individuals engaged in the complex social act. The social object appears in the experience of each individual as a stimulus to a response not only by that individual but also by the others involved – this is how each can know how the others are likely to act in general situations and it is the basis of coordination.

19. Social objects (3/4) A social object is thus a generalised gesture taken together with many tendencies to respond in particular ways. Social objects are common plans or patterns of action related to the future of the act. Social objects have evolved in the history of the society of selves and each individual is born into such a world of social objects. Individuals are forming social objects while being formed by them in an evolutionary process.

20. Social objects (4/4) Social objects are generalised tendencies, common to large numbers of people, to act in similar ways in similar situations. These generalised tendencies to act are iterated as each living present as rather repetitive, habitual patterns of action. Such particularising inevitably involves conflictual processes of interpretation as the meaning of the generalisation is established in a specific situation. The possibility of transformation of social objects arises in this particularising because of the potential for spontaneity to generate variety in human action and the capacity of nonlinear interaction to amplify consequent small differences in their particularisation.

21. Social objects and population-wide patterns From Mead’s perspective we come to understand organisations as patterns of interaction between people which evolve over time in those processes in which people are making particular the generalisations, and in the course of which those generalisations evolve. The strategies of an organisation are those generalisations and the strategies, therefore, evolve in the ordinary, everyday processes in which people interpret and negotiate with each other what the strategies as generalisations mean in specific contingent situations and what implications these meanings have for what to do next. I will be using the word ‘strategy’ to mean generalised articulations of the ongoing pattern of activity that people in an organisation are engaged in.

22. Social objects and population-wide patterns What Mead is talking about here is the manner in which population-wide patterns of action are generalisations that can only be found in the particular local interactions between people. Generalising is the same as both articulated and unconscious population- wide patterning and particularising is the same as local interacting. However, taking up the social object in our interactions is not a perfect process, because it is not the actualisation of something given and the expectations of all involved will not therefore fit in easily with each other. As generalisation, the social object will have to be made particular in each particular, contingent situation and this will inevitably lead to some kind of conflict.

23. Social control and identity (1/3) We learn early on in life to take the attitude of the generalised other as, for example, when one’s mother says, ‘What will people think of you if you do this or say that?’ Here one’s mother is not warning one to take account of how particular people will respond to us, but how people in general in our society will respond to us. We care about what others think of us and about the consequences of their not thinking well of us – ongoing existence requires the recognition of others simply because we are all interdependent persons. We continue throughout life to care and this provides a powerful constraint on what we do and so a powerful form of social control.

24. Social control and identity (2/3) We have some expectation of what will happen when we enter a hospital as a patient. We have some expectation of how doctors, nurses, administrators and porters will act. And so do all of them of us and each other. What we are all doing is taking up the attitude of the ‘game’. We are all taking up, in our interactions, the social object that is the hospital organisation. All of these people continually interact with each other in a coherent manner, moment by moment, every day, because each has the largely unconscious capacity to take the attitude, the tendency to act, of all the others.

25. Social control and identity (3/3) People then have to negotiate their way through inevitable conflicts in ways that inevitably transform their identities. People must comply, or at least be seen to comply, to avoid public humiliation, shame and even annihilation of identity. Identities, which can only be sustained in the recognition of important others, may come to be characterised more by appearance and spin than substance. Compliance may mean submerging values that may feel more important, leading to feelings of alienation and a lack of authenticity because to survive we may have to deceive.

26. Imaginative constructs (1/4) In our reflection we generalise the tendencies we experience across many present situations, creating imaginative ‘wholes’ that have never existed and never will (Dewey, 1934). What we are doing in creating these imaginative ‘wholes’ is constructing in our interaction perceptions of unity in the patterning of our interactions. That imaginatively perceived unity is then a generalised tendency to act in similar situations in similar ways. What is emerging is the imaginative generalisation that is one phase of what Mead calls social object.

27. Imaginative constructs (2/4) The other phase, which is inseparable from the generalisation, is the particularising of the general in the specific contingent situations we find ourselves in. The general population-wide pattern can only be found in its particularisation in our local interaction, and that particularising inevitably involves conflict. In reflecting upon our patterns of interaction, in generalising those patterns and in imaginatively constructing some kind of unity of experience, we employ the tools of writing to codify habits or routines – for example, as law – and even design changes in them.

28. Imaginative constructs (3/4) However, any intentionally designed change can only ever be a generalisation, and what that means can only be found in the particularisation: that is, in the interplay between the intentions of the designers of the generalisation and the intentions of those who are particularising it. Population-wide pattern is the imaginatively created unity across a whole population that we perceive in our patterns of interaction – it is the activity of generalising as one phase of social object. Local interaction is the particularising of the general, of the imaginatively constructed unity of our experience across the whole population we are part of. However, these are phases of one social act and can never be separated.

29. Imaginative constructs (4/4) The general is only to be found in the experience of the particular – it has no existence outside it. The processes of particularising are essentially reflective, reflexive, emotional, imaginative and potentially spontaneous. It is possible for individuals and groups of individuals, particularly powerful ones, to intentionally articulate and even design a desired generalised pattern, but the particularising involves an interplay of many intentions and values, and this interplay cannot be intended or designed If humans simply applied generalisations in their interactions with each other, there would be no possibility of individual imagination and spontaneity and hence no possibility of creativity.

30. Organisations as social objects (1/4) Instead, one understands human relating to be inherently pattern forming – it is its own cause. Is an organisation a ‘legal person’, a ‘system’, or even a ‘living organism’?’ - No, it is people interacting and exerting their power to fulfil their agendas We tend to talk about an organisation as actually existing as a thing, as a system. However, when we come to look for this ‘thing’, I think we are hard put to find it. What we are doing in thought when we talk in the way just outlined is treating an organisation ‘as if’ it were what Mead called a ‘physical object’ and often we forget the ‘as if’ nature of our construct.

31. Organisations as social objects (2/4) An alternative way of thinking would be to regard an organisation as a social object. In other words, we then think of an organisation as the ongoing patterning of the relationships between those who are members of the organisation and, indeed, between them and members of other organisations. The organisation is nothing more or less that the iterated ongoing processes in which people are together particularising the generalisations in terms of which they perceive their organisation An organisation then exists as an emergent phenomenon taking the form not only of practical activities, but also, very importantly, the form of an imaginative construct emerging in the relationships between the people who form and are formed by organisation at the same time.

32. Organisations as social objects (3/4) Patterns of relationships and imaginative constructs are as ‘real’ as anything to be found in our lives: indeed, they are essential to the meaning of our lives. It is for this reason that I am using the term imaginative construct to distinguish what I am talking about from a mere ‘fiction’, however useful that may be, and from the notion of ‘fantasy’ with its connotations of some individual experience that stands in contradiction to ‘reality’. We together construct the imaginative, not in some individual process of introspection or fantasising, but in our continually iterated local relationships with each other. This immediately brings us to the fundamentally social nature of imagination and so of organisation.

33. Organisations as social objects (4/4) Organisations are the ongoing patterning of conversations, so that changes in conversations are changes in organisations. Mead’s notion of social object as generalised tendencies to act is the same as the population-wide patterns I have been referring to, and his notion of particularising such generalisations is the same as the processes of local interaction I have been referring to. This is what the activity of management is all about – it is the activity of making generalisations particular. The processes of management as particularising are interpretive and conflictual, and it is in such local interaction that social objects continue both to be reproduced and to evolve.

34. The relationship between local interaction and population-wide patterns (1/3) I suggest that these meaningful patterns take the form of iterated, emerging, narrative and propositional themes that organise the experience of being together. Such themes are iterated as each present taking the paradoxical form of habit, or continuity, and potential transformation at the same time. The essentially reflexive nature of human consciousness and self- consciousness means that we have the capacity to reflect imaginatively on these patterns, both local and population-wide, articulating both the habitual and the just emerging transformations and, in doing so, either sustain the habitual or reinforce the transformation of habit.

35. The relationship between local interaction and population-wide patterns (2/3) I am arguing that local interaction between human agents as conversation, as in Mead’s thought, and the interplay of intentions, as in the thinking of Elias, is fundamentally self-organising in the sense of points 1 to 3 set out above (next slide), with an important addition in the case of human agents: namely, their ability to particularise generalisations of population-wide patterns in their local interaction Emergence means that the global or population-wide patterns are not the consequence of any plan, programme or blueprint for that population-wide pattern. In human interaction both local and population-wide patterns evolve together because of human differences, which inevitably bring with them conflict

36. The relationship between local interaction and population-wide patterns (3/3)

37. Self-organising (1/4) - Assumptions Each agent interacts with only a small fraction of the total population of agents and in that sense agents only ever interact locally. Each agent interacts with others on the basis of its own historically evolved, local organising rules or principles rather than according to population-wide general rules set for each agent by some designer external to their interaction. Agents in their diversity are thereby locally constraining each other in conflicting ways and such constraining is an important source of order.

38. Self-organising (2/4) - What it isn’t... 1. Something that happens no matter what anyone does. This means that there is no point in doing anything. One should simply sit back and just wait for fate or destiny. 2. Full-blown democracy in which all agents are equal and nothing is done without complete consensus. 3. Anarchy in which everyone does whatever they please. 4. The empowerment of the lower echelons in the organisation and then leaving them to get on with it. 5. The disempowerment and incapacitation of the higher echelons who no longer have a role.

39. Self-organising (3/4) - What it is... 1. Far from there being no point in doing anything, everything one does in one’s local interactions, including nothing, has potential widespread consequences. Far from population-wide patterns being a matter of fate or destiny, they are the co-creation of all locally interacting agents. 2. There is no reason at all why agents should be interacting in a democratic way. They might, but they might not. Indeed, what it means to interact democratically, as a generalisation or idealisation, will need to be continually negotiated in local, contingent situations. Furthermore, they are not all equal in a simulation such as Tierra. Some are pursuing more powerful strategies than others, in terms of survival. There is certainly no requirement for consensus but, rather, the tension between competition and cooperation is expressed as conflict.

40. Self-organising (4/4) - What it is... 3. There is no anarchy, because no agent can do whatever it pleases. There are a number of constraints, not least those provided by the actions taken by other agents. 4. There is no connection whatever between empowerment of the lower echelons in an organisation and self-organisation, a matter I will explore next. 5. There is also no connection whatever between disempowering the higher echelons and self-organisation, also to be explained in the next section.

41. The roles of the most powerful (1/3) The point I am making is this. Small groups of very powerful people at the top of an organisation allocate resources and in so doing both enable and constrain other members of the organisation. They design sets of procedures and hierarchical reporting structures but always in local interactions in which they are responding to what has just been happening. They legitimise some actions and not others. They gesture to very large numbers of others. They make statements about visions and missions. They make decisions and take actions that greatly affect a great many others.

42. The roles of the most powerful (2/3) What they cannot do, however, is programme the responses those others will make. They cannot control the interplay of intentions. The powerful may identify what kind of responses they would like by making statements about values and required cultures and behaviours. They may try to motivate others to adopt all of this. They may have desires and dreams. However, people will still only be able to respond according to their own local capacities to respond, and the most powerful will find that they have to respond to the responses that they have evoked and provoked.

43. The roles of the most powerful (3/3) This is what I think self-organisation means in human terms. It is a process of interaction that is ever present in all human situations and would only cease if people really did respond like automatons to statements about the values and behaviours they were supposed to display. The consequence of thinking in this way is that we come to understand organisations as social objects, as iterated patterns of interaction. The key argument is that strategies and organisational changes emerge in local interaction understood as conversation. This requires us to re-think what we mean by most organisational activities such as strategising, leading and many more.

44. The end For next week please read chapter 15 The main topics are: o Power o Choice and intention o The role of gossip, ideology and cult values o In- and exclusion And how all of this impacts identity - and hence strategy !