LECTURE 4 - NMSU College of Business



LECTURE 4

David M. Boje 655 Sept 24 2006

Ladies and Gentlemen:

As we talk to Jo Tyler. I thought it might be a good opportunity to discuss the relationship of Gertrude Stein (1935) four lectures against narrative and their relation to systemicity.

Jo and I both ordered collector’s edition copies of Stein (1935).

Narrative tells something that is not the telling of systemicity. Can a narrative telling not based in story detecting (as in detective story) tell us about the amplification, adaptivensess complexity of systemicity? Can narrative writing searching for completion, sequencing, the coherence of beginning, middle, and end – write about discover, change or emergence?

While Stein uses narrative and story interchangeably, my read is that she has one kind of narrative I call “retrospective control narrative” and another kind that I call “dialogic story” (Boje, 2006a). Narrative (and open system) “practically never tells anything about detecting” or pursuing mystery (p. 40).

I am perturbed that control narrative is not telling about people living in systemicity. Narrative is a way to influence people toward greater control systemicity, by conforming its processes to narrative, to the inevitability of beginning, middle and end. Storytelling that is more about happening, in the moment of emergence is detecting beginnings not arrived, middles that are missing, and the never endingness of unfinalizability, unfinishedness that is in dialogism (Bakhtin, 1990, 1993). There is this important distinction that Stein makes between narrative coherence of completion (think retrospective sensemaking) and the detective work of being in the moment detecting the emergent complexity. It is here, as I said in my last lecture that the bridge of systemicity intersects with the bridge of story dialogicality.

A digression. A professor ought to answer his own assigned question, deconstruct von Bertalanffy. In narratives of open systems, as your von Bertalanffy assignment was designed to explore, an audience of readers would learn nothing about what is happening in the moment of participative dialogicality.

As a biologist, von Bertalanffy (1968: 139) sets out to explain the difference between mechanistic and open system, with the tale of the difference of dead versus living dog, by “means of chemical formulas, mathematical equations, and laws of nature.” “In a living being innumerable chemical and physical processes are so ‘ordered; as to allow the living system to persist, to grow, to develop, to reproduce, etc.” (1968: 139). Mechanistic system theory approaches the dog as a clockwork machine (p. 140).

He reviews the genealogy of the machine model beginning with Descartes’ ‘watchmaker’ animal machine (and here we thought Herbert Simon invented it). Rather than mechanical machine (popular for many centuries), von Bertalanffy sees more recently the living being as a “chemodynamic machine, directly transforming the energy of fuel into effective work: (p. 140), then the World War II case of missiles, a thermodynamic self-regulating or “cybernetic machine, explanatory of many homeostatic and related phenomena”, and very recently, in the case of humans, the “micromachine” of DNA (p. 140).

As a biologist, von Bertalanffy finds Descarts’ clockwork machine approach to dogs insufficient because it does not explain a “universe of undirected physico-chemical events” of growth itself (p. 140). So von Bertalanffy moves along to Darwinistic epxplanation, but finds that even evolution does not answer his problems of “the origin of the machine” in nature (p. 140). Then von Bertalanffy’s concern shifts to the cybernetic problem of “regulation” of the “self-repairing” machine relation to “arbitrary disturbances” and the problem of how a living machine maintains by “metabolism” (“a basic characteristic of living systems” when it keeps expending fuel (p. 141). Notice how in each case the framework applied is that of biological and chemical science to explain the limits of mechanistic system theory.

His rendition of open system theory is the organic biological (“physical chemical”) model of living system bye “import and export, building-up and breaking-down of its material components: (p. 141). This is also known as “biophysics” (p. 142), where as with Katz and Kahn (1966) von Bertalanffy’s biophysics open system rendition tells us of steady state, growth, and “equifinality” (p. 143). His narrative, following Prigogine, centers on closers versus open “physico-chemical systems” where he finds statistical order, differentiation, and organization from his viewpoint of thermodynamics despite the tendency toward entropy of decreasing order and organization (p. 143). In other words, there is Schrodinger’s statement that ‘the organism feeds on negative entropy’” (p. 144). Here and there, von Bertalanffy makes the mega leap from animal to “industrial systems” that behave just like the “many processes in the cell” (p. 144), and this is as Boulding (1956) describes open system as a ‘cell’ complexity property obsession. Like Pondy (1976), von Bertalanffy does not go the way of Boulding and introduce “soul-like or entelechial factors into the organic happening” (von Bertalanffy, 1968: 144).

What about social ecology? For example Murray Bookchin theory of dialectical naturalism would not abide von Bertalanffy’s static ontology of social beings just being physical chemical processes of biophysics. Biophysics. There is also the entelechial development, “defined as self-formation through the actualization of potentiality… concerned with increasingly ‘subjectivity; in the development of each and every phenomenon.”[1] Let me summarize the web site’s entelechial development thesis. The blueprint growth of the acorn to the oak is a static single growth path solution, but in social evolution, there is dialectic causality, where this blueprint of cell to oak, interacts, and even cooperates with an eco-community, a becoming with greater complexity, and in the case of humans entering the social ecology, becoming greater subjectivity. The open system of organization develops towards not only its first nature of biophysical processes, but its second nature of cultural processes by cultural innovation.

What kind of dog is von Bertalanffy theorizing? It would seem to me to be akin to Burke’s entelechial dog, which is only one of five varieties of dog theorizing. The entelechial dog story by von Bertalanffy is a fiction of “’perfect’ embodiment of certain traits” of dog-ness.[2] But von Bertalanffy does not want to include “vitalistic characteristics of life” or make “vitalistic arguments” (p.144-145). His framework is stuck in cells, growing and dividing, importing fuel, metabolic reactions, and self-regulation which can be reported in nonlinear equations, and all these are subject to the “equifinality of growth” in the “continuous cell culture as applied in technological processes” (p. 148-149). When von Bertalanffy posits that a dead dog is a few degrees of separation from a living dog, but ignores vitalistic principles, he runs into trouble. He removes the essentially mysterious, in an attempt to explain life with a lifeless biophysics cell, matter, and energy/fuel model. As a biochemist, von Bertalanffy tries to create life in his laboratory, and his theory ends up being insufficient to specifying complexity properties of living human systemicity. Clearly he falls into an abyss of organicism, explaining vitalism as just chemical physical processes. Yes, organizations have biophysical processes of complex adaptive open systems, but are all the processes biophysical? Vitalism is the “the theory or doctrine that life processes arise from or contain a nonmaterial vital principle and cannot be explained entirely as physical and chemical phenomena.”[3]

Then the clincher, “The theory of open systems is part of a general system theory” which he self-deconstructs as a “doctrine” (p. 149). What kind of doctrine is it? It’s a biophysics doctrine riding roughshod over every other physical and social science, making human systems in our field, just cells in a bio community ecology. That approach to “cybernetic theory” is right out of Shannon and Weaver’s (1949) feedback and information loops. But as Benjamin (1936) tells us, there is need to move beyond information theory and into something else. My deconstruction is that von Bertalanffy rejects the vitalistic principle, yet turns around to impose a vitalistic principle from biophysics onto all other sciences. That is his narrative coherence structure, his control narrative, and it has been very hegemonic, and powerful. In his project, only quantitative, never qualitative insights are admissible (p. 150), and as we seen he rejects entelechial development, then imposes one of his own, “the arrow of time” actually it is borrowed from Eddington (p. 151). Yet we know that the arrow of time is neither one way nor linear sequence in human culture. Time past can be imposed upon time present. Time future is ephemeral and made less so by appeals of narrators to the concreteness of the past, which is to be imposed onto the present. Throughout von Bertalanffy reduces communication to just information processing theory of negative entropy.

Yet von Bertalanffy is narrating. His hero is another biophysicists (e.g. Trincher, p. 152) and “Beadle” (p. 152) since they allow von Bertalanffy to challenge Darwin’s theory of variation-selection-retention, and Einstein’s “play of the dice” (p. 154) as too oriented to perfecting organization or by randomness, whereas thermodynamics provides the more complete theory (p. 153) of open systems which is a project to make general system maxim the universal principle of all systems, all done in the biophysics worldview. Deconstruct to a more base level, and von Bertalanffy tells us a tale that the human systemicity world is rational, and explicable by multivariate differential equations, and we can simply ignore every subjective communication process. Yet the human soul and spirit, and other subjective irrationality deeply permeate human culture, including organization culture, and the levels of the systemicity complexity. That is the nature of the human mind. Therefore, von Bertalanffy has not succeeded in going beyond the mechanistic theory of Descartes, and open system that is organically registered in biophysics is yet one more rationalistic mind-body split out, accomplished as the open system theory of von Bertalanffy. Wittgenstein’s language game (which we will read in upcoming Pondy, 1978 leadership as language game) paper, is ignored by von Bertalanffy. Not just one language game, but a community of language games of the jargon specialties of complex organizations.

And von Bertalanffy is on board with the enlightenment project, not only rejecting subjectivity, but installing through rationalism and positivism the progress project, via information theory married to principles of biophysics, where mind is exorcised. Ironic move, since rational principles, be they empirically validated, are a product of the mind. These and other theoretical, methodological, and practical problems beset his information-processing model. In sum can formal rational principles be laid down to explain systemicity? We get a cell community model. Methodologically, what do we get when we restrict science to empirical objectivity of multivariate simultaneous equations? We ignore the human condition. Practically, what have be wrought when we exclude human subjectivity? We have a mechanistic model that says it’s an organic open system model but self-deconstructs as a reductionist biophysics’ explanation of vitalism!

Returning now from von Bertalanffy to Gertrude Stein, she looks more at how narrative coherence is privileged over the non-coherence, irrational, and subjective side of living systemicity.

The audience is brainwashed to believe in narrative structure (coherence, completion, finalizedness) and to ignore what is happening in the interdependent, even simultaneous moments of the act (Bakhtin, 1993), or as Stein (1935) puts in, in the moment of being. The open system theory of von Bertalanffy has explained away these moments by his reductionisms.

Narrative is a way of not knowing what is happening in systemicity and pretending to know and tell what is going on in words like complex adaptive system, morphogenesis, entropy, etc. Is a narrativist trained in coherence-completion capable of using these words to convey happening, systemicity emerging, in the moment. Is the audience blinded by narrative? And von Bertalanffy, like Stein say they are about explaining happening.

As the competencies of the storyteller (Benjamin, 1936) atrophy, or as Stein (1936) puts it, no longer is an Old Testament way of telling (which except for the begots is not about beginning, middle, or end). Where as Benjamin blames the changes in production community, Stein blames it directly on people being trained to do narrative paragraphing, to think and write in that horrid beginning, middle, and end prison. And von Bertalanffy’s beginning, middle, and end is a biophysics narrative teleology.

People know less about storying that is detecting, and fall upon their training in narrative sequence, in linear renditions of organizational life cycles (blue print cells), on cycles that repeat in fractal patterning (in the new versions). Here is the danger. People come to be schooled and to believe in systems designed within the lines and contours of narrative coherence, then create them. Ludwig von Bertalanffy creates them in narratives of biophysics principles being the end all of human systemicity. Coherence can be a very good thing. Too much coherence, or coherence that ignores by reductionism the dance with incoherence, is not a good thing (Boje, 2005d, Utrecht Lecture).

Stein (1935: 25) makes some important distinctions about narrative coherence of beginning, middle, and end being different from the in-the-moment unfolding emergent systemicity that is related to story:

…Beginning, middle, and end made every one have the emotion they had about anything….

…The fact that anything was existing was moving around by itself in any way it wanted to move that did not arouse any emotion…

…Escape from inevitability feeling that anything that everything had meaning as beginning and middle and ending…

…an existing without the necessary feeling of one thing succeeding another thing of anything having a beginning and a middle and an ending

What I take away from this is that narrative coherence (beginning, middle, end, hereafter BME) is but a small part of systemicity, be it open or otherwise. Further, it is storying that is about the moving, and the participatory moment. The whole thesis of emotionality is really a nice dovetail with Bakhtin’s (1993) emotion-volitional moment that shoots through the aesthetic, cognitive, and ethical. There is no emotion-volitional in von Bertalanffy, or is there. The volitional is a need for biophysics coherence to all levels of systemicity complexity, and a reduction of all science to quantitative, objectivist science, which in the end, ends up being just another variant of mechanistic science, relabeled as open, and organic.

Stein’s hypothesis is that emotion-volition is more tied to the need for coherence narrative in one’s systemicity. I read Bakhtin as being more about a participatory moment of the act, which would fit more with emotion shot through the storying. I read von Bertalanffy as denial of the participative moment of social evolution. Who is right? That is a matter for testing and multi-method inquiry into your own field studies. Finally, this inevitability feeling that BME is everywhere becomes an influencing factor on structuration and biological functionalism (organicism) of human systemicity.

Notes on Stein Lecture 1

I like Stein’s focus on contemporaneous in-the-moment, where “no part of it begins and no part of it ends” (p. 2). That too me is storying, which most of the literature on narrative misses. Work by system and strategy theorist Ralph Stacey (2006) gets at the relation of complexity, improvisation, and indirectly at story.

The main thesis for me in Stein is that there are different ways of telling. One way of telling, for me, is control narrative. Another way is dialogic story. Narrative does not get us to the everyday living, except through the window of control, and the control over story, the marginalization of others’ stories. This is clear in von Bertalanffy, Katz & Kahn, Senge, and Scott (though the last is more nuanced). This storyability ways dovetails with systemicity, in that different patterns of the triad (narrative, antenarrative, & storying) will manifest in different kinds of systemicity, and in different domains or spheres of systemicity. The interaction effects are what I seek to specify.

Story, narrative, antenarrative, and systemicity are different from one another, yet are intertwined, posing as one another, depending upon one another, influencing one another, morphing into one another. Story is mostly orality and narrative is mostly written, and antenarrative is in the act of pre-story becoming narrative, becoming story rooted in context of systemicity. And the context of systemicity is other narratives, antenarrative trajectories, and living storying. Narrative is more retrospective, antenarrative is emergent, and living story is in the moment of life every minute of every working day, and keeps moving (Stein, 1935: 4-5).

People who narrate, antenarrate, and story are conscious of different things. People who narrate, especially when they paragraph, are conscious of linear developmental BME. People who antenarrate are conscious of how in the act of becoming antenarratives morph as they traject, picking up and letting go of context elements, always in the act of becoming. People who story, are craftspeople, standing at the center of relationships, in the moment, acting with answerability to those relationships. Unlike Stein, I agree with Bakhtin. It is in the storying that the answerability is shot through with emotional-volition.

Story, antenarrative, and story will use the same words in different systemacalities. The narratives, antenarratives, and stories of two organizations of varied systemicity will be quite different, even though the words can be the same, what they mean in context is not the same. In one systemicity, people tell how they “live every minute of every day (p. 7). Since they share lots of time and space they can leave a lot to the imagination. But in a Tamara-land (Boje, 1995) the systemicity is fragmented in many different rooms, and order of encounter, who is in a room, and out, makes quite a difference. People network to make sense of what rooms they were not in when people were narrating, antenarrating, and storying. It’s the networking of tellers and listeners chasing one another from room to room, and playing catch up hearing the recounts of rooms they missed, is that Tamara-land is all about, and its very much about the intersection of storytelling and systemicity. As Stein would say, it’s all about listening, and not being able to listen, because people cannot be everywhere at once. And even people in the same room, will listen differently, depending upon what rooms (& room sequencing) they just experienced. And this is why organizations keep so many records, but who reads them? Who listens?

Systemicities yield highly different story patterns. Consider the Mormon church where the sermon is exactly the same in every location throughout the week, but the testimonials are individualized. Or the Catholics where the format is the same, but the sermon will vary, and there are no testimonials. Or the Quakers who listen at the door, in silence, waiting, and then speak out testimonials. We could run experiments on systemicity and the associated patterns of narrating, antenarrating, and storying in complex organizations. Change the systemicity and you change the telling. But, change the ways of telling, and you change the systemicity, more so for changing the storytelling than changing the control narrative to some other control narrative. It is because the later one changes the balance of heteroglossic forces. Storying differently changes the participation, the act of answerability changes.

What happens when story consultants come along and force people into a control narrative? Does it change the systemicity? Yes, if it was participatory storying, it will be less so. The people have their stories but cannot present them when management is in the room. Story consulting is attractive to managers, to have everyone on the same page. That’s branding!

As I said, I like Stein. Her lectures help me thing about narrative, antenarrative, storying, and systemicity. The differing ways of telling is very telling about systemicity. How else would you change and transform organization systemicity except by changing the ways of telling?

Storying participatively is an entirely different way of telling than telling managerially. When a storying settles down, it looses its antenarrative movement, and becomes what Czarniawska (2004) calls a petrified narrative. I want to know how petrified settled narrative behaves in relation to unsettled ways of storying. They have a different fell, a different way of moving, these untitled stories (p. 9).

Can you see that systemicity and storying is a moving dance, a completely moving participatory consciousness, a complexity that is composite and moving? And the antenarratives are moving “detaching anything from anything” (Stein, 1935: 10) creating and destroying as they move (Boje, 2001). Emergent stories move around, circulate like antenarratives, and when you write them down, it changes the meaning of orality (pp. 11-12). There are transformations to systemicity that get bogged down, that is “arrested motion or a very slow succession” (p. 10). Storying is consciousness of tellers and listeners that the storying is completely moving, and people can be very excited about it. Some antenarratives move in a particular way, then die, or get revived and then live, or move randomly making jumps across levels, layers, and, as Stein tells us, move in any direction.

Notes on Stein Lecture 2

Stein asks, “Is there anything that is not narrative” and “what is narrative?” (p. 17). One gets used to some narrative way of telling in a succession of BME. And this is different than participatory telling which is more of a “happening” (p. 17). Then narrative comes along and turns a happening into a “progressively happening” a retrospective imposition of BME. Story, like prose (old style) “does not have to have completion” (p. 18) or some repressive will of progression. Do you see how she hates developmental narrative? Let me repeat:

Narrative has been the telling of anything because there has been always has been a feeling that something followed another thing that there was succession in happening (Stein, 1935: 18).

Now in system theory there is the demand for progressive happening, for BME. Like Benjamin, Stein says ways or narrating have changed, to more of control narrative. Stein is hopeful that ways of telling will return to Old Testament (p. 19), but Benjamin is convinced the necessary competencies died when story crafting was separated from organizational crafts by managers telling everyone not to story on work time. And almost as an affirmative answer to Bakhtin (1993), Stein says:

So then in the Old Testament writing there is really no actual conclusion that anything is progress that one thing is succeeding another thing, that anything in that sense in the sense of succeeding happening is a narrative of anything (Stein, 1935: 19).

Story successively develops in act of participation but is not a successive developmental sequence. That would make it just narrative. And “That is then the difference between narrative as it has been [Old Testament storying] and narrative as it is now [BME paragraphing]” (Stein, 1935: 20, bracketed additions, mine). This is a critique aimed at Aristotle (350 BCE) and the narrative since then, except that bit of storying in the Old Testament.

The triad of narrative, antenarrative, and storying opens up some possibilities to reform the knowledge management project. Knowledge management is very concerned with capturing tacit knowledge, but keeps missing the point of storying and antenarrative – tied to the moment of performance, to context, to systemicity itself. This is why if you cross narrative control and knowledge management you get knowledge reengineering. But if you cross improve complexity with knowledge management you get at emergent story at the act/moment of being, and moving. As Stein (1935: 20) gets at the second relationship, “that is what knowledge is, and essentially therefore knowledge is not succession but an immediate existing” and again this is what Bakhtin (1993) said, except he puts emotional-volition into the act, in one of several moments. Stein, more than Benjamin, sees a storying way of narrative as coming into being:

So there we are and in a curious way we now at this time have come again to have this as our own, that there is no succession, there is moving in any and any various direction and that being a thing existing knowing is what you know at a moment anything is being as knowing (Stein, 1935: 21).

Systemicity, by definition, is the interplay of narrative in its succession completion progression and storying in the moment of Being, with its participative answerability. Instead of narrative succession there is moving antenarrative and storying (p. 21).

Because as narrative has mostly been written it is dependent upon things succeeding upon a thing having a beginning and a middle and an end ending (Stein, 1935: 23).

Stein makes her point that succeeding is not the same as having BME and it “is not necessary not really necessary that anything that everything has a beginning and a middle and an ending” (Stein, 1935: 23). How can she say this so clearly, and be ignored by all of narrative theory, folkloristics, and organization narrative studies? Its because she is so clear. Or is it because Benjamin is right and storytelling is dead, overrun by the culture industry with its TV and news so crafted with BME nay narrative writing that is not a kind of living storying. They might change the frame of where to start, in the middle, or tell the end, then derive the beginning and middle. Changing the order of BME in succession progression is really just a trick of the spectacle.

BME has that Aristotelian catharsis for the audience to “make every one have the emotion they had about anything” (Stein, 1935: 25). I think for Bakhtin (1993) the emotion is elsewhere, in a more dialogic storying. Stein and Bakhtin have this disagreement over emotion in relation to narrative/storying. And I side with both of them. Certainly advertising manipulates BME to manage inevitable feelings of the audience by the narrative writing rendered in image, gesture, and orality. There is trickery here. I also agree with Bakhtin that in the act there is answerability, especially the participatory act and our emotion-volition is our signature.

The importance to systemicity is that we discern that its not just about BME, and that BME is a manipulation to take our focus off emergence in the act of Being. Before narrative, antenarrative, and storying had been considered one thing and now we know them to play together in their differences. Gradually narrative forgot pre-story antenarrating and came to imprison storying in narrative prison (Boje, 2006a). Narrative, by itself is inadequate to the phenomenon of complexity, to what my colleague Hugo Letiche calls phenomenal complexity, which is not the metaphors of Santa Fe Institute, nor von Bertalanffy’s flight from subjectivity. It is subjectivity itself as phenomenal complexity of social meaning.

Narrative tries to confirm anything and everything to BME. Storying is what escapes. Antenarrative is storying becoming narrative, but could be defined, as narrative control coming undone, become participative storying. Ultimately the three triadic agents interpenetrate one another and systemicity.

Notes on Stein Lecture 3

What is the difference between narrative, antenarrative, and storying? Narrative imposes structural coherence of BME. Antenarrative is in the moment and leaves a trail of trajectory across time space. Storying is in the once-occurent moment of the act of Being and getting emotional-volitional about what ought to be in the social order, so that the problems don’t keep recurring.

Draw a figure with the triadic antenarrative, narrative, and story in some kind of systemicity movement, some kind of interactivity. There are stories and antenarratives that do not fit the narrative mold, and will never fit, and are moving the other direction.

We cannot go on telling systemicity and control narrative when to do so ignores so might intertwined storying dialogically with complex systemicity properties. Stein tries to expand the definition of narrative to accommodate other ways of telling” narrative is what anybody had to say in any way about anything that can happen has happened will happen in any way” (Stein, 1935: 31). Its pretty much the say I defined story in 1991: 106, 108).

Narrative is a way to stop listening to antenarrative and storying ways of telling where complexity of emergence systemicity could be known. Stein (1935: 31) says, “anybody can stop listening to any way of telling anything.” Maybe this is what is happening now. Narrativists have stopped lisening to any other ways of telling. And that is very telling about narrativists.

Stein asks her next question, “what do you tell and how do you tell it?” (p. 31). I tellit as a trilogy of antenarrative, narrative, an storying moving in relation to one another, in any order (3 factorial ways). Anybody can also just tell it as one or two of the three. That distorts complexity seeing. What happened when organizations begin to think and tell and listen in all three ways? What happens when an organization gets tuck ion one way of telling and listening?

I theorize we can be comprehensive and look at the trilogy, at the force of each, in relation to the other two. In organizations “it is extraordinary how few and how many ways there are of telling anything” (p. 33). And ways to stop listening. Stein (1935: 33-34) lists many styles of writing, what Bakhtin (1981) calls stylistics: newspapers, novels, detective stories, biography, autobiography, history, conversations, letter-writing, and poetry. For Bakhtin these ways of telling (oral and written, even architectural, and gestures) are interplaying and constitute stylistic dialogism, as they bounce meaning off one another. What is interesting is even when one or more of the stylistics is control narrative, or even all of them, in the dialogism is a self-deconstruction, like that Chevy ‘Nova’ which in Spanish means ‘no-go.’ Its as if the control narrative imposes BME everywhere, and in the process of stylistic juxtaposition, an image of a prison comes through, one not meant by those in charge of such styles to be told about. And its as if people choose to see and listen to the dialogism, or just go on not seeing and not listening (p. 35).

What is interesting about organization systemicity and strategy in particular, is all the stylistic ways of telling and how te people are listening and not bothering to listen anymore. Organizations tell what happening the ways of telling juxtaposed, and the ways of listening and not listening, in the ways of writing and the ways of orality, juxtaposed to be self-organizing, self-realizing ways of telling, oftentimes unintended. People speak and write what is happening, and not what is happening, and the two collide in interesting ways. When an organization or its consultants try to force fit all ways of telling and listening, branding them into one narrative way, that is awfully restrictive and downright oppressive. Organizations have to ignore mass quantities of reality to be that objective, to tell narratives that are unnatural.

All this theory about the triad “has an awful lot to do with the writing of history” (p. 35). A history can be written as a control narrative around the people with the sword, and leave out all the microstoria, all the telling of the little people gets swept aside, left on the editing room floor (Boje, 2001). And that says a lot about leadership theory, about the obsession by organization studies with CEO biography and autobiography.

One thing Benjamin, Bakhtin, and Stein have in common with Nietzsche is their focus on genealogy. They tell the genealogy of narrative quite differently. For Benjamin narrative is replacing storying because the crafts of organization, particularly in the Taylorization of the factory changed. For Bakhtin, there are survivals of carnival of the old ways of storying that answerably spoke back to power, along with the march to the Enlightenment ways of telling. For Stein, the storying is coming around, as in an eternal return, to once again triumph over control narrative.

What if there really is no BME to systemicity or to storying? Then control narratives have “nothing to do with anything that is living” except to steal as von Bertalanffy has done, all the living from open system, destroying vitalism itself, declaring qualitative and subjectivity itself taboo topics to open system theory. That would make Emery and Trist (1965), their call for values to calm turbulent interorganizational fields (L 4,4), quite the traitors to open system theory. And it means “there is no discover” in the narrative or in history and “it is all too easy” (p. 38) the way that Denning and Snowden carry out the story (actually narrative) consulting work. Too much retrospection, not enough reflexivity (Boje, 2006a). Where are the detective stories, the tracing out of mystery, in the act of Being?

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) is “knowing beforehand how it is going to be done” (Stine, 1935: 38), just inevitability of equifinality, without any sense of multifinality in happening. Organizational systemicity is in the happening, the play of equifinality and multifinality, the heteroglossia is more than this, but it’s a starting point.

Systemicity is neither begun nor ended. If environment of open system is the outside, and organization is the outside, a reall7 open systemicity is where the environment penetrates the inside, and organization penetrates the environment (p. 39).

“When it is neither begun nor ended it is not either a thing which has existed it is simply an event” (Stein, 1935: 39). Bakhtin (1993) would be proud. Organization being interpenetrated with environment (& vice versa) is an event, and in leadership as in strategy “it takes a tremendously strong personality to break through the event” (p. 39). The more organization and environment live in one another, “the more no outside is outside, outside is inside inside is inside” out (p. 39).

Story consulting is not real life, since the reality is left out of the control narrating. The process of intervention are meant to be outside of real life, yet, in doing so, that dialogical juxtaposition raises its participative head.

Systemicity beyond open systems (level 4) is when the environment breaks through into the organization (& vice versa). A part of the “inside that even a description of the outside cannot completely relieve the outside of the inside” (p. 40). Emery and Trist (196) would be proud until they rolled over in their graves and looked at Super Wal-Marts (the biggest of which is right here in Las Cruces). McDonald’s has move inside of the architectonics of Wal-Mart (Boje, Enríquez, González, & Macías, 2005). The outside is now inside, one giant inside the other.

Could it be that narrative tells and writes about what is not really happening in organization systemicity? When we intersect systemicity and storytelling we are detecting the mystery of happening itself. That is why I focus on emergent storying. Yet the detective story (Stein, 1935: 40) would be only one of Bakhtin’s (1981) chronotopes. Chronotopic dialogism would be the interplay of detective story and control narrative BME. If I am going to write about anything Being event, I cannot get there in open system theory or in narrative theory. Neither has enough about emotion, or reflexivity, and too much about completion.

In retrospective sensemaking “in its essence being completed there is no emotion in remembering it … for the purposes of memory a thing have not vitality” (Stein, 1935: 42). Is Stein writing against von Bertalanffy’s open system theory by putting in vitality?

Systemicity is a happening, a mystery with lots of vitality that von Bertalanffy cannot see, or permit himself to see. Which is more objective, von Bertalanffy or Stein? Ludwig banishes subjectivity, Stein pursues it with objectivity. Stein appears the realer of the two. She does not clean up her reality with excessive coherence, BME, completion, and retrospective sensemaking. She allows for emotion as part of the happening (though she enters it differently than Bakhtin).

Her BME is grounded “that is to say is there more beginning and end to it if you know what it looks like the place the actual place there the thing happened” (p. 44). Narrative has the emotion of telling what is completed, storying has the emotion of telling what is emergent. Yet it is narrative that erases the exact “spot the very place where they thing ht happened has happened” (p. 44).

Notes on Stein Lecture 4

It bothers me, as I said before, that narrating about open system is such a fiction. What is happening in the moment of Being, in the air, land, water, and ire is left out of von Bertalanffy, and is the focus of Stein. The way people eat, drink, work and live in relation to nature are more than jus cellular biology. The von Bertalanffy narrative sounds like organic, but is not very natural, not about the social act of people creating the moment of Being.

The common narrative about open system does not contain feeling. Ludwig’s is without feeling, Emery and Trist (1966) is an open system theory that includes value, but they make the aesthetic choices for the participants to control the turbulence. See Emery’s writing about what aesthetic values are necessary.

What makes systemicity exciting is the relationship to emotion-volition, to the many ways of telling, to organization living in environment, and environment living in organization. We just have to stop long enough to feel anything (p. 47). We have to be detectives of the mystery of emotion-volition.

Narrative tells us something but it is not all there is to telling of systemicity. Writing systemicity is not all there is. There is orality in relation to writing and what is organization if not a writing machine, and orality machine? (Yes, I use machine, tongue-in-cheek).

Still the audience is brainwashed to expect BME narrative coherence. It is blind to storying, lacks the competencies to see and listen to storying. The habit of retrospective sensemaking is all-pervasive.

If we are going to know anything of telling, it is in detecting systemicity. It is the interrelation of the triad perpetrators.

Narrative (especially in story consulting) is shaped to control systemicity, to brand it, then to be ironic and label it complex adaptive system. Its just another branding of mechanistic, a triumph for Descartes and for von Bertalanffy. Stein (1935: 51) captures this:

And all this has so much to do with wrting a narrative of anything that I almost cry about it.

Organization studies are carrying out its writing project. It can recognize and reinforce coherence of BME. And then the trained managers implement it. And everyone watches TV and implements it.

Her last lecture is all about audiences for various ways of writing, all the stylistic ways I mentioned earlier. Do you see how different writing on systemicity is from the writing and telling and talking those organizations do? This is why detecting is so important.

In organizations you have every stylistic and they are juxtaposes in ways that only dialogical theory can penetrate. Meanwhile shed a tear, as the writing on open system theory is a rather fictitious narrative style. It purports to be about organizational complexity but is stuck in biophysics. The audience by means of socialization in what Guy Debord calls the Society of the Spectacle has come to expect coherence.

It’s time for detective work. To wake up from the Matrix and take the red ill, stop taking the blue pill. Let’s add a bit more mystery to open system theory, a lot more emotion, and break out of the information processing model.

References

Bakhtin, M. M. 1990. Art and Answerability. Editied by Michael Holquist & Vadim Liapunov. Translation and Notes by Vadim Liapunov; supplement translated by Kenneth Brostrom. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.  From Bakhtin’s first published article and his early 1920s notebooks.

Bakhtin, M. M. 1993. Toward A Philsophy of the Act. Translation and notes by Vadim Liapunov. Edited by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Austin, TX: Univeristy of Texas Press. Originally notebooks from 1919-1921.

Benjamin, Walter. 1936/1955/1968. The Storyteller: Reflections on the works of Nikolai Leskov, Pp. 883-110. In Illuminations, Edited with introduction by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. 1955 in German, 1968 in English. 1936 was original publication of “The Storyteller”: Orient und Oksident, 1936.

Boje, D. M. 2005d. Antenarration Inquiry: The Utrecht lecture on exposition. Utrecht University, 16 Mar 05, published in 2005 Annual Review of Management and Organization Inquiry (sc’MOI). Copy available at proceedings section. Main point of article is that story need not be about cohesion, with linear plots of beginning, middle, and end (an obsession of narratology since Aristotle, and of folklore for a century). Click here for proceedings paper

Boje, David M.; Esther Enríquez; M. Teresa González; & Eduardo Macías. 2005. Architectonics of McDonald’s Cohabitation with Wal-Mart: An Exploratory study of Ethnocentricity. Critical Perspectives on International Business Journal. Vol 1 (4): 241-262.  See Pre-publication Draft. at

Stacey, R. 2006. Complex responsive processes as a theory of organizational improvisation. Pp. 128-141 in Patricia Shaw and Ralph Stacey (Eds.), Experiencing Risk, Spontaneity and Improvisation in Organizational Change: Working Live. London/NY: Routledge.

Stein, G. 1935. Narration: four lectures. Introduction by Thornton Wilder. Chicago, Il: University of Chicago Press.

von Bertalanffy, Ludwig. 1968. General System Theory: Foundations: Development, Application. Revised Edition, 1973, 1st edition, 1968. NY: George Braziller.

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[1] Source is The Psychodynamic Progress and Social Progress web page accessed Sep 23 2006

[2] See summary of Burke’s five dog theories accessed Sep 23 2006

[3] Definition on line accessed Sep 23 2006

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