Organizations, or any collection of humans on some sort of shared expedition, are narrated. People tell stories about themselves and the whole or collective in which they see themselves. It is made up of words. When chosen, the words draw boundaries and distinctions. The word can't capture everything, so something is left out. You can contest the word and try to replace it with another. Then what was in the center is now left aside. You can add words, but modifying the noun or verb changes it to something different. No story captures it all.
You carry meaning, you carry significance, you carry experience. They reside with you as something with weight. That weight which is carried is not a word or a collection of words. Words don't have weight.
I absolutely accept that paying close attention to words will give you a way of understanding an organization, it's people, and their experience together. It is a huge part of what we owe each other in organizations, in other words a huge part of what ought to be the ethic of organization, rather than obedience or submersion of the self. Discursive work is something concrete you can do, even if other aspects of the environment seem closed to influence and formation. But all those words still miss something.
That brings us to the idea of embodied experience and embodied cognition. Celia Harquail has written about this. I just got to an article she did in 2010 with Adelaide Wilcox King on the role of embodied cognition in forming or construing organizational identity. Their work starts with personal observation about how physical impressions of a workplace conflicted with verbally transmitted narratives of organizational identity and opened the door to a different understanding. Harquail and King are able to articulate the new understanding of the organization in words, but they are after something that escapes words: "an important part of knowledge remains ineffable, residing in our bodies, perpetually escaping our ability to articulate it fully in words, yet still forming a significant part of our understanding."
From a Lacanian perspective, McSwite describes the body in terms of the register of the Real, the register of understanding that is "unpredictable, beyond conscious apprehension." This is the realm of jouissance. "This is the autonomous body, the body of experience and expression not containable in the categories of the symbolic order and consciousness. Seeking expression from it, allowing it to write, opens the possibility for bringing into consideration aspects of experience normally left outside the narrow considerations of rational or strictly conscious deliberation."
Catlaw's see the potentially transformative quality of networks residing in the potential for people to tap into "immanent, constructive, creative forces" in which people share material--codes--to create, invent and collaborate "in producing a world in common." This is opposed to harnessing the relationships between people to construct a "transcendent constituted power (the People)." In a turn that surprised me, Catlaw turns from code-sharing, which can be seen as primarily verbal to the physical and embodied realm. In discussing how affect is also shared, he draws from psychoneuroepidemiology: "Brennan lucidly details how affects are “dumped” or projected from one person to another via airborne molecules that penetrate the body’s permeable membrane and alter hormone levels."
For me, a hard question is what to do with this embodied, immanent, ineffable layer of experience. If you are writing about it, you have to translate it into words. And you are back to the loss of fidelity to experience we talked about above. Perhaps you can do something with pictures. I've been interested in Social Network Analysis, which makes some of its points my plotting connections, but I've been unclear about how you weigh and compare effects--do you translate what you see into words, or are their visual moves.
As a practitioner, it is going to be easier to incorporate this understanding. One can structure experiences that allow people to express themselves and their experience non-verbally. As I said in an earlier post, recognizing the huge risk of doing something trivial that has the effect of insulting participants. There is also a practice of tuning in to one's own sensations. I had a therapist once who asked me when I talked about experience to tell him the physical sensations I had associated with these thoughts or experiences. I was terrible at it, but I am sure I could have developed more ability to tune into that.
Harquail and King identity four modalities of embodied cognition--bodily-kinesthetic, visual-spatial, temporal-aural, and emotional. When I opened the GIX building, we designed it on an open floor plan, something that appealed to me. After a short time in the space, it was clear that the staff were reacting differently to the level of noise and distraction. They were having different embodied cognition on the visual-spatial and temporal-aural levels. We were able to surface this in discussion, and made adjustments in desk placement that mitigated the effect for the people for whom the visual-sonic environment detracted from their experience. I could have allowed myself to slow down, tune into the sound environment, and perhaps anticipate the potential for disruption. Or connect observations of the space with other signals like a staff member wearing headphones while working. Again, this seems to be a skill one could cultivate.
Catlaw (2009) “Governance and networks at the limits of representation” American Review of Public Administration 39
Harquail and King (2010). “Construing organizational identity: the role of embodied cognition” Organization Studies 31
McSwite, O. C. (2001). Reflections on the Role of Embodiment in Discourse. Administrative Theory & Praxis, 23(2), 243–250.
No comments:
Post a Comment