The Journey to Wisdom

The social dimension of learning suggests the existence of a group mind that takes the form of cognitive interdependence centered on memory processes. People working together give life to a single transactive memory system, complete with differentiated responsibility for remembering their experiences. The behaviours of group members, like to the neuron connections in the brain, may be spontaneously and tacitly activated and then interconnect so that they coordinate an intelligent action. Social learning is thus a network of collective behaviours based on distributed knowledge (Tsoukas, 1996).

This approach of learning as a social process suggests that there are a set of relations among persons, activity and world. As Wenger & Lave assert a community of practice is required for the existence of knowledge as it provides the interpretative support necessary for making sense of its heritage. So, learning and knowledge creation are closely bound up with each other in a local practice rather than being distinct activities.

Learning has to do with participating, with becoming a member of the community; because social relations are important for the transmission of knowledge and the relational development of identity. Consequently, learning is mostly situated in the sphere of social interaction. Thanks to the vast numbers of social networking tools we are provided with more opportunities than ever to be situated in this sphere of learning.

The social theory of the mind was refined by Cooley who maintained that thought consists of an imaginary conversation with the self and that society is the mind of all individuals. Thus, society is a relationship among ideas, and the ways in which individuals imagine each other are concrete facts.

Similarly, Mead pointed out that society is grounded on reflectivity or the ability of the self to reflect upon itself. The self is a point of view and every individual possesses a plurality of selves. Thought is a form of conversation conducted by indiviudals with themselves.

Mead's social theory of the mind exerted a profound influence on the doctrine of the rational man. Accordingly, society is conceived of not as a structure but as a process. People don't assume ready-made roles, but rather create and re-create them according to the situation at hand. Social institutions exist only insofar as individuals come into contact with each other and jointly construct actions.

Social action comes about because individuals project various 'me's onto future situations; they then assume the role of the 'Other'; predict consequences and model their actions accordingly. This process of continous negotiation yields definitions of the situation and the social construction of reality. This concept of definition of the situation was developed by Thomas who asserted that 'If one defines a situation as real, then it is real in its consequences.' Reality is fluid and susceptible to rapid changes, and if the way people define a certain situation changes, then so does the type of behavior that it induces. Social life has a peculiar tendency to become whatever people think it is.

Margaret Archer, the founder of social realism asserts that rather than producing the society, individuals/agents transform or reproduce the society; yet always on the basis of something that was already there, albeit the result of the ‘activities of the long dead’ as Archer put it forth.

As Archer herself notes social realist theory is useful for understanding the ways that the causal power of social forms is mediated through social agency. The process of mediation between structure and agency entails the following 3 stages:

- Structural and cultural properties objectively shape the situations that agents confront involuntarily
- Agents’ own concerns are subjectively defined in relation to nature, practice and society.
- Courses of action are produced through the reflexive deliberations of agent who subjectively determine their practical projects in relation to their objective circumstances.

Structural emergent properties shape one’s situations such that they have the capacity to operate as constraints or enablements. We, in virtue of their reflexivity, can deliberate about the circumstances in relation to our own concerns. It is through this examination of the objective circumstances in which we are placed and which are not of our choosing that we prepare for the next stage. The influences of constraints or enablement will be only tendential because of the human reflexive abilities to withstand them or circumstantially to circumvent them. We can also act strategically to discover ways round or to define the second best outcome. It all depends on how creatively we can evade the constraints imposed by the objective reality in which we find ourselves.

Based on this framework, we all have the powers to monitor our own life and to mediate structural and cultural properties of the society. We make our choices based on structural conditions and conduct endless assessments of whether the price to be paid is worth paying.

Archer’s social realist theory provides us with a means to show how we are able to find ways to evade, endorse, repudiate or contravene enablements or constraints on our actions. We might be influences, yet not determined, by the barriers we face. This concept of reflexivity shaped by the interplay between the social situation and personal goals present two type of personalities in general:

- the autonomous reflexives who sustain internal conversations leading directly to action
- the fractual reflexives whose internal conversation may lead to disorientation rather than purposeful action, with life chances being determined largely by their involuntary social positioning.

Rather than remaining victims of circumstances we might want to try to circumvent the constraints.

Michael Oakeshott (1972) has referred to as a 'civilised inheritance of enduring traditions of thinking that may lie beyond the compass of their current life-world preoccupations'. To obtain such a whole system shift, the following model- simply the four ‘P’s model- might be useful:

- Paradigm: Instead of learning reflecting a paradigm founded on a mechanistic root metaphor and embracing reductionism, it might embrace holism which might give rise to purpose.

- Purpose: Instead of learning seen as preparation for economic life, it becomes a broader knowledge generation process for a sustainable knowledge society. This expanded sense of purpose might give rise to a shift in policy.

- Policy: Instead of learning being viewed solely in terms of product (courses/materials/qualifications) it becomes a process of developing potential and capacity through life, at individual and community levels through life-long learning. This connective view requires a change in methodology and practice…

- Practice: Instead of learning being largely confined to instruction and transmission, it becomes a much more participative and dynamic learning process based on knowledge generation, on real-world problem solving and situation betterment.

The integration of such a holistic view into the learning process implies the following shifts (based on van de Bor et al., 2000):

- Process oriented: Providing opportunities for learners to construct meaning through an engaged and participative learning environmment, reflecting different learning styles. Everyone is a learner, including the teacher.

- Balancing: Embracing cognitive and affective, personal and collective aspects of learning

- Inclusive: For all types of learners from all age groups and extending throughout their lifetimes.

- Open and inquiring: Encouraging curiosity, imagination, creativity to arise through thought-provoking conversations.

- Diverse: Allowing for variety and difference of provision and ways of knowing within a coherent framework.

- A learning community: Promoting learning through engaging learners in reflexive learning

Such a learning environment would be intrinsically transformational and might increase the number of‘learning beings in Mary Catherine Bateson’s terms.

In his Steps to an Ecology of Mind Bateson (2000) makes several points concerning our relationship to a greater whole that, taken in themselves, possess a high degree of plausibility—and importance. For example, he asserts that we can never be in a position to see the whole. Consciousness is always selective, working by a systematic sampling of the events and processes of the body and of what goes on outside according to its purposes.

Basically, on Bateson’s account the picture is one of the greater whole as a vast cybernetic system—a self-corrective information feedback system. And the individual mind is portrayed as a variable localised part of this system. As Bateson puts it: ‘‘My’’ mind – delimitation of an individual mind must always depend upon what phenomena we wish to explain: Obviously there are lots of message pathways outside the skin, and these and the messages which they carry must be included as part of the mental system whenever they are relevant.’ (p. 464)

This statement provides a picture of mind as synonymous with cybernetic system—the relevant total information-processing, trial-and-error completing unit. Within the mind, there will be a hierarchy of sub-systems, any one of which we can call an individual mind (p. 466)

For this ‘cybernetic epistemology’ the individual mind is immanent not only in the body, but also in pathways and messages outside the body—and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a sub-system whose identity varies with the phenomena to be explained. Bateson suggests that this larger Mind is now strictly immanent in ‘the total interconnected social system’ (p. 467).

The cybernetic/scientific model privileges an understanding of things as constituted through systematization—that is, through appropriation to a super-ordinate system that posits all as information. It sets up our understanding of the greater whole as a set of discursive interrelations. This characterisation of mind as a computer, simply a ‘sub-system’, a ‘total information-processing, trial-and-error completing unit’ radically revises the whole landscape of human Understanding.

Science is based on presupposition. The goal is to test and revise the old presuppositions and to create new ones. Bateson reminds us of the following characteristics of science:

- Science never proves anything: Science sometimes improves hypotheses and sometimes disproves them. Yet, proof would be another matter. The truth about what can be perceived or arrived at by induction from perception is something else. We don’t know enough about how the present will lead into the future. We only use the rule of parsimony. Prediction can never be absolutely valid; so science can never prove some generalization or test a single descriptive statement and arrive at truth. Science is a way of perceiving and making what we may call “sense” of our percepts. Yet, perception only operates upon difference. All receipt of information is necessarily the receipt of news of difference and all perception of difference is limited by threshold.

- The map is not the territory and the name is not the thing named: There is a transformation between the report and the thing reported as naming is always classifying and mapping is essentially the same as naming.

- There is no objective experience: All experience is subjective as our brains make the images that we think we perceive. All perception has image characteristicsand to that extent, objects are our creation and our experience of them is subjective rather than objective.

Derived from these statements, Bateson asserts that the object of science should be looking for metapatterns- the patterns that connect patterns rather than aiming at objectivity or generalization. How is the world of logic that eschews circular argument related to a world in which circular trains of causation are the rule rather than exception? Logic is unable to deal with recursive circuits without generating paradox and that quantities are precisely not the stuff of complex communicating systems.

Regarding the knowledge development within the organisations they are two main approaches.
According to the representational approach, there is a pre-given world. This approach is based on the belief that only pure thinking can yield reliable knowledge. Agents follow explicit rules in order to achieve their goals. Action is driven by reliable prior knowledge.

On the other hand, the enactive approach asserts that knowing is action. Knowledge is the result of an ongoing interpretation that emerges from our capacities of understanding. These capacities enable us to make sense of the world. So, rather than the mind passively reflecting a pre-given world, the mind actively engages with the world. Meaning is enacted (constructed) from a taken-for-granted background of understanding (Tsoukas, 2007).

The world causes us to form beliefs but not dictate the content of our beliefs (Tsoukas, 2007). The moment we ask for facts about an object we are asking how it should be described in a particular language and that language is not neutral. Its vocabulary is loaded with meaning. Notions are bound up with having certain experiences which involves seeing that certain descriptions apply.

To sum up, the enactive approach assumes that actors are beings-in-the-world; so social activity is the fundamental building block of the social world. This approach also highlights the personally constructed character of human knowledge (Tsoukas, 2007).

A narrowly Cartesian understanding of knowledge tended to privilege ‘pure’ knowledge at the expense of outlining forms of social life that sustain particular types of knowledge. Nonaka and Takeuchi argue that knowledge is essentially related to human action and is grounded on the beliefs and commitment of the holder. Similarly, Davenport and Prusak (1998) assert that knowledge is a mix of experiences, values, contextual information and expert insight that provides a framework for evaluating new experiences. Yet, this definition is an all-encompassing and little-revealing concept.

Knowledge can be defined as the individual capability to draw distinctions within a domain of action based on an appreciation of context, theory or both. Similarly, collective knowledge is the capability members of a community have developed to draw distinctions in the process of carrying out their role in a particular context, by enacting sets of generalizations whose application depends on historically evolved collective understandings. So, knowledge presupposes values, beliefs and is related to action.

Based on this definition of knowledge, an individual capacity is required based on an appreciation of context and theory. Theory allows one to take a finding and generalize from any context to another one. Knowledge becomes collective when, while drawing distinctions in the course of their work by taking into account the contextuality of their actions, individuals draw and act upon a corpus of generalizations in the form of generic rules produced by the related community.

Collective knowledge can be seen as an open-ended process of coordinating purposeful individuals whose actions stem from applying their unique interpretations to local circumstances confronting them. Given the distributed character of collective knowledge the key to achieving coordinated action depends on those lower down finding more ways of getting connected and interrelating the knowledge each one has. For this to happen, the character of the community as a discursive practice should be appreciated: a form of life in which individuals come to share an unarticulated background of common understandings. Sustaining a discursive practice is as just important as finding ways of integrating distributed knowledge.

The social world cannot be understood in the same way as natural and physical worlds. What sets social world apart is meaning. To understand this meaning requires one to recognize the discursive patterns embedded in world-making.

Postmodern thought helps us to see the roots of western metaphysics by privileging becoming over being, change over stability, process over form. Postmodernism is concerned with providing local truths that are normally suppressed by metanarratives rather than explanation per se. The postmodern then is concerned with giving voice and legitimacy to those tacit and unrepresentable forms of knowledge that modern epistemologies depend upon yet overlook in the process of knowledge creation. Its axioms are (Tsoukas, 2005):

- Instead of the traditional emphasis on stability, identity and order postmodern analyses seek to emphasize the Hereclitean primacy accorded to process, flux, formlessness and incessant change. The ontological primacy lies in the becoming of things. It eschews an atomistic thinking.

- The focus on this ‘becoming ontology’ asserts that symbolic representations don’t mirror the going-ons in the world. Theories may be workable, yet not timelessly true.

- Due to this inadequacy of language, events cannot simply be understood in terms of actors’ intentions; yet in terms of embedded contextual experiences and accumulated memories. Surprise and unexpected are the real order of things. A more tentative attitude rather than total control defines its agenda.

- Real world happenings consist of loosely coupled and non-locally defined web of event clusters.

Given this ceaseless process of reality construction, we should appreciate that phenomena are mutually constituted rather than being trapped by certain dualisms . Exploring the discursive patterns might give a clearer sense of the world-making people are engaged in.