Uncovering Systems Agency: A Case for Reading Patterns of Purposive Intent in Organizations -- Pamela Buckle, August 5, 2002

46th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS), Shanghai, P.R. China, August 2-6, 2002.

Monday, August 5, 2002, 1:30 p.m., Human Systems Inquiry Track

This digest was created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker's presentation(s) and comments from the audience. These should not be viewed as official transcripts of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. These notes have been contributed by David Ing (daviding@systemicbusiness.org) at the IBM Advanced Business Institute ( http://www.ibm.com/abi ).

Ph.D. student at U. Calgary, teaches at four colleges

People are funny

• We work, we play, ... in organizational systems.

Often, organizations behave in a way that is different from their intent. Why?

• Guile (Williamson, 1973)
• Mistakes (Perrow, 1986)
• Theories in use (Argyris & Schon, 1976)
• The whole is greater than the sum of the parts (von Bertalanffy, 1968)

Interest in dynamics of self-organization (Jantsch, 1980) and entrainment (McGarry, ISSS 2001, McGrath, ISSS 2001)

When talk to young students about science: stories about why things are the way they are.

• Organizational places as places of knowledge.
• One story: look at what individuals know, i.e. implicit and explicit -- Nonaka, 1994
  • Limits of rational behaviours
  • A firm's knowledge influenced by shifting contexts, stated priorities, understandings of reality.
  • Suggest a number of multiple collective individual teleologies / purposes on how organizations behave.

Can't let this idea about organizational knowledge go.

• Knowledge as a resource, hard to copy (Teece, Pisano and Shuen, 1997)
• Much behaviour is skilled and tacit, so it's invisible to the firm itself (Jacobsen, 1992)
• Knowledge is so complex, tacit and specific that we struggle with causal ambiguity (Reed & DeFillippi, 1990)
• Purpose / rationality considered to be the engine behind behaviour.

[lost rest of notes!]