Albert Cath

This book researches and elaborates on social complexity marked by emergence. Emergence is a key quality of complexity. Emergence is difficult to understand: in practice and theoretically. The problem is that there is a fundamental epistemological paradox involved in ‘understanding’ emergence. Understanding normally implies one graspable truth or definition, and/or a solution; while ‘emergence’ connotes radical otherness – i.e. something that arrives or comes that was not there before and could not be linearly predicted. Emergence refers to radical novelty. I believe these problems undermine the efforts to understand organisation and/or organising as really, ultimately, always, emergent. Thus, my first assumption: organisation and/or organising is emergence; organisational studies are the study of emergence. And because organisational studies study emergence badly, try to ignore and/or deny it, organisational studies make a mess of it - i.e. the use of an inadequate and false epistemology dooms the field (research) to inaccurate, incomplete, and inadequate thought. At most, mainstream organisational studies address complicatedness, which tries to domesticate emergence – i.e. tries to make it a predictable entity, which is a contradiction in terms. Here another paradox is introduced: most mainstream management textbooks start and end with the observation that the world they try to describe is complex. Managers, governors, politicians, scholars, and policymakers repeatedly state that the issue at hand is complex while acting as if it is a complicated problem. The distinction between complicatedness and complex is relevant. Emergence respects ambiguity, uncertainty, indeterminacy, disorder, paradox, historical process, and ongoing contextualisation; complicatedness (simplicity) largely denies these qualities. The book is structured around the complexity edifice of Edgar Morin and adds another provisional floor to this edifice (see figure). The central theme in this edifice is emergence.

I set off to ground my understanding of social complexity theory in the tradition from which it comes, i.e. the thought of the French thinker and researcher Edgar Morin. Specifically, I wanted to see what organisational studies would look like when it was (re-) interpreted from a position aligned to Morin. And to see how the Letiche & Lissack book panned out when examined from a position aligned to Morin. Edgar Morin’s life work, his multi-volume Method (1977-2004), is more epistemological than applied; while Letiche & Lissack is more applied than epistemological. Thus, my pursuit of the dialogues between the two. My leading research question is as follows: “Does the dialogic square of Self-Group-Environment-Emergence provide a framework for researching (and/or organising) social complexity that is aligned to Morin and Letiche & Lissack’s work?”

At the end of this book, you should understand how Letiche & Lissack have radicalised Morin’s complexity theory - from Morin to Letiche & Lissack - which is crucial to organisational theory and practice. I have made the argument that I believe the dialogic square more radically and completely opens the path to the theoretical acknowledgment of emergence. I identify Morin with analysis by Letiche & Lissack as a first step in the direction taken by Morin - so to speak as a fourth level in addition to the third level (above the first level of positivism and the second level of interpretivism) Morin has added to the investigation. This book is a theoretical investigation of (social) complexity ideas and their applications, which moves backward towards theoretical origins and forwards towards much-needed applications. In sum, the book opposes the complexity dialogues between Morin and Letiche & Lissack to the worldview of simplicity that denies uncertainty, indeterminacy, ambiguity, and paradox, in short, the fundamental complexities of the everyday (of organisation and/or organising). Complexity marked by emergence should be considered as the most fundamental and unmet challenge of management (studies).

Morin’s Complexity Edifice is a hitchhiker’s guide to different theoretical concepts that are developed in the context of thinking complexity (see figure above). The ground floor, which consists of the mechanistic worldview of Taylorism is complexified by first-order systems theory (see figure below). The concept of feedback loops breaks open the closed order of the ground floor by introducing a two-fold logic of ‘either-or’. A simplification that we can observe in the central concept of the simplicity paradigm, which informs the dominant management discourse: the 2x2 Matrix. The 2x2 Matrix is composed of two dilemmas, setting up analysis in four quadrants. There is only room for two opposing factors and/or ideas. Simple contextualisation, through opposition, only allows for dualism. This means that context is not emergent but pre-given, which leads to the blind analysis of repetition and sameness in analysis and action that is observed in Ralph Stacey’s vicious circle of the dominant management discourse. In sum, first-order systems theory largely denies emergence. The black box is filled with different mainstream management recipes that are largely based on the two-fold logic of dualism. Recipes that are incapable of coping with complexity simply because they are rooted in the notion of coherence (labels) as an input and output signal, which are linked with each other through feedback. The observer (e.g. the manager) is neatly separated from that which is observed, asserting that emergence can be controlled. On the second floor, the question is raised: what is really going on in the black box? This initiates the complexifying move towards second-order systems theory, which prioritises the organising concept of self-organisation. Emergence is invited to the table. I will discuss and problematise this concept. It is an old tradition in management studies, starting with the Hawthorne experiments and the work of the Human Relations movement. However, self-organisation is mostly used in its cybernetic or systemic meaning. This then lacks reflexivity and consciousness – i.e. self-organisation is primarily determined by organisational process, i.e. self that is organised by organisation.

Self and organisation should be understood at different aggregation levels according to Morin and Letiche & Lissack. In Morin’s self-eco-[re-]organisation concept, a three-fold logic is introduced, whereby the dualism of self-organisation is complexified. This move liberates the self-organisation concept of its dualistic footing, therefore making room for reflexivity, strong contextualisation, and awareness. Letiche & Lissack complexify Morin’s trilemma Self-Eco-Organisation by relating processes between these three factors to a fourth factor: emergence. Both Morin and Letiche & Lissack relate various factors (self, organisation, environment) to dialogic, emergent relations that are complementary, contradictory, and opposing. The move towards the third and fourth floor of Morin’s complexity edifice is made possible through the generation of complexity principles that (might) create better awareness of emergent processes.

Edgar Morin follows a three-fold logic (trilemma) discussing complexity theory. In his six-volume study (La Méthode/Method), he develops a new vocabulary and concepts about complexity. A scientific worldview that opposes the dominant paradigm of simplicity. The paradigm of simplicity proposes a reduction of complex realities to one principle of order, which only has room for the ‘either-or’ nature of reality that is represented as a dichotomy (thesis versus antithesis). In this paradigm, there is a separation between subject and object, a separation between micro and macro, a separation between theory and practice, and between laboratory experiment and the real world. Simplicity also has a bias towards probabilities versus possibilities and a bias towards objectivity and universality. Simplicity makes a coercive disjunction between that which is connected (reductionism) and connects coercively diversity (holism).

Complexity can be characterised by three underlying principles according to Morin. Firstly, through a dialogic principle: order and disorder, self and environment deny each other, but they also collaborate to produce organisation and complexity. The second complexity principle involves the principle of (organising) recursivity: a process in which the products and effects are at the same time the causes and producers of what they produce. Society is produced by interactions between individuals, but society, once produced, feeds back to the individuals and produces them. Morin thus breaks open linear causality, which marks simplicity. The third principle is a holographic principle. The parts are in the whole and the whole is in the parts, but they are irreducible to each other. Simplicity only looks at parts, isolated from their context (reductionism), while holism only looks at the whole, without paying attention to the parts. The principle of holographic structure is linked to the principle of recursive causality, which is linked to the dialogic principle of interaction between order and disorder.

The four-fold logic of Letiche & Lissack, conceptualised in the semiotic/dialogic square of Self and World, tries to reveal emergent processes by providing a guide for active dialogues that respects lived or experienced narrative – i.e. to put lived speech (parole) in the foreground. The dialogic square of Self-Group-Environment-Emergence adds a fourth factor to Morin’s trilemmas, and thus complexifies them further. I focus in this book on two important complexity concepts of Letiche & Lissack that relate to emergence: coherence, and the dialogic square of Self and World as a research framework, which tries to enhance our understanding of emergence. The dialogic square of Self and World is a guide, in which four factors (labels), which are constructed in a way that depends on the issue that is studied, are brought into dialogue through three different complex relationships: complementary, contradictory, and opposing. The dialogic square tries to make sense of emergent, situational occurrences. Using the dialogic square allows us to create complex narratives on the issue that is studied.

I have distilled four, interrelated, process conditions for coping with complex issues from my research: 1. Dialogic Interaction (underlining the importance of narrative and storying about the complex relationships between self, group, environment, and emergence); 2. Recursive Causality (moments of antagonism and paradox make room for novelty in organisation and/or organising, and create awareness of adjacent possibilities); 3. Holographic Structure (difference in aggregation levels can make room for emergent coherence in organisation and/or organising) and 4. Ecology of Action (this principle refers to the complex relations between intentions and actions).

Emergence is irreducible to complicatedness; emergence is about relatedness and the stories told about relatedness. Emergence has no end-state, there is no solution to emergence, but analysing emergent processes can offer adjacent affordances to act upon. Researching organisation and/or organising, these guiding principles can provide a coherent framework, which can be helpful to create awareness for emergent processes.