Understanding discursive resources and narratives

Reading Tony Watson’s Sociology, Work and Organisation (sixth edition) inspired this model where I have tried to clarify the relationship between individual life path and cultural/societal context.

Let’s imagine a setting where an individual is thinking about his/her future career. The culture offers various different discourses:

• “Work is important for making money, and money is what you need for living.”
• “Work should be challenging and rewarding.”
• “Friends and family should be at the center of life, not work.”
• “People are so busy working they forget about real pleasures of life.”

Different and often conflicting cultural values are incorporated to the discourses. Each individual learns their ways of thinking and acting from these discourses based on their own life goals and adaptation to the available roles in the institutions in the society (such as parent, director or worker).

There are various discursive resources that are available in different contexts. (We could actually imagine education as a sort of initiation to them.) They are what, to quote Wilson, “people can use in various ways to create their own interpretations and understandings of the world”.

Individuals produce narratives that are “accounts of events in the world which are organized in a time-related sequence”. The narrative is used to frame individual’s efforts in order to create understanding of the subjective life experience. Narratives also affect individual learning, since they create sense of “what I am and what drives me forward”.

Contraception and biopower

How come issues such as contraception, abortion and gay marriage constantly come up especially in the American political discourse? Why is contraception a political issue in the USA but not in Finland?

Foucault has presented a framework for understanding these discourses in his concept of biopower; I understand it as the form of power that seeks to penetrate to the intimate sphere of sexuality in order to gain control of the human body and close relationships.

Biopower can be positive or negative; negative biopower seeks to restrict behavior and positive aims to induce it. Also, a third form of institutional biopower could be thought to emerge in cases where the definition of intimate institutions (such as marriage or family) is under debate. The basic tactic of this power is to claim involvement through monetary transactions from and to the state. The state can e.g. encourage making children through incentives, or it can attempt to limit condemned sexual behavior through fines.

The biopower discourses in the USA exist because of the country’s large-scale democracy and culture wars, which mean common understanding isn’t pursued any longer. This results in the permanent multitude of opinions.

Finland does not have such discourses because of the smallness and homogeneity of the culture. There is not enough cultural space to form such movements, which results in feelings of awkwardness towards them.

This is also why there is not much news coverage on the US debates in Finland. They seem weird and incomprehensible – something that can only be understood from an American perspective.

How crises are solved – a model

I came up with this system model that could be thought to develop the previous one to focus more on organizational agency.

What is important to recognize is that each actor proposes actions based on their education and background. We could take the Iran nuclear program as an example:

• Authoritatively thinking people such as military officials most probably propose military action to solve the crisis.
• Economically thinking people such as economists propose market-based solutions such as sanctions.
• Politically (many-sided) thinking people such as politicians are most likely to promote diplomacy and peaceful resolution of the crisis.
• Hierarchial (authoritarian) individuals typically actively reject diplomatic efforts, and political (liberal) individuals reject military action.

In case of the Greek economic crisis the proposals go like this:

• Hierarchial thinking produces proposals based on rules, monitoring, austerity and abandonment.
• Market thinking promotes approaches such as letting banks go bankrupt and supporting creative destruction.
• Political thinking produces ideas that seek to increase political cooperation and public discourse.

All the proposed actions are processed in the dialogue in which the system transforms into a synchronous one: the individuals agree on “what must be done” and start acting as a larger unit. Here dialogue is more of a “process of reality” that results in collectively approved action.

Developing a system model of learning

At last I get to use my system modelling skills! (I did get grade 5 on scale 1-5 from the dynamic simulation course last fall where we used Powersim to build technical and ecosystem models.) Here I have used Vensim PLE which is free for personal use.

Here is pictured a system model on learning: the scale can be individual as well as organizational. The model is not definitive in the sense that all possible causalities are drawn; I have most probably missed something, but you get the image.

• An arrow can be read as “affects”.
• The arrow above emergence means flow; the boxes can be thought as stocks.
• + means positive causal link. This means: “If A increases, also B increases, and if A decreases also B decreases”
• - means negative causal link: “If A increases, B decreases, if A decreases, B increases.”
• || in the arrow means delay.

Most of the variables are quite complex and not something that can be measured.
Instead of increase/decrease, we could think the positive causality as “Improvement in A improves B”, negative causality as “Improvement in A weakens B”.

On organizations and emergence

It is important to notice the nature of an organization: They are emergent systems that exist everywhere in the society as schools, companies, states, institutions and so on. An organization always exists to serve some purpose in the complete structure of society, be it tangible or symbolical. Typically these functions cannot be separated, as there is always the purpose that is pursued and one that is actualized. There are complex forces both inside and outside organizations that continuously construct, preserve and dissolve them.

Power is the force that seeks to keep these systems intact and functioning. Basically it aims for balance between the forces of conflict, unity, crisis and separation – each of them in excess amount has the ability to break down the organization, and too little of them can make the organization unresponsive and dysfunctional in the long term, thus rendering it irrelevant.

Here I have tried to picture the dynamics:

On positive and negative power

Now that there is at least some clarity to the whole liberty/power debate, terms such as empowerment and capacity building are on much firmer philosophical ground. Both of them are connected to positive power.

By the way, Veljko Rus, a Slovenian sociologist, wrote about positive and negative power in 1980:

Positive power (induction), as an ability to initiate activity, and negative power (resistance), as an ability to stop some activity, are treated in this paper as two closely related poles of the same power cycle. The paper further demonstrates how existing theoretical treatments of power phenomena have been reduced to an analysis of positive power and have consequently been unable to treat the contradictory interdependency of positive and negative power.

How does power work?

While there has been much philosophizing about positive and negative liberty, power in social relations seems to have been left out of this discussion or its nature has been taken for granted.

Following the atomistic systems approach, I drew the following picture. In the framework conflict is the basis of power in human relations; different scenarios take place depending on the system type, that is, the prevailing culture.

If we were to define positive and negative power in this context, negative power would be “interfering force manifesting in other people that seeks to suppress individual (or group) potential and desires”, and positive power would be “individual and collaborative force that seeks to enable individual and collective potential”. Suppression is an example of negative power, while dialogue implies use of positive power. Deliberation and indifference are something in between.

Because suppression is so typical in the contemporary society, conflicts and use of power are often interpreted solely in this frame. An example of this process could be a discussion between blog author and commentator. While the author might seek to build dialogue, the commentator interprets the author’s “eagerness” as suppression because of the prevailing interpretative frameworks.

In the field of organizational conflict management Rahim (2002) has developed this model:

The equivalences are clear; Integrating style takes place in a dialogue, dominating and obliging styles exist in suppression, avoiding style is indifference and compromising style is deliberation in the atomistic thinking.

Understanding the dynamics of human systems

After listening to a podcast about Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, I became interested in micro-physics in regular interactions where power is used in the everyday level.

Human systems typically include four types of interactions: conflicts, unified interactions, crises and separate interactions.

Systems typically have many of these interactions going on at the same time: there are forces that collide with each other, forces that unify and forces that separate the actors.

Conflicts and crises are defining moments in the interaction process: based on the skills, requirements and valuations of the actors, the system can either move towards stronger unity or deepening separation.

We could imagine an everyday conversation that shows these various interactions:

Jack and Maria are sitting in the break room. Jack is reading an article about happiness in work, Maria is reading a women’s magazine.

Jack: I think our workplace could have a better working atmosphere. [opening the interaction from an initial state of separation]
Maria: What do you mean? [conflict]
J: Often I’m faced with excessive criticism instead of constructive attitude. [building the conflict]
M: You’re totally right, that happens quite often.[unity] I think it has to do with the managers, they often seem out of touch from the practical work. [unity, separation]
J: Well, to some extent, yeah. [unity] But I think all employees are partly responsible for the atmosphere, not just the bosses. [crisis]
M: I guess you have some truth in that. [unity]

Maria’s first reply shows the structure of a conflict: it isn’t necessarily a “big argument”, but asynchrony between the participants’ thoughts. Typically unity is built towards others, as can be seen in the way Maria says managers are to blame.

What is important to notice is that these various “micro-interactions” take place in the communication process all the time. No state is problematic in itself, but they all require communication skills to direct the process towards a desired state.

There are typical phrases that emerge in the different phases:

Conflict:
“What do you mean?”
“What is your point?”
“Why did you do that?”
“Do as I say.”

Unity:
“You’re right.”
“We’re all in this together.”
“What should we do?”

Crisis:
“In my opinion you acted stupidly.”
“I disagree with you on this.”
“Why are you neglecting me?”

Separation:
Polite co-operation with minimal interaction.
Silence.

If we were to combine this with the different system types thinking, the defining factor would be “what the emerging unity is like”. The equivalences could go something like this:

Closed system – strongest dominates
Open system – majority dominates
Random system – no-one is responsible
Synchronous system – everyone is responsible

Of emotional language

Radical leftist
Right-wing conservative
Anarchist
Neoliberal
Socialist
Mainstream
Liberal
Establishment
Idealist
Realist
Bleeding heart

Emotions are totally acceptable, we are humans after all. Maybe the problem is that even in this time of open expression of feelings, some archaic masculinity forces debaters to hide their emotions in seemingly objective language. Then anxiety occupies the discourse and prevents reasonable thinking.

You can test your own presuppositions by using adjectives that are contrary to the truths in the discourses you participate in. What kind of feelings arise when you think of these terms?

true anarchist
joyful socialist
mainstream radical
establishment anarchist
radical idealist
bleeding heart realist

(Inspired by Crooks and Liars.)

Specialized power and applause

Quoting Debord:

23.

The oldest social specialization, the specialization of power, is at the root of the spectacle. The spectacle is thus a specialized activity which speaks for all the others. It is the diplomatic representation of hierarchic society to itself, where all other expression is banned. Here the most modern is also the most archaic.

At the root of specialized power is applause. Approval is the only thing spectacular power demands while having its laudatory monologue.

Now that religion no longer provides spectators the consolation their dreary lives need, the president of the United States has become one of the holy men preaching for salvation.

After such a powerful man has spoken, it is polite to clap. In this sentence lies his power.