Vijf papieren bronnen van inspiratie en educatie

Onlangs jarig geweest, en daardoor weer budget voor nieuwe boeken. Met wilde plannen binnen de Maatschap, en met de structurele en harderwordende geluiden en toejuichingen om deel uit te gaan maken van de harde kern, leek het mij niet geheel onverstandig om mijzelf weer uit te dagen met boeken die het verschil kunnen maken. Met steeds concreter wordende praktijken als

1. jaarplannen
2. boeken schrijven rondom onze ICIS 2007 Award Winning Paper
3. het idee om een heuze Call for Chapters uit te zetten bij thesisstudenten van Management van Immateriële Waarden 2005-2006-2007(?), met name artikelen geabstraheerd uit thesises van academisch niveau.

Daarom de volgende boeken geselecteerd, waarvan er één geleid werd door mijn recente interesse in complexiteit en chaos theorie, een ander interessante afgeleide is uit de essential reading van MIW 2007-2008, één een klassieker is voor eenieder die bekend is met de beschouwingen rondom objectivisme/subjectivisme, de volgende is het feit dat ik het niet kan verhapstukken dat ik Luhmann’’s systeemtheorie nog niet begrijp en de laatste eentje was die reeds bij het schrijven van mijn thesis al op mijn verlanglijst stond, respectievelijk:

Social Emergence: Societies As Complex Systems (Sawyer, 2005)
Following many other contemporary social scientists, such as J. Alexander, A. Giddens, M. Archer, R. Collins, N. Mouzelis and M. Emirbayer, K. Sawyer presents a theoretical discussion of a recurrent and important question in the social sciences: How should we explain the relations between individuals and social structures? In this sense, this book refers to classical debates between methodological individualism and holism, agency and social structure, micro and macro perspectives, and the relevance of realism and dualism in the study of social phenomena. Sawyer thinks we can resolve these classical issues thanks to the third wave of systems theory which is particularly well suited to sociological explanation, and which emerged from recent development in computer science and sociological theory.

The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina & Von Savigny, 2001)
This work provides a diverse philosophical exploration of the role of practice and practices in human activity. It contains essays and critiques of this philosophical and sociological attempt to move beyond current problematic ways of thinking in the humanities and social sciences and explore several conceptions of practice: as underlying subjects and objects, as conditions of knowledge and as a building-block of social phenomena. The essays discuss philosophers such as Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Derrida, whose contributions have been influential in practice theory. It also shows how practice theory stands in opposition to numerous prevalent ways of thinking, such as structuralism, system theory, semiotics, and many strains of humanism. Among the motivations of practice theory study is its approach to science and technology as an activity opposed to representation and its attempt to rethink humanist dichotomies between human and non human entities.

Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980)
Is it true that all of us, not just poets, speak in metaphors, whether we realize it or not? Is it perhaps even true that we live by metaphors? In Metaphors We Live By George Lakoff, a linguist, and Mark Johnson, a philosopher, suggest that metaphors not only make our thoughts more vivid and interesting but that they actually structure our perceptions and understanding. Thinking of marriage as a “contract agreement,” for example, leads to one set of expectations, while thinking of it as “team play,” “a negotiated settlement,” “Russian roulette,” “an indissoluble merger,” or “a religious sacrament” will carry different sets of expectations. Metaphors We Live By has led many readers to a new recognition of how profoundly metaphors not only shape our view of life in the present but set up the expectations that determine what life well be for us in the future.

Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems (Moeller, 2006)
What are systems? What is society? What happens to human beings in a hyper modern world? This book is an introduction to Niklas Luhmann’’s social system theory which explains specific functions like economy and mass media from a cybernetic perspective. Integrating various schools of thought including sociology, philosophy and biology, Luhmann Explained results in an overall analysis of “world society.”

Complex Knowledge: Studies in Organizational Epistemology (Tsoukas, 2005)
In this book Haridimos Tsoukas, one of the most imaginative organization theorists of our time, examines the nature of knowledge in organizations, and how individuals and scholars approach the concept of knowledge. Tsoukas firstly looks at organizational knowledge and its embeddedness in social contexts and forms of life. He shows that knowledge is not just a collection of free floating representations of the world to be used at will, but an activity constitutive of the world. On the one hand the organization as an institutionalized system does produce regularities that can can be captured via propositional forms of knowledge. On the other, the organization as practice, as a life world, or as an open-ended system produce stories, values, and shared traditions which can only be captured by narrative forms of knowledge. Secondly, Tsoukas looks at the issue of how individuals deal with the notion of complexity in organizations: Our inability to reduce the behavior of complex organizations to their constituent parts. Drawing on concepts such as discourse, narrativity, and reflexivity, he adopts a hermeneutical approach to the issue. Finally Tsoukas examines the concept of meta-knowledge, and how we know what we know. Arguing that the underlying representationalist epistemology of much of mainstream management causes many problems, he advocates adopting a more discursive approach. He describes what such an epistemology might be, and illustrates it with examples from organization studies and strategic management.