Last week, for the first week of the first semester for our first year PhD students, I assigned a reading that made my students cry. Or at least whimper. Or perhaps merely curse my name. The article was Feldman and Orlikowski’s (2011) Theorizing Practice and Practicing Theory in the journal Organization Science. I must admit that it produced a bit of mental pain on my part knowing that the students would understand this paper a boatload better in their third year than in their first, but we were reading it now.
My objective in assigning the paper was to demonstrate the outcome of transdisciplinary research, which is an overarching goal of our Organization Science PhD program. The problem is that it’s difficult to understand the ins and outs of a particular research problem if you have not yet been “in” or “out” of a couple of them.
NONETHELESS, the students and I were able to get excited about the paper by discussing the authors’ call to reject dualisms. The example the students and I were able to coalesce around the common duality of agency vs. structure. The students have agency (“choice”) in where they sit in the class along with what and how they respond to the discussion questions. However, we also discussed the (possibly unacknowledged) structure in the classroom in that no one was sitting in the chairs in the corner of the room, that I sat at the head of the table, and that discussions and topics tended to be generated around the ones I thought were most interesting from the readings. The authors rejection of duality (as we interpreted it) means that to understand what is actually happening in the class (or in “education”), we need to understand how WE actually live (ENACT) the CLASS within our space/time/culture. The rejection of dualism means that agency and structure cannot be separated from each other to understand human behavior. Mind-body, objective-subjective, individual-institutional, and free will-determinism dualities should not be separated, either. (Yes, practice theory extends structuration theory and you should read Feldman and Orlikowski’s article to learn more about it, if you are so inclined.)
Our discussion became lively, light bulbs went off over students’ heads (always a goal in class), and I think we all developed an understanding of this article as moving the discipline forward by challenging old ways of theorizing and presenting new ways to understand human and organizational behavior.
Imagine, then, my surprise when I picked up a theology book I had put down a few months before and started reading about this author’s call to reject dualistic thinking. ((cue the spit take)) I then recalled a talk I heard by Gary Alan Fine at the last INGroup conference in which he discussed his new book Tiny Publics, in which he proposed that we can understand organization as well as society by understanding the routine small group interactions in situ (i.e., not unrelated to the rejection of dualistic thinking). Dr. Fine is a sociologist quite apart from Feldman and Orlikowski as well as the theologian I was reading.
I may be going out on a limb here (or I may not!), but I think we are in the midst of a revolutionary new way of thinking about human (and organizational) behavior: one that is more holistic and difficult than before. We’ve got to stop thinking in dualities (i.e., opposites) and realize that “both” sides are necessary, equal, and essential in understanding What Is Going On.
This is the part of the essay in which I am supposed to explain how we do that, how we stop thinking in dualities and start researching and theorizing non-dualistically. HA! The best the students and I came up with was that we should take Fine’s approach and study repetitive small group behavior, checking our biases for dualities, and extrapolating to the research question from there. We also decided this was going to be a lot easier for researchers 50 years from now (when we’ve already worked through these issues) than it is for us now.