Bricolage and situated performing in organizations - EGOS 2005
BRICOLAGE AND SITUATED PERFORMING IN ORGANIZATIONS
Paper for presentation at the 21st EGOS Colloquium,
Berlin, 30 June-2 July 2005,
Sub-theme 24: Rationalities and practices of organizing and bricolage
by
Raffi Duymedjian
Charles-Clemens Rüling*
Grenoble Ecole de Management
12 rue Pierre Sémard - BP 127
38003 Grenoble Cedex 01, France
*Corresponding author: charles-clemens.ruling@grenoble-em.com
Abstract
Our paper proposes to locate the idea of situated performing in the context of recent debates in sociology of work and organization theory. We use bricolage in organizations as a starting point and develop the perspective of situated performing along five key dimensions -- theory, knowledge, acting, outcome and identity. We reconsider two ideal-typical modes of acting outlined by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966), the bricoleur and the engineer, as particular instances of situated performing. The paper closes with a comparison of situated performing with other perspectives for analyzing action in organizations.
1. Introduction: situating this paper
The argument in this paper is based on prior reflection about bricolage in organizations. It represents an effort to extend our earlier research beyond the notion of bricolage to a more general framework for analyzing work and action in organizations. The notion of situated performing has grown out of the conviction that bricolage as a particular mode of acting needs to be related to a more general framework.
We introduce the notion of "situated performing" as a novel perspective for organizational analysis, and, more precisely, the study of work. The notion of "situated performing" builds on the assumption that social action (as for example in the case of work practices in an organizational setting) can be more fully understood by conceiving it as a performance that is shaped by the five interrelated dimensions. Following our initial analysis of local organizational practices, we have more recently worked on the definition of a set of dimensions characterizing a bricolage perspective. In this paper, we present five dimensions of situated performing: the theory and knowledge of the world, the acting upon and in the world, the outcome and the identity of the social performer.
A twofold caveat applies: First, this paper is an initial attempt to relate our ideas on bricolage in organizations to theories of action and sociology of work. In its present state it necessarily lacks both nuance and completeness. Second, it is not our goal to develop a new theory of action. Our aim is rather to bring together a set of disparate orientations in the analysis of organizational action. In doing so we engage in a gesture of deliberate conceptual eclecticism; in other words: intellectual bricolage. This attempt draws on a repertoire made up of heterogeneous ideas from, among others, sociology, social anthropology, psychology, cognitive and political science. The commensurability of concepts and methods from these different traditions is clearly an issue of concern to which we do not have an answer yet. However, position our argument in relation to some recent developments in sociology of work, and engage in a first comparison of situated performing with other theories of action.
Our paper is structured as follows: The next section tries to locate the idea of situated performing in the context of recent debates in sociology of work and organization theory. The subsequent section outlines our prior work related to bricolage in organizations as a starting point and illustration of our views on situated performing. The fourth section develops the notion of situated performing along the five key dimensions -- theory, knowledge, acting, outcome and identity --, and reconsiders two ideal-typical modes of acting outlined by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966) -- the bricoleur and the engineer -- as particular instances of situated performing. The last section contrasts situated performing with theoretical propositions made by Bourdieu, Callon and Latour, and Livet and Thévenot.
2. Beyond class and contingency: renewed interest in the local realities of work
The paradigmatic scene on which stage our argument can be sketched out at the intersection of recently voiced concerns about a lack of scholarly interest in the everyday realities, gestures and achievements of action in organization studies and sociology of work. We have chosen to use two contributions (one Anglo-Saxon, the other one French) to illustrate this renewed interest in the local realities of work.
French sociology of work has traditionally been marked by a strong emphasis on collective, class related oppositions and identities at the work place. From its beginning after the second world war, French sociology of work was not so much concentrated on the analysis of activity but saw itself as an instrument to analyze industrial society from a critical and emancipatory point of view (Ughetto, 2004). The emphasis was on the communities created through and beyond concrete work activities. Only recently have some French sociologists of work begun to advocate a more anthropologically informed approach towards the study of work practices (see, for example, the special issue on work as action in Revue de l'IRES (2004)).
Some points made by Bidet (2004) illustrate the claims made by these "new" sociologists of work. Traditionally, French authors have tended to analyze work through a "prism of employment" almost exclusively focusing on the tension between autonomy and heteronomy. Even research looking at local practices tends to oppose "informal" local practices to formal rules and job descriptions. Deliberately departing from this tradition, Bidet (2004) analyzes work practices from the perspective of technical interaction between telecom technicians and their clients to deal with problems concerning the telephone line. This analysis sheds light on the "profane experiment" as a particular constellation of participative action, in which clients and technicians engage in a game of shared, experiential problem solving. Characteristic for the new French sociology of work, like in this example, is its emphasis on the construction of identities through material, technical interaction.
On the side of organization theory, Barley and Kunda (2001) have recently made a forceful claim in Organization Science for "Bringing work back in". Revisiting almost 30 years of efforts to make sense of postbureaucratic organizing, the authors conclude that "both popular and academic attempts to come to grips with postbureaucratic organizing are hampered, in part, by inadequate conceptions of work" (2001: 77). Current efforts to conceptualize novel work realities seem to lack grounding in an analysis of concrete work activities.
For the authors, this is due to two tendencies: conceptual inversion and environmentalism. Inversion occurs when analysts claim that organizations and the associated work practices have fundamentally shifted to a new model. Such an analysis is flawed because it does not seek to understand how the new arrangements come about. For example, talking about "network organizations" or "boundaryless organizations" does not add much to our understanding of how new network ties or boundaries develop, connect, and relate to people's everyday actions and interpretations. The second problem, environmentalism, is related to the strong tendency in organization theory to see organizational phenomena primarily as responses to changes in an organization's environment. To avoid the construction of oversimplistic cause-effect relationships, Barley and Kunda propose an emphasis on the concrete "streams of action that mediate the effects of environmental change" (2001: 78). The influence of a new technology on organizations, for example, depends not only on the design and the deployment of this particular technology, but also on its use and interpretation within a particular organizational setting. The problems of both inversion and environmentalism can be related to "contemporary organization theory's tendency to distance itself from a detailed understanding of work and how it may be changing" (2001: 79). Barley and Kunda's (2001) provocative suggestion is to go far back in the history of organization theory, to refocus on a detailed study of work practices and to more strongly emphasize the local, embedded, material nature of action as an ongoing achievement in organizations.
3. Bricolage: an essential step towards situated performing
Since the late 1980s "bricolage", a notion introduced by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966) as an analogy to explain a particular mode of relating to one's environment, has been taken up by organization and management scholars to describe a variety of phenomena related to the use of existing resources in a mode of improvisation and creative, adaptive tactics (e.g., Weick, 1998; Moorman & Miner, 1998; Cunha & Cunha, 2000; Baker et al., 2003). Given the variety of efforts to make the notion of bricolage useful for organizational analysis, we feel the necessity to briefly situate our own approach to bricolage and to relate it back to some of the original ideas outlined by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966).
Our own work on bricolage has started in the context of a research project aiming at understanding the influence of digital image processing, on local work practices in the field of movie special effects making (Duymedjian & Rüling, 2004a). Our comparison of practices of physical and digital movie special effects creation and the way in which these two interact in movie production lead us to conclude that both sets of practices share common traits of bricolage as described in Lévi-Strauss (1966). Even though both sets of practices vary in respect to the particular competences, technologies etc. required to produce either a physical or a digital special effect, the dominant mode of action is, in both cases, one of trial and error, permutation, assemblage and re-use to create an arrangement whose primary function is to obtain a predefined result -- in the case of film making the production of a visual illusion. Both practices are based on practical experience, and signaled by references to distinctive realizations, e.g. the participation in the making of a particular film or a distinction obtained for particular work (for example, an Academy award).
Despite obvious differences, similar logic of action in both sets of local practices enables both types of special effects making not only to coexist, but to cooperate. Against common wisdom suggesting an incompatibility or struggle for influence given the high importance of information technology in digital effects making as compared to the very hands-on craft solutions proposed in the field of physical effects and their potential substitutability, both types of special effects making make heterogenous objects "hold", and both seem to coexist in a non-conflictual way as long as the movie director regulates the context – characterized by a shared visual culture -- in which their interaction takes place.
Our work on movie special effects used the notion of bricolage to refer to the type of practices we observed. In his original contribution, Lévi-Strauss (1966) refers to bricolage as an analogy to explain a particular internally coherent mode in which an individual (and, by extension, a group) sees, knows about, and acts upon the world. Lévi-Strauss argues that much of the reasoning that can be found in indigenous populations is neither pre-logic nor opposed to scientific rationality (in the way early anthropologists were inclined to do), but should be understood as a "science of the concrete", characterized by a concern of exhaustive observation and systematic inventorying of all elements in the surrounding world. The related mental operations thus differ from the modern understanding of scientific reason not in their nature, but in respect to the types of phenomena they refer to.
As we will show in more detail in the following section, Lévi-Strauss confronts the ideal-types of the bricoleur and the engineer. The engineer tends to determine the proper tools for a task and then gathers them while the bricoleur uses the elements of his repertoire in order to create an arrangement that is functional in relation to a given project. The bricoleur is someone who uses "whatever is at hand" (1966:17). The bricoleur's acts are based on a repertoire of elements collected over time. The bricoleur's belief that a collected item might serve one day serves as the overarching principle in the constitution of the repertoire.
Most references to the notion of bricolage in organization and management theory occur from the late 1980s onwards to describe various families of organizational phenomena: a particular mode of organizational adaptation, a particular orientation within entrepreneurship, or a particular kind of appropriation of information and communication technologies.
Mainstream organization theory commonly assumes that organizations have to innovate in order to be able to adapt to changing contexts. Bricolage as a mode of action has been used to characterize (both in a descriptive and in a more normative orientation) organizational practices related to innovation. In such literature, bricolage is related to improvisation (e.g., Weick, 1998; Moorman & Miner, 1998; Cunha & Cunha, 2000). The fact that improvisation is based on a restricted set of rules and resources and the notion of permanent adjustment in the composition relates it to bricolage. For other authors, the notion of bricolage extends towards the relationship of organizational structure and improvisation (e.g. Orlikowski, 1996). From this point of view, organizations can be understood as improvising systems characterized by a "mixture of the precomposed and the spontaneous, just as organizational action mixes together some proportion of (...) exploitation with exploration, routine with nonroutine, automatic with controlled" (Weick, 1998: 551), and organizational actors appear as bricoleurs that use whatever resources and repertoires they have at hand. Yet another variant positions bricolage within the tradition of organizational symbolism in order to describe the process of organizational analysis as much as the way in which organizational members "make sense of and order the world (...) against a background of material and social constraint" (Linstead & Grafton-Small, 1990: 291).
Bricolage is also used to designate an organization's capacity to resist a particularly destabilizing situation. In this sense, Weick (1993a), for example, presents bricolage as one element of resilience, enabling an individual or an organization to overcome a crisis situation by maintaining a coherence of identity and the capacity to act. A related idea, "ritualized ingenuity" (Coutu, 2002), thrives on the bricoleur's familiarity with the elements that make up his environment and an ongoing practice of diversion and permutation of elements in a process of assemblage.
In line with associating bricolage and organizational innovation is the idea of considering bricolage in the context of entrepreneurship (e.g., Baker et al., 2003; Garud & Karnøe, 2003). Entrepreneurial firms, which are often small or medium sized, seem more apt to recombine and to make creative use of their existing resources. They seem to share a capacity to mobilize practical knowledge in a way that challenges general theoretical approaches specifying the utilization of resources a priori. These companies are able to find a response to environmental constraints and the dependencies they are facing because they enjoy great latitude in their processes of collecting and utilizing resources which they cannot always acquire or utilize according to rational standard procedures. As a process of continuous creation and utilization of practical knowledge and an exploitation of varied types of resources, bricolage depends on the existence of organizational memory. This memory has to allow the organization to maintain an inductively generated knowledge providing, at the same time, an occasion for constant testing. Larger organizations sharing a tendency towards fragmentation along professional or occupational boundaries have, from a bricolage point of view, a disadvantage compared to organizations built upon multidisciplinarity and exchange across boundaries. Yet other uses of bricolage in the innovation orientation discuss entreneurial firm's responses to resource dependence (Baker & Aldrich, 2000; Baker et al., 2003) or develop models of distributed agency in technological innovation (Garud & Karnøe, 2003).
With respect to the development of information systems, Ciborra (e.g., 1992, 1996, 2002) has made extensive use of the term bricolage in order to characterize a particular strategy of information technology appropriation in which an information system is seen as a set of means an actor can (re-)assemble at any given moment according to actual informational needs. Despite their technological rigidity, information systems are characterized by a high degree of flexibility in use which allows users to act as bricoleurs. Diversion of functions, breaking up and recombination of systems in use seem related to the notion of bricolage. An information system is a permanent source of bricolage in organizations, in which each user bends the components of a given systems according to his individual usages. In the same vein, Orlikowski (e.g., 2000) suggests to draw a distinction between technologies-as-artefacts, i.e. technologies defined by a set of technical functions determined in advance, from technologies-in-use, i.e. technologies in a situation of practice. The flexibility and handiness of digital objects greatly facilitate bricolage because all kinds of signs are transformed into a common format allowing for infinite collage.
While some assimilation of the notion of bricolage with the more widely accepted themes in organization and management theory has taken place over the last years, most contributions tend to trim down Lévi-Strauss's (1966) notion of bricolage to the idea of using "whatever resources and repertoires one has to perform whatever task one faces" (Weick, 1993b: 352; see also the overview over definitions of bricolage across the literature presented in Cunha et al., s.d.). This contradicts the comprehensiveness of Lévi-Strauss's notion which reaches beyond simple gesture to emphasize the underlying theory of the world as well as a range of related processes like, for example, the constitution and use of the bricoleur's repertoire. A second reduction lies in the focus on the symbolic side of bricolage. It seems to us that much of the literature on bricolage has introduced a symbolist bias by emphasizing processes of sensemaking, interpretation and improvisation. This excludes some of the notion's complexity which is precisely due to the Lévi-Strauss's equal consideration of material and immaterial objects.
To clarify the notion of bricolage in our work, we tried to find out the difference when we looked at a particular organizational phenomenon from a bricolage perspective. We have chosen to consider bricolage as one particular mode of acting that is different from other, often more dominant modes of acting in contemporary work organizations. We use "situated performing" as a "meta" position from which practices of bricolage can be recognized and understood. It is a general analytic gesture relating situation, cognition and action. As we will develop in the following section, situated performing implies the consideration of five dimensions of acting and their interrelations: an actor's theory of the world, knowledge of the world, acting upon the world, the nature of the realization, and the way in which acting and the realization are related to the actor's identity.
4. Dimensions of situated performing
There are many relatively recent terms introduced by new cognitive or actionist approaches in sociology of work and sociology of organization. Part of these terms notably result from the necessities that have their creators to insist on cognition and action more as a process than a result. "Acting" (Weick, 1979) completed "action" to put the emphasis on the process, and so did knowing (Lave & Wenger, 1991) to prevent the dangers of a reifying approach of knowledge. These concepts were combined into expressions aiming at connecting results and processes, and also the cognitive and the materialistic aspects of human action. These conceptual constructions, such as "knowing in practice" (Orlikowski, 2002), "situated cognition" (Brown & Duguid, 1989), "embedded knowledge" (Polanyi, 1967), or "cognition in practice" (Lave, 1988), give also the opportunity to bring together scientific disciplines which are traditionally separated - psychology, anthropology, ergonomics, sociology. They all base their assumptions on a new definition of cognition, shifting from of an individual, rational, abstract, detached, general platonic vision to a situated perspective, which is social, embodied, concrete, located, engaged and specific.
Given the many available expressions connecting action to cognition in a situated perspective, the need for another expression seems questionable. The reason why we think another concept is useful is that none of the existing approaches seem capable of fully grasping bricolage. What we mean by grasping is the adoption of a comprehensive posture which enables us to answer the expectations of a sociology of action in organizations, namely getting closer to the reality without falling in the traps of environmentalism and conceptual inversion, while most of approaches tend to favor the cognitive side of action using "cognition" or "knowing" as their central concepts.
"Situated" refers to the economic and technical embeddedness of acting -- a notion that seems unanimously accepted in the literature. The key point in "situated performing" is that we we concentrate on "performing" instead of looking at "cognition" or "knowing". The first and the most obvious reason comes from the fact that "performing" conveys the idea of a process of execution, of accomplishment which insists more on the action than on the underlying cognitive mechanisms. This does not mean that we exclude the cognitive dimension from our analysis, but that we also observe the body in movement and the manipulated objects. The second reason is that "performing" also conveys the idea of performance in the sense of efficiency. And as we chose to observe acting into productive organizations, we cannot exclude the necessity for an action to achieve economic goals, and therefore be oriented by them. The third reason is the semantic relationships between performing and the world of theatre. This relationship has two consequences. The first one is that every representation (performance) is at the same moment identical to the previous one, but also different. This prevents us from focusing solely on the concept of routine which is key to other research postures (e.g., Giddens, 1984; Orlikowski, 2002). Our work aims at taking the relative uniqueness of the idiosyncratic action into account.The second consequence is based on the complex link between the identity of the actor and the character he is playing. The stage is a place where an actor puts a part of himself in his character, which in turn influences the actor as an individual. We believe that organizations are also rooms of co-dependence between modes of acting and modes of being, and that it is useful to wonder about the co-evolution of the context, the gesture, the outcome and the identity of the actor.
In order to develop the five dimensions presented below had to move beyond the text of Lévi-Strauss. His notions of bricolage and the bricoleur cannot be used as concepts in an academic sense, but serve as metaphors to introduce the "savage mind". An extensive reading of Lévi-Strauss showed us that his description goes well beyond an individual manipulating objects taken from a repertoire patiently accumulated throughout the bricoleur’s experiences. He also makes some comments about the intricate relation between the bricoleur and his arrangement, and the fact that their identities are co-related. Cognitive aspects are also not forgotten, when he describes the bricoleur as using fragments of principles from different fields of knowledge without mastering any of them. Finally, the anthropological illustrations used by Lévi-Strauss suggest that bricolage is related to a specific theory of the world held by the bricoleur.
First dimension: Theory of the world
This first dimension provides the foundation for an ecology of action by defining the preconceived values structuring the world of an individual. These values are projected upon the material as well as the symbolic world, determining the type of space and time and the nature of the interactions between humans and other entities composing their world. These "basic assumptions" (Schein, 1985) are the roots of a general cosmology specifying the place Man has in the world surrounding him, and the nature of relationship he may have or is authorized to have.
Bricoleur: The bricoleur's world is composed of entities structured by a non-hierarchical logic. These entities are equivalent, i.e. each of them plays a part in the general cosmology of the world. This world, full of interdependencies, is a complex system, hard to decompose into small separate parts. It is closed in two ways: spatially, which means that the collection of entities composing it is not infinite, and temporally because time is considered circular, events sometimes interrupting the running of time. Finally, the bricoleur is not dominating things, but living among them in a kindly relationship looking for harmony among all connected entities.
Engineer: The world of the engineer is based on an a priori order, specified by principles issued from a transcendental science. This order imposes a hierarchy among things, ideally upon quantification and measure. The entities of the world are considered potentially separable from one another. It's also an open, infinite world, without visible and admissible boundaries. Time is linear, running from a bygone past to an unknown and open future. In this world, human actors are at the top of the hierarchy of things.
Second dimension: Knowledge of the world
This dimension defines the epistemology activated on the stage of "situated performing". It is composed of the mental gestures which articulate the theory of the world and the acting on the world. It is based on the fact that "knowledge is less about truth and reason and more about the practice of intervening knowledgeably and purposefully in the world" (Spender, 1996:64). It is not just a comprehensive epistemology, but also and mainly a practical one, because understanding requires feeling and manipulating.
Bricoleur: The bricoleur's knowledge of the surrounding world is of encyclopaedic nature. He compiles, inventories what surrounds him looking for exhaustiveness. His observations give him an intimate knowledge of his world. But his knowledge is oriented by his theory of the world, namely a system of interdependent entities, each one having a place in the running of the world. He is more interested in the relations between things than in their inner properties; his knowledge is mainly functionalist for he wonders about how things can "go together"; this knowledge is versatile because there is no set of means functionally more important than another, and because the totality (closed in space and time) of the world has to be known; finally, the relative closure of the world leads the bricoleur to look for solutions in a repertoire of existing answers.
Engineer: The engineer is in search of the general laws which govern the world around him. He focuses on the essence of things, but the general representations feeding his symbolic system of understanding create an insurmountable distance between him and his environment. His functionalist vision tends to attach a thing to a very particular use. The fact that the engineer wants to go beyond appearances of things leads him to specialization. But this logic of studying further joins the vision of a world without limit.
Third dimension: Acting in and upon the world
This dimension is central because it relates the cognitive dimensions with the dimension of identity described below. It consists of understanding the physical gestures, from the movements preparing an action, to the process of achieving a work.
Bricoleur: He undertakes bricolage well before problems appear, by collecting what will constitute his personal repertoire, following a principle of potential usefulness. When trying to solve a problem, he starts to act without having a clear definition of what he is aiming at. He has only a very partial representation of the result to be reached and means to be used. The bricoleur then engages in a dialogue with the entities of his repertoire. Those considered appropriate are assembled according to methods of connections which will authorize a possible dismantling and return to the repertoire. An element incompletely suitable will possibly be transformed, diverted from its initial function without loosing its identity. If inadequate, it will be substituted by another element of the repertoire. These gestures - dialogue, assembling, diversion and substitution - take place in the chains of moments of actions unfolding in a specific situation.
Engineer: The engineer, facing a problem, designs a "project". His timescale is directed and determined with regard to the definition of the objectives to reach, means to use and of the organization of these means. The current action is systematically compared with the ideal plan of action. According to this logic of projection, every gesture is connected with a body of specialities defining appropriate tools as well as materials to transform. Acting is framed by rules, principles which have to be strictly applied. Tools are used according to the user guide, related to what has to be done. If tools are to be adapted, adaptation is always marginal, in these spaces where resistance between matter and tool creates the unknown which must be investigated and integrated into the general system of principles and laws. It is not so much assemblage which constitutes the main gesture than the ever more perfect integration of objects into a seamless functioning whole (Simondon, 2001).
Fourth dimension: Outcome
Without subscribing to the commonplace "only result matters", any mode of acting is partially evaluated through its outcome. This conjunction of the action-process and the action - outcome points out a difficult negotiation between these two perspectives. It also justifies the coupling of knowing and knowledge and of acting and action. Our fourth dimension of analysis, the outcome, will share the same difficulty of distinction between the process of action and its result.
Bricoleur: His outcome is inevitably different from his initial intention, which was weakly predefined. It looks like nothing pre-existing. The fact that it works and serves its purpose is enough to satisfy the bricoleur. The outcome of the bricoleur is an assemblage of heterogeneous, dissociable elements, and, as such, belongs to the category of arrangements, far from any coherent and integrated systems. This device is moreover inseparable of the individual who realized it, as far as our bricoleur is the only one to know how to start it up, maintain it, improve it or adjust it to what is needed. It reveals a relation of intimacy, a functional and structural proximity of the bricoleur and his arrangement.
Engineer: The outcome of his action is supposed to match what was previously planned. It has to fill the structural and functional specifications, which are directly inferred from the problem to be solved, and based on the rules of the arts and science corresponding to the profession of the engineer. The engineer is aiming at the greatest functional integration to optimize processes (Simondon, 2001). The outcome is conceived as a product supposed to have a life of its own and to be detached from its designer at the end of the production process.
Fifth dimension: Identity
"Identity" represents for us the most difficult dimension to analyze. It is indeed easy and tempting to use this dimension to elaborate pure psychological categories and build upon them a normative system of evaluation. What we want to understand here is the correspondence between how an individual sees himself as a producer and what and how is he doing "things".
Bricoleur: We have already underlined that the bricoleur was a part of his arrangement. Indeed, his intimacy with the work he designed, but also of which he is the only user and the only one who can guarantee its maintenance transforms him into an a "author" who co-identifies himself with his "work". Furthermore, his involvement in the process of bricolage relies on a feeling of self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997) that lets him think that, although he does not exactly know how to solve the problem, he has no reason not to succeed. What can be seen from outside as a risk, is experienced as a game of virtuality and contingency.
Engineer: He is guided by a logic of necessity, driven by the strictest possible application of general principles and laws. No personal investment and creativity are required beyond power of calculation, rigour and discipline. His involvement relies not only on the feeling of being able to solve a problem, but also on institutional legitimacy. Furthermore, the fact that he embodies industrial values based on reproducibility limits the possibility of identification with "his" outcome.
|
Dimensions |
Definition |
Bricoleur |
Engineer |
|
Theory of the World |
How things (human and non-human) are valued, organized and bound together. |
Complexity (non separabality) Inclusive structure Equivalence Closure Circular time
|
Complication (decomposability) Transcendental hierarchy A priori value Opening Linear Time |
|
Knowledge of the world |
Mental gestures, "objects" and characteristics of knowledge. |
Exhaustive compilation of the world as it is Focusing on relations between objects Intimate knowledge Versatile knowledge
|
Searching for general laws and principles Focusing on the properties of things Distant understanding Specialized knowledge
|
|
Acting in and upon the world |
Physical gestures defining how things are acquired, assembled, transformed and disposed. |
Actualization: each connection is "contingent" Start without a clear view of the result Collection – dialogue - assemblage – diversion – substitution – disassemblage Related to the past of an already constituted repertoire, and the present of the action |
Realization: connections are necessary and defined by the specifications of materials and tools Thorough design, from the outcome to reach to the tools and materials to use and the way they are organized Resource seeking – integration - recycling Related to the time of the project
|
|
Outcome |
Functional and structural characteristics of the achievement |
Called arrangement because is mainly an assembly of heterogeneous things and unexpected connections between them Expected to work Cannot be separated from his author who assumes the functioning, the maintenance and the upgrading
|
Called "product" Supposed to correspond to the initial requirements Detached from his designer/producer and projected into a fluid economic market |
|
Identity |
The relationship between the actor and his work; how he defines himself through his achievement |
Engages in the process of bricolage with high self-efficacy ("I think I can do it") Puts something of himself into the arrangement Gamer sometimes finding original ways of joining things together. |
Engages in the design process because of his legitimate expertise Obeys to general laws and principles decreed by the "science" or "discipline" he belongs to guided by a logic of necessity |
5. Situated performing and other theories of action
We chose to compare our approach with three sociological theories of the action which we believe fundamental. Each of them tries to bring a new stance on how to grasp individual and collective situated. Pierre Bourdieu (1992), is fighting against a theoretical stance building general and objectivizing discourses about practice. Callon and Latour (are willing to bring materialism to the process of action by apply a very provocative principle, of a symmetry between human and non-human. Livet and Thévenot (1994) wish to articulate the different levels of action, from personal to collective activities.
Pierre Bourdieu and the logic of practice
Pierre Bourdieu's work is partly in accordance with the posture we present in what he tries to get closer to the practice by studying the relationship between the agent and his action. Bourdieu aims at defining a practical approach to practice rather than an objectivizing system analyzing the action from an outside. An when he claims that the logic of practice is not the traditional Aristotelian Logic based on the Logos, this almighty Reason positioned as ruler of the body and the passions, he expresses an opinion very close to Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss rejected the theories of Lévy-Bruhl qualifying as pre-logic the thought of the savages, defending that the Savage Mind followed its own logic, certainly different from our scientific logic, but also of interest and capable of great discoveries.
The proposition of Bourdieu gives special importance to the situations within which this logic of practice expresses itself through the confrontation between a body in movement and practical problems. It is for the habitus an occasion to show its efficiency within an economy of practice where the costs of reflection are reduced by the use of partially predetermined gestures, i.e. routines.
It is mainly because of the importance Bourdieu gives to habitus in the logic of practice that situated performing distinguishes itself from Bourdieu’s works. We believe two fundamental dimensions are missing in the analysis of practice, i.e. the cognitive aspect of the practice, and also the question of identity. Not only Bourdieu attaches little importance to the reflexivity of the actors and to the specific knowledge he possesses of the action being made; but, furthermore, his "agent" applies a set of routinized actions where situations of crisis constitute the only places for expressing his individuality through adaptation and creation.
However, the articulation Bourdieu proposes between field and habitus gives means to think of the relationship between a theory of the world partially inherited from the objective social world of the actor, and the embodiment, or rather the interiorization of this theory. The interactions of fields, which becomes for Bourdieu the beginning of a theory of the domination, could make us understand the complex tensions emerging inside a logic a practice based on bricolage under the influence of a social space structured by strong rationalistic values. But we shall not follow him in his reflections on the symbolic violence which put too much emphasis on the problem of power.
The questions Bourdieu raised concerning the conditions of possibility of a theoretical discourse on practice cannot be however excluded from our concerns. Frédérick Keck (Keck, 2000) tempted in this way to link Lévi-Strauss and Bourdieu around the question of a theory of the practice who seem to open interesting perspectives
Actor Network Theory -- the love of objects
The theoretical system of Michel Callon and Bruno Latour (e.g. Callon & Latour, 1988) possesses this attractiveness specific to any provocative and coherent thought. It is therefore difficult to extract a synthesis from it, so dense and complex their reasoning unfolds. We shall stress, however, a central characteristic for our purpose, namely the place of the objects in the action of the individuals.
Putting in the heart of their theory the relations between humans and objects, Callon and Latour embrace in their analyses these "
Actor Network Theory is seducing as it defines no category and no preliminary hierarchy in the understanding of human-object relations. Heterogeneous objects are observed which, by being "networked", become commensurable and act together.
On the other hand, we feel that Actor Network Theory gives too much emphasis to the question of power. Our perspective looks at the dynamics of co-evolution between the bricoleur and his arrangement, rather than the stabilization of a network over time.
Livet and Thévenot's theory of collective action
The collaboration of a heterodox economist prematurely attracted by the Economics of Convention, and a philosopher of action recently produced an original categorization of the collective action. Starting from a reflection on coordination in organizations, Laurent Thévenot, in an already ancient work (Thévenot, 1990), tried to show that there is no clear cut between the constraints an individual is subjected to in order to maintain his action in time and space (coordination with itself) and requirements of coordination with Others. Already in "L’action qui convient" (The suitable action) (Thévenot, 1990), he tries to suggest a kind of continuity from the intimate gesture to the suitable action and, finally, the justifiable action,
His thoughts were refined through his collaboration with Pierre Livet (Livet & Thévenot, 1994). They build together a categorization of the collective action which, finally, allows positioning the individual action towards a collective action. They identified 3 types of collective actions, action commune ("to act in common"), action ensemble ("to act together") and action à plusieurs ("to act as several individuals") -- which differ from one another from the importance and role held by a common project, the means used for dealing with uncertainty and risk of error, the spatial and temporal distance between members, and the nature and place of objects authorizing, conditioning and stabilizing action.
The approach of Livet and Thévenot is interesting in several ways. First, they give a comprehensive analysis of the collective action which tries to solve the problem related to the apparent gap between individual and collective action. Second, they mix sociology, economy and philosophy of action into a coherent conceptual system. Third, their research takes into account the central place of objects as guidelines for individual as well as collective actions, but also conventions, i.e. negotiated rules guiding action and representing the organizational constraints in which actions take place. By doing this, they articulate a materialistic perspective - by the importance they give to objects - and a cognitive-symbolic perspective with the necessity of justification, notably based on conventions.
However, they base their argumentation upon the fact that intentions are indecidable (Livet, 1994), restricting their analysis to physical, i.e. visible gestures connected to physical objects and visible rules, negotiated or "natural". They give no importance to those "basic assumptions" structuring a theory of the world, as well as to the specificity of identities cooperating around a common project. Their primary issue -- how people cooperate through quarrels and uncertainty -- focuses on the dynamics of cooperation and dismisses the questions related to what is expected to be achieved as outcome.
Our purpose in analyzing these three theories was not to compare them in a strict conceptual manner. We intended to see whether the combination of our five dimensions for understanding modes of acting considered as situated performing was too marginal to be relevant, or if there were other conceptual structures experimenting original postures. Bourdieu, Callon and Latour as well as Livet and Thévenot are all opposed to a detached position from where understanding situated action. Their preference also goes to ethnographic methods to reach the dynamics of acting in situation, giving room to interdisciplinary observations. But, by getting closer to action, they at the same time moved away from the cognitive side of the action. And by giving to much emphasis to people pursuing a quest for power or social groups fighting for domination, they tend to make individuals disappear, while situated performing assumes a strong co-dependence between one's identity, one's achievement, and the performing process. For those reasons and despite the problems we shall meet using our five dimensions into one single analysis, we believe situated performing is an effective posture for understanding of acting in organizations.
6. Conclusion
We have moved in this paper from an initial consideration of bricolage as an analytic framework for understanding a particular mode of acting towards a broader perspective which we have named "situated performing". This notion served as a proxy for an approach trying to develop a better understanding of contemporary workplace realities by bringing together the consideration of an actor's theory of the world, his knowledge and gestures, the nature of the outcome of his acting, and his identity conveyed and re-instantiated through the process of acting.
We have presented two ideal types of situated performing, represented by the bricoleur and the engineer to highlight key distinctions and differentiations to be introduced in the study of work in a perspective of situated performing. We have in addition outlined some contours of comparison of situated performing with other theories of action. Positioning situated performing in relation to other theoretical approaches is an ongoing undertaking that needs to be carried on. However, we do not think that situated performing as a perspective should substitute itself to any of the theory of action. Our idea is the development of an integrative arrangement that allows scholars (and practitioners) of organization to creatively bring in (and to make hold) different theoretical ideas. The underlying logic is one of completion, not of substitution.
There are still important issues related to situated performing in general, and bricolage in particular.
Our first and immediate concern is based on the difficulty of using bricolage as a collective mode of acting. Three reasons may explain this issue. First, Lévi-Strauss speaks more of the bricoleur than the bricolage, considered as a personal action even if based on a collective cosmology. The second problem comes from The French meaning, as well as one of its english translation, i.e. do-it-yourself, which emphasizes egocentric action expressing the ability not to depend on a craftsman (and on somebody else than oneself in general) to repair or build something. And finally, attempts to create a collective vision of bricolage jump from the individual level right to the organizational level, from a comprehensive description to a normative one, without analyzing it in limited groups (Ciborra, 2002).
However, we believe the analysis of Livet and Thévenot should help us clarify the connection between individual and collective bricolage. But their concept of convention is challenged by the fact that it may be difficult to negotiate rationally by sharing hard to verbalize intimate knowledge and forbidden poaching experiences.
Another issue is related to our ability to use situated performing for observing other modes of acting. In this article, we compared situated performing to other theories of action which seemed to achieve the same goal of getting closer to action in order to better describe and understand. We chose to illustrate situated performing with the two ideal-types of acting represented by the bricoleur and the engineer. However, there are also other conceptualizations of modes of acting which could be interestingly analyzed through Situated Performing, among them Improvisation or path creation. This may help us test situated performing and see if it is adapted to other modes of acting than the ones it was generated from.
The last issue to explore is more "exotic". Even though situated performing is supposed to broaden our point of view on action in situation, it is also embedded in an occidental perspective of action. Moving to Asia, specifically in China, may bring new, even challenging concepts for realizing that the way we look at acting is immersed into a strong cultural context. A sinologist and philosopher, François Jullien (2004) opened this possibility by analyzing how Chinese were defining efficacy in action, explaining that action relies on the "propensity" of things in such a way that the result takes place of itself. This way of acting is completely opposed to the projected idealized occidental action, and gives central emphasis on the context from which opportunities are exploited. We believe we could make use of this research, but there is danger in simplifying our observations by giving cultural justifications to the way people act.
Beyond the key themes and issues developed in this paper and the avenues for further research are outlined above, we conceive of our proposition as an agenda that should have implications not only for management research but also for management practice. The last years have allowed us to accumulate ample anecdotal evidence that bricolage is not considered a legitimate mode of acting in organizations by most managers and stakeholders. Here, we would like to be able to show, through in-depth analyses of actual work practices and their performance, that bricolage can be a valuable mode of acting in its own right.
To us, the lack of acceptance in organizational settings is probably related to the way in which the notion of bricolage is presented in the research and more applied management literature today. Bricolage is systematically associated with situations of either lack of resources or existential crisis. It occurs as a strategy by which organizations must adapt to hostile and threatening environments in order to survive. The problem with this view is first that it risks to lead us back into the in environmentalist bias criticized by Barley and Kunda (2001), and second that it prevents management scholars and practitioners alike from embracing the potentially creative and emancipating facets of an active approach to organizational bricolage. From our point of view, the study of bricolage should move from the focus on a lack of resources towards analyzing the effectiveness of bricolage. In other words, we would advocate a shift from looking at bricolage is a necessity towards looking at bricolage as a voluntary and legitimate mode of acting.
Another underexposed aspect of bricolage is related to the pleasure of the bricoleur. As we have argued above, the bricoleur not only identifies with the outcome of bricolage, but engages in a process of intimate dialogue with his repertoire. Bricolage can be an expression of an autonomous choice of a mode of acting that repects a specific problem situation as well as the desires of the actor. In this perspective, bricolage appears not simply as a marginal adaptation under constraint, but rather as a privileged mode of acting in which idealistic thought and linear progression are confined to the margins.
We see a situated performing perspective as an analytical tool, putting an emphasis on a fine grained analysis of concrete activities, for the study and the design of work. Within this context, bricolage appears as a particular mode of acting that seems today paradigmatic for the post-bureaucratic and post-industrial settings an increasing number of organizations find themselves in. Developing a situated performance perspective on organizational action demands the integration of a wide array of approaches ranging from psychology to anthropological and philosophical work on productive human action, and also requires that conceptual work is more strongly related to the particular organizational conditions favoring or hindering particular modes of action.