From Metaphor to concept: Towards a foundation of bricolage in organization and management theory - EGOS 2003
FROM METAPHOR TO CONCEPT:
TOWARDS A FOUNDATION OF BRICOLAGE IN ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT THEORY
Paper to be presented at the 20th EGOS colloquium 2004,
sub-theme 39 "Epistemological foundations of organizational knowledge and knowing",
convenors: Georg Schreyögg and Ursula Schneider
by
RAFFI DUYMEDJIAN &
CHARLES-CLEMENS RÜLING
Grenoble Ecole de Management
12, rue Pierre-Sémard - BP 127
38003 Grenoble Cedex 01, France
Contact:
charles-clemens.ruling@grenoble-em.com
The paper explores the proposition that "bricolage", a term used by Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Savage Mind (1966) as an analogy to explain a particular mode of relating to one's environment, helps understanding a particular type of practice and thus helps to overcome the distinction between knowledge and knowing by emphasizing an internally coherent mode in which an individual (and, by extension, a group) sees, knows about, and acts upon the world. The aim of this paper is to take the idea of bricolage from a more metaphorical use (the way in which it has initially been referred to by Lévi-Strauss) to outline the contours of a useable concept for organizational analysis.
It can be argued that the gap between knowledge and knowing -- or epistemologies of possession and epistemologies of practice (Cook & Brown, 1999) -- that has been diagnosed in recent writing and thinking about organizations is at least partly related to formalization as an important means to achieve inter-individual and inter-temporal reliability of organizational practices within contemporary organizations. Related is the idea of making knowledge explicit as a way to secure an organization's duration through a mode of abstract transmission over time. In consequence, many contemporary management technologies like, for example, quality management, integrated information systems, standard operating procedures, the construction of repositories of explicit knowledge all relate to an understanding of management as the manipulation of abstract, explicit, de-individualized signs processed by managers as symbolic analysts. Managerial possession of building blocks of organizational knowledge can thus be easily juxtaposed with the process of knowing as "a part of action" (Cook & Brown, 1999: 387), emphasizing a dynamic, concrete and relational perspective.
Our paper explores the proposition that "bricolage", a term used by Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Savage Mind (1966) as an analogy to explain a particular mode of relating to one's environment, helps understanding a particular type of practice and thus helps to overcome the distinction between knowledge and knowing by emphasizing an internally coherent mode in which an individual (and, by extension, a group) sees, knows about, and acts upon the world. In some sense, we try to tackle the issue of juxtaposed epistemologies from another angle by looking at a particular way of acting, and by exploring the question which kinds of knowledge are mobilized by an actor acting in a mode of bricolage. In very general terms, bricolage implies, according to Lévi-Strauss, a sensual bond with a set of objects that is part of the well-ordered universe of the knower, and it allows conceiving a strong tie between the representations of the world and the realm of physical objects, between the knower and his or her sensations.
Over the last two decades, the notion of bricolage has enjoyed growing popularity in the social sciences, which has allowed it to travel from anthropology to domains such as cognitive sciences, information technology, entrepreneurship, innovation research, and organization theory. Yet most recent allusions to the notion of bricolage seem to concentrate on an exclusively symbolic view of the operations involved, at the expense of the materiality implied in the proposition originally made by Claude Lévi-Strauss. The one-sided cognitive-symbolic transposition of bricolage seems related to some difficulties in the notion itself. Firstly, Lévi-Strauss introduces bricolage as a metaphoric transposition to capture the essence of primitive thought as a "science of the concrete". In this sense, he refrains from developing a full-grown theoretical concept. Here, our paper attempts to show that his notion is far more complex than its recurrent contemporary understanding of "doing things with whatever is at hand". Secondly, the strong symbolist bias in current references to the notion of bricolage can probably be related to Lévi-Strauss's strong interest in (as well as his current association with) modes of reasoning and symbolic constructions (myths in particular). Here, our paper aims at rediscovering bricolage as a notion anchored in physical practice and materiality. From a bricolage perspective knowledge/knowing is materialized in the potential uses of the objects that make up the bricoleur's stock -- the uses reside as much in the mind of the bricoleur as in the material properties of the objects --, and objects may resist the bricoleur's willingness to "enrol" them into an arrangement.
In short, the aim of this paper is to take the idea of bricolage from a more metaphorical use (the way in which it has initially been referred to by Lévi-Strauss) towards a point at which some initial contours of a useable concept for organizational analysis become visible.
The paper is structured in three parts. The first part illustrates some of the ways in which bricolage has been recently used in organization and management theory and contrasts these views of bricolage with the characteristics of bricolage suggested by Lévi-Strauss. The second part outlines the general contours of bricolage as a concept for understanding organizational practices, and the third part explores more specifically the implications of inscribing bricolage in a collective organizational space. This paper is clearly exploratory in nature. It aims at proposing ideas and their articulations in order to start a constructive debate about the relationship between knowledge and knowing from a practice perspective.
Over the last years, references to the notion of bricolage have increased across various domains related to organization and management theory. We first illustrate several ways in which this notion has been used in the organization and management literature and then trace the bricolage back to its inception as a metaphor proposed by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss to shed light on a particular mode of relating to and acting upon the world.
1.1 Bricolage in the organization and management literature
The notion of bricolage occurs in the organization and management literature in the late 1980s to describe several types of phenomena. It seems that, on one hand, the overall economic context, consistently described as being more and more chaotic, perturbed, unpredictable and marked by a succession of crises, has directed the attention of organizational analysts toward this form of "acting with whatever is at hand" in a mode of situationally adapted tactics. On the other hand, the arrival of bricolage in organizational thinking might also be related to the way in which the administrative sciences have traditionally associated reason and action. Bricolage could not have emerged as a legitimate mode of action in productive organizations before principles of bounded, situated rationality within an organizational system in a situation of constant learning had become accepted by wider audiences.
We see today three main constellations in which the notion of bricolage appears in the organization and management literature: as a specific mode of action within or across organizations, in particular relation with entrepreneurship, and as a type of appropriation of information and communication technologies. More recently, some scholars in strategic management have started using the notion of bricolage, in particular in relation to the resource based view (e.g., Lehner, 2003).
Organizations are supposed 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 a first sense, bricolage is related to improvisation (e.g., Weick, 1998; Moorman & Miner, 1998; Cunha & Cunha, 2000). Improvisation consists of an assemblage of elements based on simple rules in order to yield an original composition. The jazz musician serves as an archetypal figure to illustrate this mode of action, which is characterized by a coincidence of conception and realization that makes it difficult to clearly distinguish moments of reflection from instances of action. This integration of thought and action allows for a high degree of rapid adaptation and thus makes organizations apt to relate to a turbulent environment. It is the fact that improvisation is based on a restricted set of rules and resources and the notion of permanent adjustment in the composition that allows to compare 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. Other contributions position bricolage in relation to sensemaking 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 in a second sense to designate another type of adaptation capacity which takes a form of resistance to a particularly destabilizing situation. In this sense, Weick (1993a), for example, present bricolage as one element of resilience, a capacity which enables an individual or an organization to overcome a crisis situation by maintaining a coherence of identity as well as a capacity to act. One of the almost paradoxical mechanisms identified here includes the idea of some sort of "ritualized ingenuity" (Coutu, 2002) based 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 (see below). In a crisis situation, the encounter with familiar objects and the capacity to perform simple basic gestures which allow for an open assemblage allows to keep up one's orientation marks, but also to immediately engage into a process of trial and error, thus avoiding that the process of taking action gets paralyzed.
In line with associating bricolage and organizational innovation is the idea considering 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 an organizational memory. This memory has to allow the organization to maintain an inductively generated knowledge base founded upon experiences which serve, at the same time, as an occasion for constant testing. Here again, large organizations, which share 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. Bricolage has also been used as a concept to discuss entreneurial firm's responses to resource dependence (Baker & Aldrich, 2000; Baker et al., 2003). An finally bricolage ahs been more recently referred to in the context of 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 a information system is seen by a user as a set of means he or she 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. The point of departure lies in the observation that information systems are rarely used in the ways they were initially conceived for. Diversion of functions, breaking up and recombination of systems in use seem related to the notion of bricolage. The notion is actually used to point out the fact that 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), for example, 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, without negatively evaluating the gap between the two. The flexibility and handiness of digital objects greatly facilitates bricolage in the field of information systems in that all kinds of signs are transformed into a common format that allows for an infinite range of collage. The diffusion of integrated information systems and the development of interconnectivity between physical arrangements are an additional facilitator for bricolage, which then concerns not only the manipulation of signs, but also the tangible infrastructures which can be recombined. The development of USB, Wifi and other data exchange protocols form today some key areas from which further technological and application progress is expected today.
While some assimilation of the notion of bricolage with the more widely accepted themes in organization and management theory has taken over the last years, most contributions tend to reduce Lévi-Strauss's (1966) notion of bricolage to the idea to use "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.). Others see bricolage where "known tools of the technology are used to solve new problems" (Bar et al., 2000: 14), or like Lundström and Strömdahl (1998) use the notion of bricolage to designate "what we do when conducting experiments and observing the result of our actions" and claim that "to conduct bricolage implies […] to apply and combine previously known tools and routines to solve new problems" (1998: 13-14). Next to the somewhat one-sided focus of "doing things with whatever is at hand", a second reduction lies in the focus on the symbolic side of bricolage. It seems to us that the link of much of the literature on bricolage with sensemaking, the construction of interpretation and improvisation has introduced a symbolist bias which risks falling short of recognizing the part of notion's complexity which is precisely due to the equal consideration, in Lévi-Strauss's writings on bricolage, of material and immaterial objects.
We strongly feel that the different ways in which bricolage is currently referred over-simplifies the original richness of Lévi-Strauss's writings (even though we recognize, of course, that even in its reduced form it might be useful to understand phenomena not addressed by other approaches).Our working hypothesis for the rest of this paper is that an effort to reconstruct and solidify a more complete understanding of bricolage might be beneficial for organizational analysis. In order to do so, we first turn to the Lévi-Strauss's view of bricolage as a metaphor before trying to outline the contours of bricolage as a concept for organization and management theorizing.
1.2 Bricolage as a metaphor used by Claude Lévi-Strauss
In a sense that goes beyond the use of the notion in current management research, bricolage designates for Lévi-Strauss as much a particular relation to time, to space, to objects and to knowledge, as a particular way of practical reasoning. In the first chapter of his book "The savage mind" (published in French in 1962), programmatically entitled La science du concret, Lévi-Strauss argues that much of the reasoning to 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 differ thus from the modern understanding of scientific reason not in their nature, but in respect to the types of phenomena they refer to. They rely on a highly developed mode of knowing based on an intimacy with the concrete. To illustrate the mode of operation of this "science of the concrete", he refers to the notion of bricolage as "an activity which on the technical plane gives us quite a good understanding of what a science we prefer to call 'prior' rather than 'primitive', could have been on the plane of speculation" (1966: 16).
He uses bricolage as an analogy which sheds light on the processes underlying both mythical thought and bricolage. For the same, didactic and illustrative, purposes he develops the comparison of the bricoleur and the engineer. While the engineer tends to determine the proper tools for a task and then gathers them, the bricoleur uses the elements of his repertoire in order to create an arrangement that is functional in relation to a given project. Lévi-Strauss characterizes the bricoleur as someone who uses "whatever is at hand" (1966:17) instead of searching for materials and instruments adapted to his project. The bricoleur acts on the grounds of a repertoire of sometimes odd and heterogeneous elements which have been collected according to one overarching principle: the fact that they might serve one day. In doing so, he does not hesitate to push the usage of these objects beyond any limits that their designers would have imagined.
It is important to keep in mind that Lévi-Strauss, despite the precision of his writing, does not provide a clear definition of bricolage but rather tries to express and illustrate his ideas through frequent changes in perspectives which address as much the process of bricolage as as the role of the bricoleur and draw on ample comparisons of bricolage, craft, myth, play, and art. From our reading, three elements are paramount to understanding bricolage according to Lévi-Strauss: repertoire or his view of the resources used, dialogue or the process of bricolage, and outcome or nature of the results of bricolage.
The notion of repertoire is in the center of Lévi-Strauss's concept of bricolage. Bricolage starts with the constitution of a repertoire and finishes with the return of objects to the repertoire. The repertoire consists of objects that are collected independently of any particular project or utilization on the sole basis of the bricoleur's intuition that an object could "be useful one day". For the bricoleur, all objects belonging to his repertoire are not only perceived as independent entities but derive their characteristics from their potential for association, in other words: their capacity of "going together" with other objects from the repertoire: "they each represent a set of actual and possible relations; they are 'operators' but they can be used for any operation of the same type" (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 18).
The bricoleur's repertoire comprises elements that are heterogeneous by their material nature, wear and history ("remains of previous constructions or destructions" (1966: 17)), and despite its potentially large size, any bricoleur's repertoire is finite. The repertoire is held in an equilibrium through a continuous flow of objects, means, ends and significations: It is self-maintaining in the sense that "it is always earlier ends which are called upon to play the part of means: the signified changes into the signifying and vice versa" (1966: 21).
Bricolage as a process, in other words: the activity of assembling objects starts in the moment in which the bricoleur is confronted with an objective or a practical function to be fulfilled. According to Lévi-Strauss the process of bricolage always begins with an inventory of the repertoire in which the bricoleur engages in a dialogue with the elements it contains. He examines all heterogeneous elements of his treasury to discover the significance and the contribution of each of them to the definition of a set which has yet to materialize but which will ultimately differ from the instrumental set only in the internal disposition of its parts. (1966: 18).
The dialogue is directed at the capacity of elements contained in the repertoire to be associated within a functionally performing structure and occurs throughout the process of assemblage. Even if the objects in the repertoire undergo certain transformations, the bricoleur's principal operation remains the arrangement of objects. If the bricoleur realizes that a given object does not "fit" into the structure, he has the "possibility of putting a different element there instead" (1966: 19). In other words: The assemblage proceeds through permanent testing, permutation and substitution of objects.
Three elements constrain the dialogue. The first is related to the boundaries of the repertoire. The physical limitation of the repertoire forces the bricoleur to rely on a limited set of combinations instead of playing with an infinite number of objects. The second boundary is related to the fact that a bricoleur (other than the scientist) rarely transcends the class of actions and significations he is accustomed to, and "by inclination or necessity always remains within [the constraints imposed by a particular state of civilization]" (1966: 19). A third constraint that is mentioned only very briefly by Lévi-Strauss is related to the overall time frame the bricoleur disposes of in the context of the problem he is addressing. And finally, bricolage is not free but bound to a logic of performance (to repair, to heal, etc.).
For Lévi-Strauss, the outcome of bricolage reflects the underlying process: it is an assemblage of different objects that remain visible as such. A second characteristic is its relative distance from the original idea ("inevitably be at a remove from the initial aim […], a phenomenon which the surrealists have felicitously called 'objective hazard'" (1966: 21)). The outcome differs from the original elements in the repertoire only through the way in which the parts are assembled (1966: 18). This ensures that the outcome of bricolage can be easily be disassembled and re-integrated into the repertoire.
Interestingly, many of the ethnographic illustrations Lévi-Strauss uses in the first parts of his chapter on the "science of the concrete" are not taken up in his propositions on bricolage even though they might have been useful to understand this particular type of activity. It seems to us that this is not due to a limitation Lévi-Strauss places on his own analogy, but that it is rather related to the overall goal he pursues in his text -- describing and valuing a mode of thought that had until than disdainfully been considered as a primitive form of knowing. To be clear: Lévi-Strauss does not reflect upon bricolage. For him, bricolage only serves as a means to shed light on his main topic -- mythical thought. With this background in mind, the following sections set out to explore the notion of bricolage as a concept in its own right.
The following sections take up the basic ideas outlined above to sketch the contours of bricolage as a type of gesture associated with a particular disposition (2.1), related to a set of particular conditions (2.2), and oriented towards the construction of an arrangement (2.3). While fully recognizing its symbolic dimension, we will, try to avoid the symbolist reduction of bricolage as a means to analyze productive action referred to above. In order to develop our ideas on bricolage ideas we bend Lévi-Strauss's original text in two ways: The first one concerns the association we establish between bricolage and the ethnographic illustrations Lévi-Strauss uses in the Science of the concrete. The second is a change in perspective from the bricoleur towards his gesture. In order to avoid falling into the common traps related to the use of archetypal forms, we prefer to argue that in modern productive organizations gestures and dispositions which represent instances of bricolage may coexist with others that depend on scientific and technical reason. In this sense, we use the notion "bricoleur" not to indicate any permanent state or a person's psychological profile, but the particular, momentary disposition of someone who carries out a gesture of bricolage.
2.1 Bricolage as a disposition and as a gesture
Bricolage as a particular type of disposition is composed of a particular view of the world, a particular type of knowledge, and actualizes itself through a particular kind of gesture.
The gesture of bricolage implies a particular view of the world. The world of the bricoleur is primarily a world of interconnections and interdependence. Seeing the world as constituted by interconnected things implies that chains of linkages exist between all things in the world. The bricoleur's universe is considered as a complex system, in which relations are more import than the related entities. As a consequence, the bricoleur constantly observes his environment through an exploration of relations like the one of a woodpecker's beak curing a toothache (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 9). This interdependence goes beyond the immediate link one could draw, for example, between the lock and its key, or between the mother and her child. It assumes that all things in the world, even the most distant, the most futile and the simplest ones, are connected through chains of linkages. The bricoleur's universe can be considered as a complex system in which relationships are more important than the related entities.
The perception of a complex world made up of interrelated objects is secondly marked by an absence of any hierarchy of objects. This does not mean that things are not ordered -- for Lévi-Strauss, the search for order in any universe forms a anthropological constant. What we refer to is rather a tendency not to establish any kind of absolute superiority among the elements that constitute the world of bricoleur. This attitude rejoins the one that has been more recently been developed by some sociologists of science and technology, among which Bruno Latour, and which, for example, and instead of falling into the dichotomy of technophobia or technophilia, readily admits a dynamic of co-evolution between humans and objects. The principle of equivalence not only helps explaining the heterogeneous character of the bricoleur's repertoire, but also the intricate relationship of the human actor and the arrangement in the making.
The bricoleur's universe is for a good part determined by his repertoire, which he has built up during his subsequent encounters, following the principle that "this might always be useful". The bricoleur knows his world in an intimate, familiar way. He knows what is part of the repertoire. This knowledge does not include the usage that will be made of any object in the repertoire because, in a mode of bricolage, nothing allows to foresee the probable abduction that will occur (within the limits, however, of a set of pre-constraints inherent to an object). The bricoleur's knowledge is first of all knowledge about the content of the stock, which is ordered in a way which belongs entirely to the bricoleur (e.g., objects that are flat, objects that help fixing others, etc.). This kind of familiarity demands a memory which retains things and categories they belong to.
The bricoleur's relation with the world and his knowledge about his repertoire do not allow for extreme specialization: "the 'bricoleur' [does not] need the equipment and knowledge of all trades and profession" (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 18). He is not focused on a particular expertise or a single domain of competence. The world-as-system which surrounds him, which he learns to order, and whose relationships the can read, grants the bricoleur access to varied resources which he has to know to assemble depending on the problem of the moment. It is for this reason that the bricoleur "is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks" (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 17). The memory of things and relationships is thus competed by knowledge of "faire aller ensemble" which transcends disciplinary boundaries.
Even if the gesture of bricolage, in the sense which we use the term here, implies a particular view and knowledge of the world, it cannot be reduced to purely mental operations. Bricolage is essentially related action -- a process and its outcome characterized by five particular gestures: collection, dialogue, diversion, assemblage, and substitution.
As already pointed out above, bricolage begins with the collection of the elements that make up the repertoire. The bricoleur's eye observes things in his world according to the view of the world and the kind of knowledge described above. Everything can enter the repertoire if there is a positive answer to the question "might this be useful one day?"
When he is facing a problem, the bricoleur engages in a dialogue with the objects from the stock. In Lévi-Strauss's words, he turns back "an already existent set made up of tools and materials, to consider and reconsider what it contains and, finally and above all, to engage a sort of dialogue with it and, before choosing between them, to index the possible answers which the whole set can offer to his problem" (1966: 18). This kind of conversation with the objects points to an explicit instrumentality, which serves as the ultimate test for the bricoleur's repertoire. For the bricoleur, however, instrumentality differs from the ideal of the Enlightenment which is based on the idea of a subordination of the objects to a human actor who manipulates them. Here, following the principle of equivalence, the human actor is an entity of equal value as those which participate in the process of bricolage. The dialogue is not purely speculative, and diversion not only takes places in a mental place. Any objects' capacity to "hold" within an arrangement (and to make it hold) is continuously put to the test in a dynamic process of assemblage and substitution, which Lévi-Strauss characterizes as a process of "permutation" (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 20).
The bricoleur's dialogue points also to the kind of liberty the bricoleur has to divert his objects from their initial function (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 16). This diversion is double in the sense that the human actor allows himself to give a second life to things that have been used before, and which carry on themselves the signs of usage, and that he allows himself to bend his objects into applications which might be far away from those for which they have been initially conceived. Every object enjoys an array of diversion and a plasticity which its inventor has not conceived of. Yet, the objects' flexibility is limited by the fact that "the elements which the ‘bricoleur’ collects and uses are 'pre-constrained'" (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 19), a factor which defines the point beyond which the bricoleur might find an effective alternative.
2.2 Conditions of bricolage
We have defined bricolage as a particular gesture which is enabled by a particular disposition vis-à-vis the world. Yet, while the gesture of the bricoleur depends to some extent on this kind of disposition, a number of external conditions facilitate the emergence of bricolage. Lévi-Strauss only vaguely speaks about these conditions, which we would like to distinguish according to their relationship with the resources, with knowledge, and with the problem context (the bricoleur's project).
On the resource side, bricolage seems to appear more frequently if resources and means are limited. In this situation individuals are constrained to "do things with whatever is at hand". All indigenous societies taken as examples by Lévi-Strauss (indigenous Hawaiians, the Fang from Gabon, etc.) are marked by an absence of material affluence. Sansot's (1991) analysis of "les petits bricoleurs", for example, yields numerous analyses of frequent practices of recycling and bricolage that appear typical for materially poor societies. The bricoleur, however, needs some resources, especially time to follow his "preoccupation with exhaustive observation and the systematic cataloguing of relations and connections" (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 10) and to build up his stock, paired with an extremely strong memory (especially in a situation of oral tradition). It seems equally important that the bricoleur has access to a space in which he can encounter those objects "which might serve one day", and that he must dispose of a space to constitute his stock on the basis of the objects he has collected.
The bricoleur's knowledge necessarily mirrors both the variety of his gestures and to the heterogeneity of his repertoire. It cannot find itself durably constrained by principles (related, for example, to a profession) prescribing, a set of gestures, tools and specific materials. In order to manifest itself, bricolage depends on an environment that tolerated a mix of professions, genres, principles and methods. The same degree of tolerance must apply for quality standard, which tend to be bound to the professions. For bricolage, the only thing that counts is the immediate performance of the arrangement. The successful testing of the arrangement constitutes the ultimate reference.
Concerning the problem context, bricolage is, from our point of view, far from being a leisure activity. It is often related to crisis situations and develops in practice when an important process gets stalled -- the machine has to hold some more hours, the presentation has to be ready tomorrow morning -- when there is a lack of time to find the means that would ideally corresponding to the ends. Whether the tension leading to bricolage has technical, economic or other origins, bricolage itself follows an economic principle.
2.3 Bricolage-as-outcome: the arrangement
Like the terms innovation or production, bricolage simultaneously refers to a process and its result. In the metaphorical use Lévi-Strauss makes of the notion of bricolage, this ambivalence is not a problem. On the contrary, the double meaning of the word is shedding light on the specific dynamic of circularity which relates the source of the process, the bricoleur's repertoire, to its outcome. Lévi-Strauss suggests an essential correspondence between the two arguing that the outcome of bricolage can be seen as "a new arrangement of elements, the nature of which is unaffected by whether they figure in the instrumental set or in the final arrangement (these being the same, apart from the internal disposition of their parts) (1966: 21). But the repertoire and the arrangement also interact in the sense of an "continual reconstruction from the same materials, [in which] it is always earlier ends which are called upon to play the part of means: the signified changes into the signifying and vice versa" (1966: 21). This factual correspondence between the process and its outcome is reinforced by the idea that the dynamics of dialogue and trial and error based on multiple gestures of assemblage and substitution make the bricoleur part of his oeuvre. For Lévi-Strauss, the bricoleur thus "'speaks' not only with things [...] but also through the medium of things: giving an account of his personality and life through the choice he makes between the limited possibilities. The 'bricoleur' may not ever complete his purpose but he always puts something of himself into it" (1966: 21).
Recently the notion of dispositif, an idea close to Lévi-Strauss's notion of arrangement, has become a point of interest for some French authors who use this notion to integrate the dialectics of process/outcome and of author/oeuvre in a view of the world as a complex environment in which human beings and objects keep close to each other in a non-dominating relationship (see, in particular, the thematic issue on the notion of dispositif in Revue Hermès - no. 25 (1999)). Berten (1999), for example, come surprisingly close to our view about bricolage. The dispositif is described as an "error tolerant environment" (1999: 42; translation by the authors) whith an emphasis on the "multifunctional resources at the subject's disposal, which become significant when they start carrying the mark of a loose and transversal intentionality" (Berten, 1999: 43; translation by the authors). We also find the notions of trial and error, and of continuous testing of objects set one against the other in an arrangement whose contours are influenced by the project at hand. In our understanding, the notion of arrangement underlines as well the proximity and familiarity between human beings and objects, as their identity implications. In this way, the arrangement manifests "an aspect of the frequentation of the objects, the words, the persons, which relates to the constitution of identity, and which establishes an affective and bodily mediation between oneself and the world, between oneself and one another, and finally between oneself and oneself. In other words, between rational and instrumental activity and a contemplating passivity which is receptive of an environment, the in-between of the arrangement suggests the idea of mediation." (Berten, 1999: 39; translation by the authors). The arrangement exhibits the creative dimension of bricolage suggested by Lévi-Strauss, for example when relates bricolage to poetry (1966: 21). For Berten, "arrangement as an instance of mediation suggests the reconnection of non-specific competences to an available environment, and to leave room for creativity" (Berten, 1999: 43; translation by the authors).
To conclude this first part of exploration, we propose to define bricolage as a specific gesture which is conditioned by a particular relation with the world. We have outlined some of the conditions favoring its apparition, and we have separated the gesture from its result by the distinction of the process of bricolage from its outcome which we have characterized as arrangement. We have in addition put an emphasis on the material side of bricolage to complement the dominant symbolic view. Up to here, we have discussed bricolage as such without paying much attention to the organizational context in which we would like introduce the concept.
The following sections aim at placing bricolage in the context of productive organizations. Lévi-Strauss presents bricolage an individual bricoleur's activity. Using of bricolage in the context of productive organizations raises serveral issues. Some, like the relationship of bricolage and power demands further theorizing, whereas others, like the idea of the bricoleur as an individual facing the needs of an organization as collective entity, need conceptual clarification. To extend our ideas on bricolage towards organizations, we propose an exploration of some of these issues along three lines of thought: collective action in the dynamics of bricolage, perturbations created by an activity of bricolage within a given power structure, and transmission of bricolage within a system oriented towards duration.
3.1 Bricolage and modes of collective action
Lévi-Strauss's bricoleur is alone. This view coincides with the image of the bricoleur in everyday situations. In a research interview we conducted in the context of an ongoing study on the transmission of local practices, the CEO of a medium sized company affirmed that "bricolage is solitary, you do it for yourself, and even if you do it with others is always in small groups, based on personal affinity -- it is always based on individual initiative".
Our attempt to link bricolage with collective action starts from the question of how collective action works when it is facing a high degree of undecidability concerning the means and ways that should be used to attain set goals, in other words: one of the key characteristics of bricolage. We have argued above that bricolage is fundamentally contingent on the relationship between human beings and objects, and upon permanent testing and permutation of elements. This both expresses and reproduces radical uncertainty about the capacity of both the bricoleur and the arrangement in the making to successfully perform. The collection of elements, the multiple diversions operated on these elements, and the dynamics of assemblage and substitution all contribute to charge the interactions between human and objects throughout bricolage with doubt and variations. This other type of "generative dance" involving bricoleurs and objects is characterized by a radical undecidability, a-priori, about the right paths and combinations leading to effective goal attainment. In the context of collective action, these situations have been studied in particular by the French political sociologist Laurent Thévenot (e.g., 1990). His ideas can be read together with the theory of collective action proposed by the French philosopher Pierre Livet (1994). From our point of view, the interest in both authors' reflections lies in the complexification they propose in order to understand the "grey zone" between individual and collective action.
Thévenot starts from an exploration of the differences between an intimate, personal gesture and an action that "suits" or "fits" a collective situation. The intimate gesture is the expression of a personal convenience in relation to one's environment. It "evokes a direct physical implication, the idea of a close and profound union between the gesture of a body and an environment that can contain persons as well as things. It is by saying 'I' that this way of behaving in an intimate environment [...] expresses itself" (Thévenot, 1990: 52; translation by the authors). The intimate gesture evokes the familiarity of the bricoleur with the objects in his environment, and the idea that his or her identity is inextricably related to these objects. Pierre Livet (1994) identifies three modes of collective action -- action commune, action ensemble, and action à plusieurs --, which differ in relation to the importance and role held by a common project, the means for dealing with uncertainty and risk of error, spatial and temporal distance between members, and the nature and place of objects authorizing, conditioning and stabilizing action.
Action commune implies the closest ties and is based on a common goal between actors closely operating as a small group within a delimited time-space. This type of collective action demands "interlinking the processes of correction and revision of individual action together with the implementation of mutual tolerance" (Livet, 1994: 251; translation by the authors). Because it is based on the close tying together of individual actions, action commune permits to refer to the same objects that have been associated with the solitary gesture. Properties and possibilities of manipulation of these "personalized" objects are defined through action commune. The process of error correction and the particular type of relation to objects whose forms and functions are adapted during the course of action reminds of some of the central characteristics of bricolage outlined above. This is not surprising to the extent that the familiarity which established itself in the dynamic of human and object can only emerge and perdure within a restrained and integrated community with close dispositions concerning elements and their environments.
The other two modes of collective action outlined by Livet seem less compatible with the idea of bricolage. Action à plusieurs refers to a situation in which each participant pursues his personal action without participating in the activities of others. In this case, the collective is reduced to a preoccupation with the others' actions, or, more precisely a concern about the others' actions' consequences for oneself (Livet, 1994: 254). For this situation, the "generic" dimensions of objects play a central role. They define the boundary conditions regulating the objects' utilization within a given space of practice (Livet, 1994: 268). According to Livet, action à plusieurs derives its coherence from the relative duration of the modes of usage of generic objects (1994: 269). The predefined, "generic" characteristics of objects entering into action a plusieurs makes it quite unlike for collective bricolage to occur.
Livet's (1994) third mode of collective action, action ensemble is situated between the two others. It typically occurs in a situation in which a common objective has to be reached but the participants cannot act within shared time and space. In this situation ongoing interlinking of individual processes in some sort of mutual adjustment appears impossible, and actors are required to rely on "conventional" objects whose specificities are negotiated among participants. The function of these conventions is to suspend, for some time, the issue of indecidability by defining a relatively reliable and stable commonly accepted frame of reference until a need for renegotiation occurs. The conventionally achieved stability of objects seems to be in contradiction with the essential claim of openness of usage associated with bricolage.
A challenging avenue for further exploration concerns the role of (and probably need for) an object's generic dimensions to enable the transfer of the object and its associated modes of manipulation from one domain (or from one bricoleur) to another (Livet, 1994: 269). Paradoxically, transferability is among the key requirements for the bricoleur for whom an object's openness of usage is one of on object's core performance criteria. On a collective scale, it seems difficult to imagine a group of bricoleurs developing their own, shared conventions of usage though a negotiation of the potential functions and utilizations of the objects they collectively dispose of. Once the arrangement is completed, its operation and maintenance may demand the negotiation of specifications for its appropriation by actors who have not been among its designers.
3.2 Bricolage and power in organizations<
Lévi-Strauss's bricoleur seems free of social constraints. However, his relation with the objects in his repertoire and the constraint to work with "what is on board" forces the bricoleur to employ objects for usages that may be far away from the functions for which these objects had been initially designed. Whether they are recycled from another use or drawn away from their initial function in order to fit the arrangement, the relationship of the bricoleur and his objects is often characterized by some form of violence (even though the bricoleur strives in the first place for a way of making things hold together and not necessarily for an alteration or transformation of the elementary objects contained in his stock). Placing bricolage in an organizational context further multiplies the possible linkages that can be established with the notion of power. The following sections explore and propose sets of questions for analysis related to three areas in which bricolage in organizations is potentially exposed to power: space, expertise, and ownership.
The issue of power related to the disposition of space can be analyzed from a perspective sugested in Michel de Certeau's analysis of everyday life presented in L’invention du quotidien. 1. Arts de faire (de Certeau, 1990). One of the ideas developed there is that consumers, rather than adapting their usages of consumption objects to the intentions of the objects' designers, engage in a form of poaching [braconnage]. Poaching happens when an individual moves inside a space that is not his own, or, more precisely, that is not marked by a fixed boundary within which the individual himself determines the rules of action, and in which the individual does not dispose of a stable base to plan and to capitalize on his or her moves. In such a situation an individual's game becomes tactic, and the actor starts playing with time and events in order to create opportunities.
The notions of poaching and tactics enable us to understand the gestures of the bricoleur in relation to his repertoire within a system of constraints and power. Questions that could be used to analyze this systems of constraints may include the following: Are they external to the stock and does the stock primarily serve the bricoleur for creating a space that is his own and that can protect him from disturbing outside events? Are the constraints part of the manipulated objects, which have initially been imported from a world outside the stock and thus perpetuate a relationship with their origins? Or do the constraints originate from external performance imperatives which the bricoleur has to meet? Diversion not only opens up leeway for novel forms of analysis and discussion, but also allows for an articulation with the notion of objects as we find it in Livet and his ideas of conventionalization or personalization in relation to the generic characteristics of the objects used.
An individual's power within an organization is partly determined by his or her place, which in turn is often related to a function, or a profession and the associated languages, objects, methods and techniques. On the other hand, bricolage, as we have seen above, contradicts specialization and appears as a gesture that provides and requires means to cross spaces of practice that tend to be institutionally separated in modern organizations. To make an example: Finance professionals are not supposed to use marketing professionals' tools and vice versa (at least outside a set of well defined situations). Any professional has a tendency to look at least with some form of amusement and condescence at the amateur who plays with means that are recognized as being part of the preofessional's repertoire. In a purely professional perspective stepping out of one's professional boundaries is considered a loss of time or, at best, a pastime occupation. Thus, neither the gesture nor the arrangement, nor the bricoleur's knowledge of dialogue, assemblage, diversion, substitution and continuous testing enjoy durable legitimacy and recognition within modern productive organizations that are characterized by specialization, the presence of strong professional communities (and identities) and the associated norms and gestures. Organizational bricoleurs (have to) operate in an inter-professional and inter-expertise no man's land.
The bricoleur's strength, however, can lie precisely in his expertise and capacity to assemble heterogeneous things, gestures and objects, by following the logic of instrumental performance instead of the accepted principles of any particular profession. The bricoleur's expertise is of different nature than the expertise of the professional in the sense that it is unrelated to the legitimizing dynamics of the advancement of a discipline in which the constantly repeated and reproduced link between particular gestures and specialized objects guarantees professional coherence. The bricoleur's expertise is difficult to to assess before the concrete, unique arrangement is completed, therefore difficult to generalize, to foresee and to plan for. The organizational bricoleur's legitimacy is therefore strongly built upon personal recognition based on past successes.
Power is related to ownership. Owners of resources have not only the capacity to act upon their possessions but also to authorize the non-owners to utilize these resources within a contractually and legally defined way. Over time, the development of cost accounting and controlling techniques has organizations allowed to refine the processes of acquisition (and by extension of possession) in the sense that each unit or even each individual can be identified as a buyer endowed with a budget signalling some kind of autonomy. The generalization of the notion of ownership and property opposes itself to the idea of open access to a variety of resources in a movement of collection, which is, as we have outlined above, one of the essential gestures of the bricoleur. The bricoleur looks for free or inexpensive access to things that might become useful one day. Lévi-Strauss's bricoleur "adresses himself to a collection of oddments left over from human endeavours, that is, only a sub-set of the culture of the culture" (1966: 19). The value of any object collected by the bricoleur is not determined by any kind of market arrangement or by some intrinsic values of an object, but solely in the context of a unique arrangement, constructed through the distinctive gestures of a partciular bricoleur. In the case of bricolage, the value of any object cannot be identified in advance. This leads to a considerable amount of problems and tensions in the context of measuring the bricoleur's resource consumption or determining an adequete reimbursement of an owner whose (material or immateral) resources the bricoleur holds in his or her repertoire.
The issue of ownership opens up at least four problem areas. The first is related to the constitution of the repertoire within the space of collective action. Bricolage seems largely based on action commune (in the sense of Pierre Livet), and the shared repertoire emerges from individual gestures adding to it. If bricolage is collective and repertoires are shared, to what extent does it remain necessary to be still able, at any moment, to identify the origins of anobject? The second problem is related to the ownership of space occupied by the bricoleur's repertoire. Any kind of repertoire takes some sort of space which is in many instances property of the organization. Lévi-Strauss's bricoleur seems not concerned by the threat of limited storage capacity. However, in contemporary organizations, access and ownership of physical space have become an importanct source of power. The third problem is related to the cost of using resources which have, a priori, an owner. The bricoleur does not hesitate to use all resources in his reach that seem convenient to him. This use depends more on the availability of means than on authority and entitlement to use. Here again strict rules on investment control have the potential to impede gestures of bricolage in which the actors engaged in action commune scorn property rights as much as rules of proper usage inasmuch as functional performance remains their (only) priority. And the final point associating bricolage and property asks for the ownership of the arrangement. We have argued above that the bricoleur puts something of himself into the arrangement, and that the arrangement itself participates in the constitution of the bricoleur's identity. In an organizational environment, it is difficult to attribute a given arrangement clearly to one profession or specialization because it appears as a boundary object between different domains. But who is entitled to reap the benefits? If the assembled means are of heterogeneous nature and the underlying gestures multidisciplinary, should the benefit belong to the individuals that have participated or to the organizational units or roups the participant belong to?
3.3 Transmission and duration
A key issue of briolage in organizations is transmission over time of repertoires, processes, and arrangements. In the words of one of the managers we have recently interviewed about practices of bricolage in his organization: "One of the strong points with bricolage is to be able to keep the control over what we do. We can modify and repair everything without external help. The only problem is that only those who have participated in the creation [of an arrangement] know how to operate it". In order to capitalize on the initial investment made, organizations immediately feel a need to ensure relative durability and sustainability of the arrangement. Their principal fear is that the economies that have been incurred during the realization and the exploitation of the arrangement disappear -- often together with the arrangement itself -- at the moment when its creators leave. Interestingly, firms seem only rarely interested in ensuring the transmission not of the arrangement itself, but of the involved actors' capabilities of bricolage
Increased formalization of the arrangement and its usages immediately appears as a solution. In many organizations, documenting the functioning (users' guide) and the structure (for maintenance reasons) of an arrangement is seen as the principal way to ensure sustainability for the exploitation of an arrangement beyond the point in time at which the initial bricoleurs besome disengaged. From a knowledge perspective, formalization is based upon reification in the sense that it postulates that knowledge can exist as delimited entity which can, in turn, be formally stated. This way, the arrangement created through bricolage collapses into the means of standardized industrial production and loses the particularity that characterized its process of realization. We would hypothesize, though, that the utilization and the maintenance of an arrangement that has been the outcome of bricolage will always at some point in time demand interventions based upon a mode of bricolage, and that whenever bricolage is involved, an approach towards organizational knowledge as emerging from a network of social relations, experiences and personalized memory remains essential (cf. the famous example of sharing stories of photocopier repair mentioned by Orr (1996)).
While organizations tend towards formalization, we would argue that there is an additional need to preserve an organizational capability of bricolage. This includes, for example not only the identification of individual knowledge and experience, but also to ensure their organizational legitimacy and visibility, and by providing opportunities for systematic testing. We feel that an organizations' capacity to provide conditions that nuture, develop, encourage and orient bricolage could, in some cases, provide an interesting alternative to formalization and the logic of rendering implicit knowledge explicit which still underlies much of the literature on "knowledge management".
We have tried in this paper to explore the idea of bricolage as an interesting concept for analyzing everyday action in organizations. While it has become increasingly popular in some strands of organization and management theory over the last years, many references to Lévi-Strauss remain themselves metaphorical in the sense that they use bricolage -- in a way not to far from the one in which Lévi-Strauss himself uses the term -- as a metaphor employing materialization to facilitate the comprehension of essentially symbolic processes. Our goal for this paper was twofold: Firstly, to explore different dimensions that could in the future allow us to use "bricolage" in a more precise way in organizational analysis, and secondly, to "redirect" Lévi-Strauss's notion from a more individualistic orientation towards a logic of collective action. We have tried to define bricolage as a form of activity that associates a particular position vis-à-vis the world, a specific kind of gesture, and a specific realization, the arrangement. At this point, the nature of our work is still explorative, creating at least as many questions as we are able to provide answers, but we also start sensing the contours of some useful conceptual tools for understanding the things that happen in organizations' everyday life (for a first empirical application of the ideas outlined in this paper, see Duymedjian & Rüling (2004)).
In relation to the EGOS sub-theme on the epistemological foundations of knowledge and knowing, several points seem relevant to us: Firstly, we think that the notion of bricolage allows exploring an interesting relation between bricolage and knowing. Most reflections about knowing tend to focus on the distinction of knowledge and knowing from the angle of reification versus process, and try to rearticulate two concepts that had been axiomatically separated. Some contributions also talk about the problems related to this separation, often based on the difficulties encountered when trying to operate the reconciliation which is nevertheless felt as being a necessity. Bricolage might be useful to think about knowing because it does not operate a separation. It integrates both views on knowledge/knowing on based on the principles of equivalence and associability applied by the bricoleur to the objects of a world to which he belongs himself.
The second integrating principle concerns the mutual identification of the bricoleur and of his arrangement in the making (which depends on the principle of equivalence mentioned before). As we have argued above, the bricoleur always puts something of himself in his oeuvre. In this sense, bricolage points towards an integration of making and being. And bricolage points to the indissociable nature of knowledge/knowing by emphasizing the difficulty of distinguishing the process from the result (the arrangement). Bricolage consists not only of assembling and disassembling following a mechanism of trial and error (in other words, a process), but also includes the notion of reintegration of the components of the arrangement into the repertoire, which eventually makes impossible to separate the process from the repertoire or to clearly distinguish where the process starts and where it ends.
A third point which makes bricolage an interesting concept for doing research about knowing and knowledge is its emphasis on materiality. From a methodological point of view, it opens up the possibility to observe anything -- like the bricoleur and his "preoccupation with exhaustive observation and the systematic cataloguing of relations and connections" (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 10). From our point of view, an emphasis on materiality is essential for studying practices embedded in an organization's everyday life. Knowledge in action is strongly related to the ways in which humans relate to the material world that surrounds them, and the investigation of knowing in organizations should therefore not be dissociated from an understanding of practice-in-materiality Does this view apply any kind of action? It is clear that it only makes sense to use "bricolage" to designate a mode of action if not everything is bricolage. However, we would defend the idea that probably most everyday action contains some aspects of it. This opens up the possibility to ask how different modes of action are articulated against each other: At what moments does bricolage happen, how is the transition managed, how are sequences of bricolage embedded and integrated into other regimes of action including the construction of legitimacy? Beyond the "knowledge" view, assemblage (in organizational practice as well as in research) always requires that we get to know the material reality of the objects we manipulate.
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