ABSTRACT
In the last chapter, I pointed to how Western thinking evolved from a mode that took the form of a tension between immersing in experience and abstracting from that experience through categorizing it (fi rst order abstracting) to a mode that focused increasingly on second order abstracting in which the fi rst order categories of experience were used to map and model not just the natural world but also the social world. This increasingly drew even further away from the local interaction of immersing in experience itself. Thought came to focus so heavily on second order abstractions of systems and models, understood as science, that when it was applied to human organizations, the ordinary reality of the experience of local interaction between actual human bodies disappeared from view as attention was focused on objectively operating on abstractions as if they were reality. I suggested that it was this movement in thought to second order abstraction, split off from immersion in local interaction, that led to the belief that organizations could be designed and manipulated by objective observers. The result is an inadequate way of thinking about organization and management that covers over the simple organizational reality of local interacting and leaves us without satisfying ways of understanding what is currently happening to organizations. In Chapter 4, I reviewed the application of the complexity sciences as science or as metaphor and concluded that these applications have generated some insight into the dynamics of organizations but have primarily simply reproduced the prescriptions of the dominant discourse in somewhat more esoteric language. This is not surprising when one notices how those applying complexity sciences both as science and as metaphor focus their attention on the second order abstraction of system or on somewhat mystical wholes and in doing so banish ordinary, bodily human activity from view. It seems to me that there is a pressing need to develop modes of thought in which there is a tension between immersing in ordinary daily experience of local interaction and abstracting (fi rst and second order) from that experience, also itself understood as emerging in local interaction, in order to understand what we are doing.
