We have lost Mayer Zald

In August of 2012 the world of organization studies lost Mayer Zald.  His own work on resource mobilization, social movements, and organizations would have made him a great figure, but his ceaseless joy in fostering and sharpening the work of colleagues and students was, if anything, an even greater impact. 

I wrote an appreciation of Mayer that I'll quote below.  It appeared originally, along with many other heartfelt expressions, at http://asociologist.com/2012/08/07/mayer-zald-rip/ . Although Mayer's main scholarly contributions were not about routine, he was enormously helpful to me and to many of us who work on that and related questions. It feels very right to acknowledge here the support of this wonderful man.

Mayer was a great friend to a vast network of friends, a supporter when serious research needed help, and a seemingly inexhaustible source of ideas about what one might productively read. I have a trove of “thought of you when I read this” notes from him and his sense of my interests, though they were not exactly his, was nonetheless pitch-perfect. So many others say the same.

When younger scholars or budding research communities needed a boost, Mayer was always to be counted on to help channel resources and to stand up for the quality of new ideas. He was a founder of the ICOS community of organizational researchers at Michigan, an interdisciplinary network that has sustained itself for decades. It’s little known that he got the original funding for it by making that a condition for his staying at Michigan when he had a generous outside offer, putting the local research community on a par with his own resources.

And what a friend ! What a hearty smile whenever he encountered one of his far-flung army of students and colleagues. (Perhaps they were thousands. I watched him at conferences and realized it was just the same around the world as it was at Michigan.) There were always questions about one’s family. Detailed memories for that and for what were your most recent research ventures. And then questions and suggestions about how it could move forward.

He survived many health problems in his later years, which forced him to give up his beloved tennis, but somehow they never stopped him from showing up a good talk by an interesting colleague and asking the wisest question when the ripe moment came. I remember him joking before an ICOS session about wearing the heart monitor they’d strapped on him when releasing him from the hospital.

We were so lucky to have his friendship and scholarship right up until the end of his long, generative, and splendidly humane life.

Karl Weick's Latest ICOS Lecture

On Friday, September 7, 2012, Karl Weick gave a talk in the ICOS Seminar series at Michigan. It was on the occasion of his retirement from the University and he titled it "Keep your eye on organizing!". (A recording is available at http://rossmedia.bus.umich.edu/rossmedia/Play/63eb3afc87064a8482afc131947f507b1d )

The lecture audience was huge. They had to schedule it in Blau Auditorium at the Ross Business School, which is usually used for plenary meetings of larger conferences. People came from all over campus – indeed from all over North America. There were perhaps two dozen special visitors who had flown in for the occasion: former students, friends, collaborators, admirers of his scholarship. (These are not mutually exclusive categories.)

As an adjunct to the celebration of Karl's magnificent – and continuing – scholarly career,  ICOS solicited notes from those attending, which were printed on special stationary and are being bound into a book for him. Responses to the request came in from all over the world. Karl will have some lovely hours of reading how much his colleagues value his extraordinarily productive insights into the processes of organizing, and how fond they are of the man whose quiet, unceasing thoughtfulness has given us this bounty.

My own note-writing got a bit out of hand and ended up at half a dozen pages.  I wanted to tell Karl how much I had benefitted from what probably seemed to him just a small digression in an ICOS lecture he gave nearly a decade ago on "Imagination in Organization Studies".

Karl pointed out then that Coleridge and Romantics used to make a distinction that we no longer bother with between 'fancy' and 'imagination'.  The former was taken to indicate more mechanical recombination of known elements, as happens in constructing a chimera, such as Pegasus, the winged horse. The latter was used for fuller, more organically integrated creations, such as a playwright's rendering of a great character like Oedipus or Hamlet.

Indeed, in discussing imagination, Karl invoked the wonderful passage from A Midsummer Night's Dream,

And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

I felt sure this distinction of fancy and imagination was important as soon as Karl spoke about it, but it's taken me all this time since to be able to say something about why.  I had help recently from Owen Barfield's History in English Words, which has a lengthy discussion of fancy/imagination. 

Barfield was part of the «Inklings» literary and philosophical circle at Oxford in the 1930s, along with J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. They had a strong interest in the Romantic and medieval world views, so it was natural for Barfield to write about the importance of imagination to Coleridge and Wordsworth and about medieval realists like Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus (who were also important to the other C.S. : Peirce). 

With Barfield's help I gradually began to see the link of imagination to the way emotion and habit are bound into our concepts.  I then went back to Dewey – a favorite of Karl's – and found that in Art As Experience he had worked with the same idea about imagination in artistic creation. (Somehow, despite so many past occurrences, I am still amazed each time I find that «Dewey already thought of that».)

~

I'm hoping to post the whole note here eventually, but I have to wait until I see what Karl has to say about it …

Habit in Public Discourse

Some items in recent issues of the New York Times have got me thinking – or maybe it's just hoping – that ideas about habit might be gaining some ground, taking a larger role in the way we talk about «The Public and Its Problems».

The Sunday (2012.09.2) Times list of business best-sellers had Charles Duhigg's Power of Habit in its number two slot, and Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow in third. (A biography of Steve Jobs was first.) Duhigg's book actually involved consulting with many researchers who have been thinking about habit and routine, like Sidney Winter and Wendy Woods. Kahneman's, though he doesn't use the label 'habit', is clearly committed in his discussion of the fast processes he calls "System 1" to various automaticity and priming effects that underlie routine action.

Today's edition (2012.09.06) presents a long literary «portrait» of President Obama. The author, Peter Baker, reports on Obama's reading of Kahneman's book. Though I wouldn't claim the book somehow affected Obama's approach to his job, it's still striking how the author weaves through the piece the notion that successful action at the highest level requires more than just careful deliberation and persuasive argument.

The same issue contains an opinion piece by Michael Roth on educational policy. It relies centrally on arguments drawn from John Dewey on how education instills lifelong habits. Roth quotes Dewey: "The inclination to learn from life itself and to make the conditions of life such that all will learn in the process of living, is the finest product of schooling."

It's hard to imagine that Dewey would have been taken as authoritative in a piece like this written as little as a decade ago. But Roth, in warning about narrowly vocational education trends, quotes Dewey again. "The kind of vocational education I am interested in is not one which will 'adapt' workers to the existing industrial regime; I am not sufficiently in love with the regime for that."


Seeing the two books doing so well, and the articles in which the ideas are coming into play, I was encouraged – a little, with all the usual hesitations – that the larger society might be getting ready to think more of a world where not every action is simply the result of a self-conscious rational deliberation, one where skills and dispositions acquired through experience play a fundamental role in shaping what we do.

A room (or dress) of one's own

The Zahavi and Gallagher book, Phenomenological Mind, suggests that schizophrenia patients often report a kind of "disturbed self-experience", which events and intentions are dissociated from the self, so that things seem to be happening and then only secondarily, or by a kind of inference, happening to them.

One of Parnas’ patients reported that the feeling that his experiences were his own always came with a split-second delay; another that it was as if his self was somehow displaced a few centimetres backwards. A third explained that he felt an indescribable inner change that prevented him from leading a normal life. He was troubled by a very distressing feeling of not being really present or even fully alive. This experience of distance or detachment was accompanied by a tendency to observe or monitor his inner life. He summarized his affliction by saying that his first-personal life was lost and replaced by a third-person perspective (Parnas 2003, p. 223).

I am reminded of an experience often discussed in our family of recognizing that an object –usually out of context–that looks like one of yours actually is yours, e.g, "that shoe on the gym floor looks just like a shoe of mine! Oh, it is mine..."

That a thing is yours is just as much a part of it as its color, shape or surface scratches. All can be misperceived. All are «bindings», constructions arising in interaction with the object that constitute what it is.

From this perspective it's interesting to think about the awkward social occasion that occurs when a lady in a fine new dress meets another in the same dress.  What she had made hers, suddenly isn't.

I find myself wondering too about how this observation related to "the uncanny", the sense of unease with an experience that should be familiar but is somehow strange.  Freud developed this notion pretty extensively, and it has gone on into the concept of "Uncanny Valley", the notion introduced by Japanese roboticists and taken up by animators, that experiences too closely approaching the lifelike can suddenly give rise to revulsion.