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».)

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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 …