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 …

More on word frequencies of 'habit' and 'routine'

A little more fooling around with google's Ngram tool produced this interesting plot of frequencies of the phrases 'my habit', 'our habit', 'my routine', and 'our routine', from 1800-2000 in their sample of one million English books.

  
   



I chose these search phrases out of interest in whether 'habit' and 'routine' differ historically in their individual or collective connotations. The interesting result is that 'habit' has more often been mine than ours, while routine has more often been ours than mine. I take this as a suggestion that the collective connotation is stronger for 'routine' and the individual one is stronger for 'habit', though each clearly has a substantial frequency in its «minority» connotation.

This link, http://tinyurl.com/habit-routine , will let you reproduce the query, examine specific examples of the usage from different eras, and try other queries.

The history of 'habit'

The new Google N-grams facility allows searching their huge digitized text collection for relative frequencies of terms.  Below is a plot for three concepts that come up often in this blog: 'habit' (blue), 'choice' (red) and 'decision' (green), shown from 1840-2000.  (A pretty amazing resource !)

Data from all English books, 1840-2000, computed 2010.12.17.

For many decades the three terms track each other at around .0035 percent of all items. They begin diverging sharply in the late 1920s, with 'habit' declining steadily from its peak in 1929. 'Decision' rises gently, and then quite sharply beginning in World War II. By 1980 it is at nearly ten times the level of 'habit'. 1929 is also the year in which 'choice' first becomes more frequent than 'habit', and it rises steadily from that point onward.

The data match up quite well with the claim that ideas of habit have been disappearing from our ways of thinking about the sources of action. (As in the Camic 1986 article, "The Matter of Habit".) In the 1920s Dewey could write that "habit is the mainspring of action" without seeming a little odd (in The Public and its Problems). Although our current era has many similarities to the "confused publics" he analyzed, we don't seem to have available for our reflections the  notion of habit as a fundamental human faculty that was an established resource in his time. 

The root meanings of 'patient' and 'agent'

Following my penchant for tracing the history of our key terms, I’ve gone back to examine the pair ‘active’ - ‘passive’ and some other pairs of related terms.  Their Latin roots mean (with a little help from http://wordinfo.info), respectively:

• ag- agen- act- agi- agit- :   to set in motion, to shake; to drive; to do, to act, to lead, to conduct, to guide
• pass- pati-  suffering, feeling; enduring

The one who is active is an ‘agent’ , while the one who is acted upon is a ‘patient’.  This is a quite useful distinction in grammar. At the syntactic level the subject of a verb might not be the one who is actually (semantically) doing something,  as in “The man’s left hand was licked by the dog.”  But at the semantic level the agent in the sentence is the dog and the man's hand is the patient.

We sometimes lose sight of this root sense of patient as the opposite of agent if we are thinking of the related meaning of waiting calmly.  But if we think of the medical use of the term, it aligns pretty well with the dictionary sense as “one who suffers or undergoes”, especially if we remember at the same time the broader historical sense of ‘suffer’ that we still can see in “She does not suffer fools gladly.”  

And once we recover the sense of ‘patient’ it becomes easier to see the traditional opposition of  ‘action’ to ‘passion’ .  For many modern readers it can seem odd to say that to be passionate is not active. But over the long history of language, going back to Greek and Latin, the idea has been that a passionate individual was being subjected to emotional or other compelling forces.  Indeed, when we feel emotions we say we "are moved", an idea contained in the very word 'emotion'.  We still retain this sense of being acted upon in the Christian phrase “the passion of Christ”.  The reference is not to Christ’s strong motivation, but rather to what he suffered, or underwent as the patient in the story.