网范文：“Epistemological advances: the micro-macro divide”第一个问题,组织应该解释的理论是社会系统构成要素之间的关系,即人和现象的相互影响。这是讨论最多的,不仅在组织领域,也在任何社会现象。实际上,没有好的社会性理论。在组织领域,很难解释这种关系的结果，英语论文题目，因为缺乏个人和社会之间的调和。在这篇范文中，考虑一个典型的说法:策略，英语论文，尽管被广泛认为是企业成功的核心特性,但在不同的角度,似乎无法调和，很难提供这一概念的定义。
战略存在于管理者的思想。也具体化在一个企业的活动规则。理解战略需要掌握它在精神和行动方面的共同起点。发生在认知世界的一部分,由特定的心理过程，对该企业及其环境产生作用。下面的范文讲述了这一问题。
The first issue that a theory of organizations should explain is the relation between the constitutive elements of social systems, namely persons, and the emergent phenomena that result from their interactions. This is one of the most discussed problems not only in the organizational field, but in any approach to social phenomena. Thus, Goldspink and Kay claim that ‘without a capacity to explain this relationship there is, in effect, no substantive theory of sociality’ (Goldspink and Kay 2017, 597).
In the organizational field, the difficulty to explain this relation results from a lack of integration between the individual and the social level and is often referred to as the micro-macro divide. Let us consider a paradigmatic example: strategy. Despite being widely considered the core feature of a company's success, strategy has been conceptualized in different perspectives, seemingly impossible to reconcile.
Noting that it is difficult to provide a definition of this concept, Gavetti and Rivkin (2017) explicitly derive this fuzziness from its dual nature: ‘First, strategy exists in the minds of managers – in their theories about the world and their company's place in it (Porac and Thomas 1989, Huff and Jenkins 2017). Second, strategy is embodied. It is reified in a firm's activities (Porter 1985), rules (March et al. 2017), and routines (Nelson and Winter 1982). Understanding the origins of strategy therefore requires a grasp of how both its aspects – the mental and the physical – jointly come into being. That is, it requires the characterization of a twopart search process. One part occurs in the world of cognition and comprises the mental processes that mould particular theories about the firm and its environment. The other part unfolds in the world of action and consists of mechanisms that shape what a company actually does’ (Gavetti and Rivkin 2017, 420).
Goldspink and Kay (2017, 598) further argue that ‘both questions are complicated by the fact that many, if not all of the contexts of action are themselves social’. As regards this issue, however, we share Clancey's (1997a) view that the social nature of human contexts, actions and knowledge, far from being a complication or, in his words, ‘a peripheral or an implementation concern’, is at the very heart of human existence. Consistently, Clancey points out that there is a terminological misinterpretation of the word social, whereby social actions are commonly seen as somehow subordinated to individual ones, and the latter appear to be synonym of acting alone.
The adjective social is thus limited to actions which are carried out in interaction with other people. Instead, he argues, social is a fundamental ontological feature of human activities and their contexts. Our activity, as human beings, is always generated, shaped, constrained, and given meaning by our on-going interactions within a business, family, and community, even when we are alone. In the field of organizational learning, the relation between individuals and organizations is framed by the very question ‘who is learning?’.
Huysman (2017) reviewed the relevant literature, scouting the hidden ideas and assumptions underpinning many writings on organizational learning. Her conclusion was that most authors focus on the individual level, supporting the idea that it is the individuals who learn within the organizational framework and therefore that organizations are mainly or only considered the background site of learning. On the other side, there is a smaller but growing area of literature which adopts a cultural perspective, where the focus is less on individual cognition or behaviours than on what is going on in the practice of groups and organizations. When organizations are defined as cultural or collective processes the focus is not on individuals as such but on the organization as a community (Cook and Yanow 1993, Henriksson 1999, Weick and Roberts 1993, Yanow 2017).
The individual thus becomes a participant in the organizations and their culture (Elkjaer 2017): ‘Cultures of groups and organizations like the cultures of societies, tribes and communities have a collective nature; there is no such thing as the culture of an individual’ (Huysman 2017, 85). Of course, a phrase like ‘collective nature’ is not spent very freely in cognitive science, if only because it opens well-known debates concerning collective intentionality, intentions and actions as contrasted with their individual counterparts, and so on. What we are interested in here is to highlight that approaching learning as culture has the advantage of focusing also on organizational, vs. merely on individual, aspects of learning. Still another issue is that it is misguiding to discuss the question of ‘who is learning?’ without also giving an account of what knowledge is. Let us then explore this further question.
What is knowledge?
What we can know about the world, how we know it, what the status and the role of experience are and, in general, what nature, origin, and status to attribute to knowledge have been among human kind's most burning questions. Western perspectives onto these issues have traditionally taken one of two forms: rationalism and idealism (Cilliers 2017). The former – also named positivism, modernism, objectivism, rationalism, and epistemological fundamentalism – is based on the assumption that the world can be made rationally transparent so that the knowledge about the world can be made objective. The latter – also labelled relativism, idealism, postmodernism, perspectivism, and even sheer flapdoodle – is based on the assumption that knowledge is always someone's knowledge, and links the notion of knowledge to others like experience, culture, and context.
These two perspectives are imported, not always consciously, into the organizational learning field, where it is possible to retrace their alternate fortunes and misfortunes, as well as those of the various theoretical streams that embraced the one or the other. ‘Theories of learning, like all scientific theories, come and go. Some innovations reach deeper than others; occasionally, theoretical changes amount to a conceptual upheaval’ (Sfard 1998, 4). Sfard (1998) goes on to argue that the notion of knowledge in organizational learning has been dealt with essentially by means of two metaphors, which she respectively labels acquisition metaphor and participation metaphor.
This dichotomy should not be mistaken for the well-known divide between individualist and social perspectives on organizational phenomena (Sfard 1998). Rather, it resembles other dichotomies, widely spread in the wider area of the cognitive sciences, like that of symbolic representationalism vs. constructivism and embodied cognition (Watzlawick 1981, Mate and Tirassa 2017, Tirassa and Vallana 2017). Despite having opposite underpinning ideas of knowledge, however, these two metaphors have not been conceived of as mutually exclusive and are simultaneously present in most of the works in the field (Sfard 1998). In the acquisition metaphor the mind is conceived as a container, knowledge as a substance, and learning as the transfer and addition of substance to mind. This perspective is also intrinsic to the attempts to build formal and computational knowledge systems (see Clancey 1997b): in fact knowledge has to be objective and considered a commodity among the others if it has to be gathered, stored, and manipulated without the intervention and of a subject and independently of the subject's activity.
This perspective pervades several conceptions of organizational phenomena. For example, the enhancement of information processing and decision-making in organizations is often viewed as susceptible to being improved by the acquisition of relevant information and knowledge on the part of the individuals, whose organizational behaviour becomes modified in its turn (Elkjaer 2017). Learning here is identified with the accumulation and the acquisition of some kind of private or internal property. What remains problematic is the understanding and the explanation of how an individual learning outcome may be transferred to the organization (Elkjaer 2017). According to Sfard (1998) the core idea of the participation metaphor is the suggestion that learning takes place as processes of participation in communities of practice (Wenger 1997, Elkjaer 2017). This idea goes under several names in the literature on learning and organizational learning, e.g. situated learning (Brown and Duguid 1991, Richter 1998), social learning (Elkjaer 1999), learning as cultural processes (Cook and Yanow 1993, Henriksson 1999, Yanow 2017), or practice–based learning (Gherardi 2017).
In this framework, to learn is to participate in organizational life and work practices. The on-going learning activities never are considered separately from the context within which they take place. The context, in its turn, is rich and multifarious, as shows through talk about situatedness, contextuality, and cultural embeddedness (Sfard 1998). The set of new key words that, along with the noun practice, prominently features terms like discourse and communication suggests that the learner should be viewed as a person interested in participation in certain kinds of activities rather than in accumulating private possessions. To put it differently, learning is conceived of as a process of becoming a member of a certain community. In the literature about organizational learning cast within the participation metaphor, adds Elkjaer (2017), learning is regarded as a natural part of human activity – it can, in other words, not be avoided: it is just part of everyday organizational life and of the work practice into which it is integrated. Recently, there have been attempts to find a third way beyond the fundamentalist/relativist dichotomy (Elkjaer 2017).
According to Cilliers (2017), however, when they come to the technological applications of theories of knowledge, there is an implicit reversion to one of these traditional positions. Cilliers (2017) suggests that a way out of the objectivist/subjectivist dichotomy is instead offered by the paradigm of complexity. Complex systems, indeed, as we will discuss further on, tend to exhibit emergent properties, that is, properties that are not reducible to the properties of any specific subsystem. To put it the classic way, the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
When looking at knowledge from this vantage point, the knowledge that an organization possesses and produces turns out to include both the knowledge which is possessed by the individuals and the subsystems and that which emerges from significant relations between them as well as between each of them, the organization as a whole and the external environment. Actually, the knowledge possessed by the individuals, the subsystems and the organization as a whole is only relevant to the other levels, or to the other agents belonging to the same level, inasmuch as it becomes manifest and available to them in the unfolding of the interactions that they have with each other (Mate et al. 2017). As Cilliers (2017) notes, an understanding of knowledge as constituted within a complex system of interactions has at least two important implications. On the one hand, such view denies the very idea that meaning can be objective. Knowledge happens in a dynamic network of interactions, one that is devoid of distinctive borders: therefore, knowledge cannot be atomized and conceived of as a fact.
However, Stacey (2017) is very critic of these attempts of assessing knowledge. In his opinion from the standpoint of complex systems theory, ‘knowledge is continuously reproduced and potentially transformed in processes of interaction between people. It follows that people cannot ‘share’ knowledge because one cannot share the actions of relating to others, only perform them. It also follows that knowledge as such is not stored anywhere. All that can be stored is reifications in the form of artifacts, or tools, which can only become knowledge when used in communicative interaction between people. It becomes impossible to talk about measuring knowledge as ‘intellectual capital,’ because knowledge itself does not exist in measurable or any other reified form.’ (Stacey 2017, 23).
On the other hand, a theory of knowledge as constituted within a complex system of interactions correspondingly denies that knowledge can be purely subjective. The subject cannot be conceived as being prior to the network of knowledge; instead, it is in itself constituted within that very network. Knowledge in interaction with other agents therefore is a matter of intersubjectivity (Tirassa and Bosco 2017). An agent's flows of knowledge may be oriented to the self or to the environment. Self-oriented knowledge contributes to the construction of meanings and narratives that may become shared with the subsystems and the individuals that participate in the organization. It is also crucial to the formation and the maintaining of a coherent identity of the whole organization. Knowledge which is instead cantered on the environment helps the agent to keep adapted to it. Adaptedness is a dynamic property which depends on the relation between the states, the flows and the events that are internal to the agent and those that are external to it (Tirassa, Carassa and Geminiani 2017).
Cilliers's (2017) statement that the dialectical relation between knowledge and the system within which it is constituted has to be acknowledged is particularly interesting: ‘The two do not exist independently, thus making it impossible to first sort out the system (or context), and then to identify the knowledge within the system. This codetermination also means that knowledge and the system within which it is constituted is in constant transformation. What appears to be uncontroversial at one point may not remain so for long. The points above are just a restatement of the claim that complex systems have a history, and that they cannot be conceived of without taking their context into account.’ (Cilliers, 2017, 48).()
网站原创范文除特殊说明外一切图文作品权归所有；未经官方授权谢绝任何用途转载或刊发于媒体。如发生侵犯作品权现象，保留一切法学追诉权。
更多范文欢迎访问我们主页 当然有需求可以和我们 联系交流。-X()
|
