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Hans Kokhuis
Imaginization (chapter 11 - Images of Organization)
A Direction for the Future
Organizations are many things at once!
It is this intriguing idea that provided the inspiration for this book. I believe that some of the most fundamental problems that we face stem from the fact that the complexity and sophistication of our thinking do not match the complexity and sophistication of the realities with which we have to deal. This seems to be true in the world of organization as well as in social life more generally. The result is that our actions are often simplistic, and at times downright harmful. I have written this book (=Images of Organization) in an attempt to make some small contribution to our understanding of the way we oversimplify, and to identify a possible means through which we might begin to develop a capacity for doing a little better than we do now.
My overall approach has been to foster a kind of critical thinking that encourages us to understand and grasp the multiple meanings of situations and to confront and manage contradiction and paradox, rather than to pretend that they do not exist. I have chosen to do this through metaphor, which I believe is central to the way we organize
and understand our world. But one does not have to accept this thesis.
The much more important general 1. ........ is that our ways of seeing the world are always bounded ones, and 2. ....... much can be learned by appreciating the partial nature of our understandings 3. ....... how they can be broadened. I have used metaphors to show how we 4. ....... frame and reframe our understanding of the same situation, in the belief 5. ........ new kinds of understanding can emerge from the process.
When we look 6........ our world with our two eyes we get a different view from 7. ........ gained by using each eye independently. Each eye sees the same 8. ....... in a different way, and when working together, the two combine to 9. ....... yet another way. Try it and see. I believe that the same 10. ....... occurs when we learn to interpret the world through different metaphors. The process 11. ..... framing and reframing itself produces a qualitatively different kind of understanding that parallels 12. ..... quality of binocular vision. As we try and understand phenomena like organizations 13. ...... machines, organisms, cultures, political systems, instruments of domination, and so on, a new depth 14. ....... insight emerges.
The way of seeing itself transforms our understanding of the nature 15. ...... the phenomenon.



On elephants and
organizations

At first sight, much of what I have tried to say has 16. ..... great deal in common with the old Indian tale of the six blind men and the 17. ..... . The first man feels a tusk, claiming the animal to be like 18. .... spear. The second, feeling the elephant's side, proclaims that it is more 19. ....... a wall. Feeling a leg, the third describes it as a tree; 20. ..... a fourth, feeling the elephant's trunk, is inclined to think it like 21. ..... snake. The fifth, who has seized the elephant's ear, thinks it remarkably 22. ..... a fan; and the sixth, grabbing the tail, says it is much 23. ..... like a rope. Their understandings would be even further complicated, as Peter Vaill has noted, 24. .... the elephant were set in motion. For the man clinging to the 25. ...... leg would experience an elliptical forward motion. The man holding the tail 26. ....... be whipped in random fashion, while the others would be jerked and 27. called/jolted/thrown, and perhaps splashed and splattered with water and manure. The elephant's motion 28. ........ probably destroy all their previous understandings and further complicate the task of 29. arriving/coming/knowing at a consensus.
There can be little doubt that, as with the 30. ...... men, our actual experiences of organizations are often different and hence we 31. ...... sense of our experiences in different ways. Thus a person 32. ..... a dingy factory may find obvious credibility in the idea that organizations 33. ...... instruments of domination, while a manager in a comfortable office may be 34. ........ enthusiastic about understanding the organization as a kind of organism faced with 35. ..... problem of survival, or as a pattern of culture and subculture.
However, 36. .... parallels with the Indian tale break down in some important ways. First, 37. ...... we look at the plight of the blind men we do so 38. ..... the privilege of sight. We know that they are dealing with an 39. ...... , and that if they were able to get together and share their 40. experiences/idea/tools they might arrive at a much better consensus with regard to what 41. ...... elephant is really like. However, the problem of understanding organization is more 42. ....... in that we do not really know what organizations are, in the 43. ...... of having a single authoritative position from which they can be viewed. While 44. ...... writers on organization attempt to offer such a position-for example, by defining 45. ...... as groups of people who come together in pursuit of common goals- 46. ..... reality is that to an extent we are all blind men and 47. ...... groping to understand the nature of the beast. While we may be 48. .... to share our different experiences and even come to some consensus, we 49. ..... never achieve that degree of certainty that is implicitly communicated in the Indian 50. .... by the idea that it is they who are blind and we 51.. .... have sight.
Stated in more conventional terms, there is a difference between 52. ..... full and rich reality of an organization, and the knowledge that we 53. ..... able to gain about that organization. We can know organizations only through 54. .... experience of them. We can use metaphors and theories to grasp and express 55. ..... knowIedge and experience, and to share our understandings, but we can never 56. .... sure that we are absolutely right. I believe we must always recognize 57. ..... basic uncertainty.
A second important difference between the moral of the Indian 58. .... and the problem of understanding organizations is that the very same aspect 59. .... organization can be many different things at the same time. Thus different 60. .... about organization do not stem just from the fact that like the 61. ..... men we are grasping different aspects of the beast, but because different 62. dimensions/ideas/ theories are always intertwined. For example, a bureaucratic organization is simultaneously machinelike, a 63. animistic/cultural/different and political phenomenon, an expression of unconscious preoccupations and concerns, an unfolded 64. .... of a deeper logic of social change, and so on. It is 65. ..... these things at one and the same time. We can try to decompose organization 66. ....... sets of related variables: structural, technical, political, cultural, human, and so forth; 67. .... we must remember that this does not really do justice to the 68. ..... of the phenomenon. For the structural and technical dimensions of an organization 69. .... simuItaneously human, political, and cultural. The division between the different dimensions is 70. .... our minds rather than in the phenomenon.

To illustrate this point, I 71. .... like to take one of my favorite examples. The authoritarian owner of 72. ..... small organization, concerned about his negative impact on employee morale and his general 73. access/gain/ loss of control, has just returned from a course on human-resource management. 74. .... genuinely feels that he has had "a conversion experience" and wants to 75. ..... his style of management to be more people-oriented. In an attempt to 76. .... closer and better relations with the workforce he decides to visit one 77. ...... his factories. On the shop floor he makes a point of shaking 78. ..... with each employee. They are naturally surprised and don't quite know what 79. ..... make of the situation, because "the boss" has always kept a clear 80. .... and ruled with an iron hand.
Clearly, numerous different meanings are latent 81. ..... the very same phenomenon-the handshake. The handshake is a symbolic gesture, 82. .... expression of a human-relations approach to management, possibly the beginning of a 83. .... and more democratic kind of political relationship within the firm, but also possibly the 84. .... of a new kind of employee control. The handshake embodies potentially contradictory 85. ..... , e.g., of friendship, people-centeredness, manipulation, and control, just as the rationality of 86. ..... organization can simultaneously have political and exploitative dimensions.
In trying to 87. ..... an organizational situation we have to be able to cope with these different 88. ..... potentially paradoxical meanings, identifying them through some form of decomposition while retaining 89. .... sense of their interrelationship and essential integration.
This has obvious implications for 90. .... way we use the kind of analytical scheme developed in Chapter 10, and 91. .... making us aware of the dangers of theories that overcompartmentalize or decompose 92. ..... understanding of organizations. I have emphasized that one of my main goals 93. ..... been to develop a way of thinking that can cope with ambiguity 94. ... paradox. We must avoid the pitfalls of the blind-men syndrome. In using 95. ..... or other frames of reference to unravel the complexities of organizational life 96. ..... can see certain metaphors fitting certain situations better than others (e.g., organization X is more machinelike than organization Y, department A is more holographic than department B, group C has a team-based culture while D is more adversarial), but we 97.. .... always remember that aspects of every metaphor may be found in every 98. ..... .
The analytical scheme that I have developed is thus best understood as 99. ..... sensitizing or interpretive process rather than as a model or static framework. Good analysis rests 100. ..... just in spotting "what metaphor fits where" or "which metaphor fits best," but in using metaphor to unravel multiple pattems of significance and their interrelations. I believe that the best intuitive readings made by managers and other organizational members have the same quality. These individuals are open to the kind of nuance that stems from an appreciation that any given situation can be many different things at once.
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