Pattern recognition and the growth of knowledge

Citation

Magala, S. (2009), "Pattern recognition and the growth of knowledge", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 22 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm.2009.02322faa.001

Pattern recognition and the growth of knowledge

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Organizational Change Management, Volume 22, Issue 6

In the wake of the credit crunch all academic institutions, which heretofore supplied legitimate portions of knowledge to the elite segments of its consumers, and business schools (which were supposed to play the role of the non-military West Points for the managerial cadres) in particular, started to chant “mea culpa” and to regret bitterly not having been a bit more ethical in dealing the knowledge out to their clients, constituencies and other receivers.

Long sentence? It sure is. But a pattern which emerges casts an even longer shadow. When academic profession gently slopes down into corruption and enjoys the benefits of an all too close connection to the rich and the powerful, somebody else has to produce knowledge about dealing with a surplus corruption. Who could that be? Not ayatollahs, but the writers and the misfits, the extravagantly marginalized are the only hope left for our knowledge to grow and make us prosper in a fair community with just rewards (and prompt punishments). And so it was William Gibson and not Harry Mintzberg who had coined the term (and the title of a delicious novel parodying the worst excesses of marketing gurus) “pattern recognition”. It was David Foster Wallace and not Francis Fukuyama, who told us that the best cure against our addiction to television, sex, alcohol, workaholism and drugs and rock’n’roll was a bit of old fashioned boredom as in IRS office, where the action of his last posthumous novel The Pale King takes place. It was Thomas Pynchon, who … .

But we are not in the business of using fine achievements of literary art in order to club dull academic authorities with. Even Mintzberg knows that MBA education is a joke and even Fukuyama knows that history has not committed suicide to suit his conclusions. Let us limit ourselves to the prophetic title of the author of Necromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Idoru and The Spook Country. Pattern recognition is what we are all after in all walks of academic life. The authors in this issue of Journal of Organizational Change Management are no exception. Hongwei He and Yehuda Baruch employ grounded theory and case method in order to analyze the role of an organizational identity when institutional, administrative changes make the members/participants/employees aware of the fact that their identities are becoming painfully obsolete. Can we generalize their findings about a UK building society?

Not necessarily, but their counterparts from a different continent provide another case in point: Margaret Brunton and Jonathan Matheny write on a related phenomenon of a divergent acceptance of change (this time we are in a public health organization and not in a building society, but identities are still professionally tinted and strongly related to a context of a subculture within the organization under study). What happens when a health promotion staff, in a preventive mood, networked with local community of potential patients drifts away from medical specialists (be it surgeons or those who X-ray female breasts for diagnosis or cure), whose fabric of meaning does not leave much space for socializing with streamlined objects of high-tech treatment? Do not we recognize the pattern of social differentiation and growth through the emergent new identities?

Vicec Fernandez and Albert Sune explore the collective mind of an organization under change and reconstruction. How come, they ask, that some new knowledge is gained, won, constructed, created, multiplied and so on – but at the expense of some other portions, parts, types or clusters of knowledge, which have to be forgotten so that an organization does not have to suffer from some collective cognitive dissonance. All of us, busy with higher education and daily display of knowledge degradation and destruction should pause to reflect on codifiability of knowledge as a remedy against forgetting and the intentionality of forgetting (internal innovation can be a destructive process, not only a value-adding one).

We can try to get more quantitative about this ambiguity of gaining and losing knowledge. William Judge and Thomas Douglas study organizational change capacity and attempt to develop a systematically constructed scale (multidimensional, 32-items long) – which they hope might then be applied in assessing an organization’s ability, willingness and skills necessary for a change to happen. If successful, they can try to recognize patterns and plot them with their capacity for change scale.

Martyna Sliwa pays attention to the intuitive, emotional, identity-bound feeling of a space. In her study “This is not the same city” she studies individual narratives of a post-communist spatial change in urban spaces (her subjects have all been found in Poland, precisely in these areas, in which former communist industrialization gave way to the post-communist developments). It is exciting to note that her conclusions about the influence of city spaces upon our identity co-shape the latter at the micro-level, making some of our former identities as obsolete as those studied by Hongwei He and Yehuda Baruch.

Last not least, Antonio J. Verdú and José-María Gómez-Gras measure organizational responsiveness as perceived and evaluated through managerial flexibility. The issue closes with a theoretical tour de force, namely Maurice Yolles’ attempt to identify “a social psychological basis of corruption and sociopathology”. According to him one can distinguish between cultural, group mind, and behavioural aspects of a social collective, and one should study knowledge migration between individuals and collective if we are to understand why pathologies happen. Pattern recognition is vital, but not frequent:

The mind perceives phenomena and supplies knowledge that corresponds to a particular viewing point or perspective. In so doing it structures the phenomena into meaningful patterns through the process of projection. Indeed, […] phenomena are themselves created through the interaction between information and cognition, we can align ourselves with the constructivist notion that reality is actually created, but at a non-conscious level.

Yolles quotes approvingly Ackoff, Ashby, Beer, von Bertalanffy, Koestler, Weinberg and Simon and clearly intends to follow in their footsteps but with a humanist coefficient and cross-cultural awareness. While his knowledge is rapidly getting lost from and within the Liverpool University, we could try and trace his contribution to the theory of “viable systems”. Why should we care? According to Yolles, because:

The coherence of the culture is ultimately determined by the strength of the capacity to so share. The theory leads to the recognition that while there is distinction between the individual and the collective, theory can be migrated from one to the other.

Knowledge migration as the new platform for joined forces of researchers from knowledge management, organizational change, organization theory, organization behavior and conflict management?

Who knows. It is up to us, readers, to recognize patterns.

Slawomir Magala