Posted by Luke in Recently, Seth Godin posted about what he called the Ism schism:
Modernism, classicism, realism, impressionism–dividing things into schools of thought–or even warring camps–makes it easy to create tension and thus attention.
When I first tweeted about this my thoughts were wow, I have faced this problem my whole academic life. Since 2002 I have been toying with this idea introduced by a former colleague about crossing paradigm boundaries. The ism schism eh?
Here’s where the problem is for problem solvers. There aren’t problems of information technology, information systems, management or operations research, there are just problems, we are people we frame them. We have invented weasel words in academia and built our kingdoms on the back of dead philosophers and then wore a path to the goal of making knowledge for the masses. So what’s the point? I am reading a book about the social sciences at the moment and how case studies became popular, then declined, only to become popular again and yet in both falls there is a consistent thread bringing them together. Pointless debates about methodology. You’d think that by now given a couple of hundred years we would have solved some of our social problems, we aren’t even close. Not even knocking on the door, while science and other areas are shooting ahead at a lightning pace. Why?
Perhaps the answer lies in the question: Why can’t academics solve problems? Well how long an explanation do you want me give? Should academics solve problems or just catalog and file them? In a recent conversation with a senior member of staff at Griffith, I was told that I need to find my ‘patch’ and become known for something. This is very good advice. Yet, I am reminded of my PhD literature review of the problem solving literature that covers six major discipline areas including: Education, Philosophy, Business, Humanities, Law and Science. Why? Because I was stupid enough to make a commitment to study the problem of the problem. Problems are like people, they are everywhere… funny that! The issue now for me, a somewhat backward less modern post-post modern academic is where do I fit? Nowhere and everywhere. Do we start micro-defining problems? Or macro-defining meta-knowledge? The whole wife and two kids issue fits into this somewhere as well… dammit.
So why is the academic enterprise failing?
It’s hard to say, but I wonder what John Dewey would say if he were alive. He once argued that we can only think about life as a process if we understood problems from the point of view of the people who gave them meaning. He wasn’t talking about individuals only but also groups. People who give meaning to things as a byproduct of being human. Academics have categorised a large percentage of problems into cubes such as ‘management’, ‘information systems’, ‘international business’ and so on. These are disciplines that have their own frames of reference, literature and so forth, yet they all have the problem of a problem and this covers differing views of what concerns us and how we think about it. To answer my own questions, knowledge has fragmented and studies now are micro, with a very small sphere of influence. This is a shame because we could combine our various disciplinary smarts and solve REAL problems, not imaginary ‘methodology’ problems. A philosophical problem has meaning, it surely does, yet the impact of the meaning is almost always meaningless unless the problem is non-trivial and not just philosophical.
I will finish with a thought first brought to my attention from a book about conflict resolution. It’s easy to say I am right and you are wrong, but it’s much harder to say in which way are both of us right?
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Problems, problems, problems… It seems trite to suggest that there is no such thing as a problem – and therefore all “solutions” are delusions. These “problems” of which you speak are everywhere, yes, but only because people are everywhere (or, where they are not, there do problems not be found).
To frame a state of affairs as a “problem” is to conceive of the possibility of a different state of affairs that is in some respects “better”. Then, to “solve” a “problem” is to change reality so that, in at least some of those respects, it is “better” than before. Such a way of thinking would have been entirely alien to the mediaeval minds that conceived of academia. The European universities of the Middle Ages were never a “solution” to a “problem”.
Well, I wasn’t there, of course, and some people might claim that, in any event, much has changed since then. But there is a reason why the word “academic” is used pejoratively to mean “of no practical use; having no consequences”. In case you think my prejudices are showing, I suspect that they are. But I have no principled or reasoned objection to academia, though it seems to me to be both self-absorbed and self-serving, more parasitic upon society than in symbiosis with it.
Here is the state of affairs that seems to me to be capable of being changed for the better: the “problem” of education, if you will. To put it simply: we do not teach our children and young adults how thinking works (not least because we do not know) even though “ways of thinking” are logically prior to the academic disciplines that we do introduce them to. Of course, these fundamentals are still learned, to some extent, but who can say how well?
To the “general systems thinker” anything worth thinking about is a “system”, and to the “problem solver” everything is a “problem”. With whichever perspective (if they are, in fact, different), the situation, if interesting, is inherently complex. We must therefore simplify our mental model of the situation in order to be able to reason about it. It does not follow from this, however, that the situation itself needs to be simplified. The real-world situation is somewhat adapted, by accident or design, to the real world. Most of the time, for most people, the real world will not easily change, and not radically. In such cases, wishful thinking is counter-productive; it inclines us to choose mere hope as an antidote to constructive action – there’s “no point”, now, living within your means, for example, since you’ll “never” be able to clear your debts, unless you win the lottery (true, perhaps, but only liable to make your current situation worse).
Therefore, my first lesson in practical thinking is: the real-world situation is as it is. Unless we have some understanding of why the situation is as it is, our interventions are as likely to make matters worse as better. As Hippocrates said: “First, do no harm.” Now, to do anything (or nothing) is to conduct an experiment upon the real world. So what effects do we expect to see, and why? A special case of the first lesson is: what works, works. If our experiment didn’t work, then our understanding or our reasoning was probably faulty, so we have an opportunity to learn and to conceive of a new experiment. This, in a nutshell, is “the scientific method” but, in reality, that is just a formal abstraction of one of the ways that thinking works. It works that way because it is adapted to how the real world behaves – some of the time!
Hi Alan,
I think your point about European Universities not being a solution to a problem is precisely what I am trying to say. I don’t believe (anymore – although I still maintain that belief is tenuous) that education is something you do in order to get something, it’s something intrinsic to human affairs. Isn’t the point of education… to learn? I don’t know that I am articulating this properly. If I am not it’s because I am muddled!
You said:
You know my daughter came home from school the other day and handed me a Rubric they use to assess how well she can speak in public. A rubric that was so complex I wonder if someone was to be innovative how could we know it was brilliant? Again, education is not a process, it’s something that brings joy and learning. At least to me but as my wife says, ‘you look normal but aren’t.’ What this will do is measure how well she speaks from one star up to five, but how well she thinks about something is unable to be measured. Why? I don’t have the answer to that but I know that there is something called, ‘excellent’ or the ‘X factor’ that comes along that shows me it’s more brilliant than I thought it was and changes my concept about what I previously thought it looked like. Now that, is brilliant! It’s the same when I see things in a new light, it may reinterpret the problem for me and now I have a solution (or at least a slightly less agreeable problem set!)
I agree, ways of thinking are prior… it’s above discipline and yet is one. Well said. It’s funny you know, I have spent the passed eight years trying to convince myself that how people think was a worthwhile study. I still think it (sic) is and will continue to do it. I am struck by your statement about ‘systems thinkers’ and so on. In my department there’s a man who likes to boil things down to a clear process for research, and as such excludes worthwhile methods of study through this. When I had the misfortune to talk to him about this my thought was, when have I done this. How many times have I thought about something only to change my mind later and see the complexity of it. At least once!
Thanks Alan, the best comment you made was the parasitic one… I am hoping to at least shove this along towards practicality before I expire. I believe academics should be leading the way instead of sucking life from things, but then I was always confused by ideology and purpose against belief and intent. Although, I am happy to pass that on to unprepared people.
Well, there’s brilliant thinking and brilliant exposition, and the second is rarer than the first. Most teaching of native language is actually training in the linguistic modes of thinking. The linguistic modes are the easiest to discuss, because we see their imprint on language wherever it is used. The non-linguistic and inchoate pre-linguistic modes are much less easy to discern once they have passed through the destructive filter of language. We learn to “talk sense”.
Occasionally, we catch glimpses of non-sense, echoes of pre-sense, harmonics of para-sense. These we may call brilliance, or dross. But as I sit here wondering what to say next, the many thoughts that are not quite uppermost in my mind are that there are always many times many more things that remain in the ante-room to consciousness; and of the vaguely conscious, only one may be spoken. Selection is key. So we may learn to understand our biases, to look beyond the single “victor” to its valliant opponents, who might have won, had the rules of our game been slightly different. Is the winning thought a zebra or a lion, a termite or baboon? In the eco-system of our minds, the single act of a single member of a single species: thought is.
Academia, then, is not a process, but an eco-system, analogous to the individuals that comprise it. It is, as it originally was, a garden where the life of learning is like, yet unlike, the natural habitats it somewhat emulates. Can a garden such as this be failing? Or is it just that, like any garden, it must be tended if it is not to become…
…feral?