Search results

This chapter explores the expansion of reality regarding the issue of terrorism. “There are those who argue that there is an empirically verifiable truth as to what constitutes the political” (Easton, D. (1968). International encyclopaedia of the social sciences (Vol. 12, pp. 46, 282–298), while others maintain any definition is a contingent social construction, with the disciple of politics dependent upon the nature of the political arena, itself dependent upon socially constructed and historically variable forces. Definitions of “political” are not discoverable in nature, but are rather a legacy or convention (Wolin, S. (1961). Politics and vision (p. 5). London: Allan & Unwin).

Regarding terrorism as an objective reality and subjective interpretation, this chapter reviews the definition, history, and perceptions of terrorism as it relates to the theoretical interpretations of constructivism (the meaning-making activity of the individual mind and unique experiences) and social constructionism (social interpretations of understanding).

The need to comprehend the notion of ontological relativity – that each person has a unique history from which to make sense of and create an individual reality that is valid to the self, while at the same time knowing that culture has an enormous influence on an individual’s worldview.

Thoughts, ideas, perceptions, and interpretations are important for all nations and especially in the United States because voters in history’s most influential, wide- ranging, hegemonic power are helping to shape American policy. Perceptions and interpretations (subjective reality) influence whether or not – and for whom – a person votes, which has long-lasting and far-reaching political implications. Once a vote is cast, that vote becomes an objective reality.

The first set of introductory notes to the graduate study of the history of economic thought, and the reasons for their use, was published in Volume 22-B (2004). Subsequently, while distributing the first set in my graduate courses, I initiated a largely new, second set of introductory topics, using a new outline for presentation in each course of lectures on further introductory ontological, epistemological and hermeneutic topics that went beyond the materials in the first set. For several years, I lectured using in part an outline of my 1991 essay (cited below). That outline is reproduced here as Set II.1. The notes published below as Sets II.2 and II.3 are composites, as to content and sequence of topics, of subsequent successions of lectures. Whereas the set of notes published in Volume 22-B was distributed to students with only casual accompanying remarks, these served for me as the basis of lectures and were not distributed. No set of notes published here indicates the comments I made, from course to course, when distributing the first set of notes on the first day of class. One difference between II.1 and II.2–3 is the increasing attention to historiographic topics vis-à-vis discourse-analysis topics with the passage of time. The common elements are, first, the social construction of reality, in two senses: the literal creation of society and the interpretations given that creation; second, the distinctions between truth and belief system, and between truth and validity; third, the continuing relevance therefore of epistemology and ontology alongside the rhetoric of economics; fourth, the relations of epistemology and language to policy; and fifth, the importance of limits. During this period of time conflict had erupted between advocates of the rhetorical and epistemological approaches to the history of economic thought. I was teaching that both approaches to the meaningfulness of ideas were important.

Reality breakdowns generate reflexivity and awareness of the constructed nature of social reality. These pivotal moments can motivate institutional inhabitants to either modify their social worlds or reaffirm the status quo. Thus, reality breakdowns are the initial points at which actors can conceive of new possibilities for institutional arrangements and initiate change processes to realize them. Studying reality breakdowns enables scholars to understand not just how institutional change occurs, but also why it does or does not do so. In this paper, we investigate how institutional inhabitants responded to a reality breakdown that occurred during our ethnography of collegial governance in a large North American university that was undergoing a strategic change initiative. Our findings suggest that there is a consequential process following reality breakdowns whereby institutional inhabitants construct the severity of these events. In our context, institutional inhabitants first attempted to restore order to their social world by reaffirming the status quo; when their efforts failed, they began to formulate alternative possibilities. Simultaneously, they engaged in a distributed sensemaking process whereby they diminished and reoriented necessary changes, ultimately inhibiting the formulation of these new possibilities. Our findings confirm reality breakdowns and institutional awareness as potential drivers of institutional change and complicate our understanding of antecedent microprocesses that may forestall the initiation of change efforts.

It’s been thirty years since the original articulation of “Appreciative Inquiry in Organizational Life” was written in collaboration with my remarkable mentor Suresh Srivastva (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987). That article – first published in Research in Organization Development and Change – generated more experimentation in the field, more academic excitement, and more innovation than anything we had ever written. As the passage of time has enabled me to look more closely at what was written, I feel both a deep satisfaction with the seed vision and scholarly logic offered for Appreciative Inquiry, as well as well as the enormous impact and continuing reverberation. Following the tradition of authors such as Carl Rogers who have re-issued their favorite works but have also added brief reflections on key points of emphasis, clarification, or editorial commentary I am presenting the article by David Cooperrider (myself) and the late Suresh Srivastva in its entirety, but also with new horizon insights. In particular I write with excitement and anticipation of a new OD – what my colleagues and I are calling the next “IPOD” that is, innovation-inspired positive OD that brings AI’s gift of new eyes together in common cause with several other movements in the human sciences: the strengths revolution in management; the positive pscyhology and positive organizational scholarship movements; the design thinking explosion; and the biomimicry field which is all about an appreciative eye toward billions of years of nature’s wisdom and innovation inspired by life.

This article presents a conceptual refigurationy of action-research based on a “sociorationalist” view of science. The position that is developed can be summarized as follows: For action-research to reach its potential as a vehicle for social innovation it needs to begin advancing theoretical knowledge of consequence; that good theory may be one of the best means human beings have for affecting change in a postindustrial world; that the discipline’s steadfast commitment to a problem solving view of the world acts as a primary constraint on its imagination and contribution to knowledge; that appreciative inquiry represents a viable complement to conventional forms of action-research; and finally, that through our assumptions and choice of method we largely create the world we later discover.

The main purpose of this essay is to reflect on the nature of justification. To this end, the analysis draws on Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s De la justification. Les économies de la grandeur ¹ [On Justification: Economies of Worth ² ]. More specifically, the article aims to examine the extent to which Boltanski and Thévenot’s conceptual framework, widely known as ‘the sociology of critical capacity’, ³ permits us to demonstrate that processes of justification ⁴ are vital to the symbolically mediated construction – that is, to both the conceptual and the empirical organization ⁵ – of social life. In order to prove the validity of this contention, the inquiry explores the meaning of ‘justification’ in relation to the following dimensions: (1) existence, (2) ethics, (3) justice, (4) perspective, (5) presuppositions, (6) agreement, (7) common worlds, (8) critique, (9) practice and (10) justification itself. By way of conclusion, the article maintains that processes of justification constitute an essential ingredient of human reality.