CREATIVITY AND PARADIGMS

Another way to look at the problem situations managers face is to view them from the perspectives o¡ered by di¡erent sociological paradigms. The word paradigm is now commonly used to refer to something like world view or way of seeing things. Originally, however, it had a technical meaning, provided by Kuhn (1970), and referred to the tradition of research regarded as authoritative by a particular scienti¢c community. It was the set of ideas, assumptions and beliefs that shaped and guided their scienti¢c activity. I will keep this technical meaning here because it enables a ¢rm distinction to be kept between metaphor and paradigm.

Metaphors, as we saw, are clearly partial representations of what is observed. They highlight some things and hide others. It follows that, while they emphasize di¡erent things, they can hardly be regarded as in fundamental con£ict with one another. Adherents of di¡erent paradigms, to the contrary, usually believe that they are o¡ering the best account available of the nature of the ‘reality’ that is being observed. For this reason

‘paradigm wars’ are frequent and paradigms are often said to be ‘incommen-surable’, meaning that the accounts o¡ered by di¡erent paradigms cannot be reconciled. Managers listening to advisers basing their thinking about

Creativity and paradigms 37

organizations in di¡erent paradigms will therefore receive contradictory advice and will themselves have to mediate.

It is possible to explain now why creativity is best encouraged if we embrace di¡erent paradigms as well as di¡erent metaphors. Although metaphors provide various viewpoints on problem situations they do not demand that radically di¡erent alternative perspectives are always enter-tained. Paradigms do ^ because they rest on assumptions that are incom-patible with those of other paradigms. Without adding paradigm creativity to metaphor creativity, it would be too easy to choose a set of metaphors that ¢tted well together and corresponded with existing cherished beliefs.

Exploring di¡erent paradigms, however, always ensures that a challenging encounter with rigorously formulated, alternative theoretical positions takes place.

We are of course concerned with sociological paradigms because man-agers, in trying to improve the operations, services or organizations they manage, have to contend with social systems. A review of the work of Burrell and Morgan (1979) on sociological paradigms and organizational analysis, complemented by that of Alvesson and Deetz (1996) to take account of postmodernism, suggests that there are four common paradigms in use in social theory today. These are:

. the functionalist paradigm;

. the interpretive paradigm;

. the emancipatory paradigm;

. the postmodern paradigm.

I will now brie£y describe each of these, at the same time relating them to the metaphors discussed in Section 3.2.

The functionalist paradigm takes its name from the fact that it wants to ensure that everything in the system is functioning well so as to promote e⁄ciency, adaptation and survival. It is optimistic that an understanding can be gained of how systems work by using scienti¢c methods and tech-niques to probe the nature of the parts of the system, the interrelation-ships between them and the relationship between the system and its environment. The expertise it provides should put managers more in control of their operations and organizations, and enable them to eliminate ine⁄ciency and disorder. Associated with this paradigm can usually be found the machine, organism, brain, and £ux and transformation metaphors.

The interpretive paradigm takes its name from the fact that it believes social systems, such as organizations, result from the purposes people have

and that these, in turn, stem from the interpretations they make of the situations in which they ¢nd themselves. Organizations happen, and people act and interact in organizations, as a result of their interpretations. This paradigm wants to understand the di¡erent meanings people bring to collaborative activity and to discover where these meanings overlap, and so give birth to shared, purposeful activity. Managers can be guided to seek an appropriate level of shared corporate culture in their organizations.

They can take decisions, on the basis of participative involvement, that gain the commitment of key stakeholders. Usually associated with this para-digm are the culture and political system metaphors.

The emancipatory paradigm takes its name from the fact that it is con-cerned to ‘emancipate’ oppressed individuals and groups in organizations and society. It is suspicious of authority and tries to reveal forms of power and domination that it sees as being illegitimately employed. It criticizes the status quo and wants to encourage a radical reformation of, or revolution in, the current social order. It pays attention to all forms of discrimination, whether resting on class, status, sex, race, disability, sexual orientation, age, etc. Usually associated with this paradigm are the psychic prison and instru-ments of domination metaphors.

The postmodern paradigm takes its name from the fact that it opposes the

‘modernist’ rationality that it sees as present in all the other three paradigms.

It challenges and ridicules what it regards as their ‘totalizing’ attempts to provide comprehensive explanations of how organizations function. From the postmodern perspective organizations are far too complex to understand using any of the other paradigms. It takes a less serious view of organizations and emphasizes having fun. It also insists that we can learn much by bringing con£ict to the surface, claiming a space for disregarded opinions and thus encouraging variety and diversity. The carnival metaphor ¢ts well with this paradigm.

To understand how these di¡erent paradigms can encourage creativity, try to picture any organization known to you from the point of view of each paradigm in turn. How would you manage that organization according to the very di¡erent perspectives o¡ered by each paradigm?

3.4 CONCLUSION

This chapter has concentrated on the importance of creativity for problem-solving. We have seen how problem situations can be viewed creatively through the di¡erent lenses provided by alternative metaphors and

Conclusion 39

paradigms (see also Flood and Jackson, 1991). Now we need to discover how we can be holistic at the same time. Fortunately, as the previous chapter demonstrates, this is possible because systems thinking has developed a variety of problem resolving approaches to match the variety of the problem contexts we can envisage.

In the previous chapter we charted the history of applied systems thinking in terms of progress along the two dimensions of the SOSM. A di¡erent and equally enlightening way of conceptualizing this history is to see it as being about the exploration and opening up of di¡erent metaphors and paradigms by applied systems thinking.

Hard systems thinking clearly depends on the machine metaphor. System dynamics and complexity theory can then be seen as abandoning that for the £ux and transformation metaphor, while organizational cybernetics builds additionally on insights from the organism and brain metaphors.

The soft systems approaches (strategic assumption surfacing and testing, interactive planning, soft systems methodology) reject the machine meta-phor in order to build their foundations on the culture and political systems metaphors. Critical systems heuristics and team syntegrity are based on the psychic prison and instruments of domination metaphors, while postmodern systems thinking privileges the carnival metaphor.

Paradigm analysis can be used to paint a similar picture of the develop-ment of applied systems thinking ^ this time in terms of the range of types of social theory it has been prepared to embrace. System dynamics, organiza-tional cybernetics and complexity theory did not jettison the funcorganiza-tionalism of hard systems thinking although they did take it in a more structuralist direction. Soft systems thinking, however, made a paradigm break with hard systems thinking and created systems methodologies for problem-solving based on the interpretive paradigm. Critical systems heuristics and team syntegrity make sense in terms of the emancipatory paradigm. Post-modern systems approaches were created to accurately re£ect the new orientation and the new learning about intervention that could be derived from the postmodern paradigm.

In short, not only can we be creative about problem situations by employ-ing metaphors and paradigms, we can also respond to them, tryemploy-ing to solve, resolve or dissolve them, using forms of holistic intervention con-structed on the basis of di¡erent metaphors and paradigms. This relationship is more fully considered in Part II, and, looking ahead to Part III, modern systems thinking sees value in all the di¡erent metaphors of organization and sociological paradigms, and seeks to make appropriate use of the variety of systems approaches re£ecting di¡erent metaphors and paradigms.

Creative holism conceives the di¡erent systems approaches as being used in combination, ensuring for the manager the bene¢ts of both creativity and holism.

REFERENCES

Alvesson, M. and Deetz, S. (1996). Critical theory and postmodernist approaches to organizational studies. In: S.R. Clegg, C. Hardy and W.R. Nord (eds), Handbook of Organization Studies(pp. 191^217). Sage, London.

Burrell, G. and Morgan, G. (1979). Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis. Heinemann, London.

Flood, R.L. and Jackson, M.C. (1991). Creative Problem Solving: Total Systems Intervention. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, UK.

Kuhn, T. (1970). The Structure of Scienti¢c Revolutions (2nd edn). University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Morgan, G. (1986). Images of Organisation. Sage, London.

Morgan, G. (1997). Images of Organisation (2nd edn). Sage, London.

References 41

Part II