A Son and Father Talk about Organization Procreation

The conference theme – Looking back. Looking forward on OB teaching – and its historical moments at Pepperdine University in 1997 and 2007 brought to mind this question. Do our theories of organization sufficiently reveal to learners how organizations are made, so that they may better manage the making thereof?

Participants were invited to join in an open episode of a son and father talk that has spanned the coasts, the OBTC at Pepperdine decade, a familial generation, sociological eras, and two differently formulated OB careers. What started over twenty years ago as father and son talks, father instructing son from his knowledge of organization theory and organizational behavior to son teaching father what he has now codified in his 2005 University of Santa Barbara doctoral dissertation as social enaction. Fearon, Jr. asks whether organizations can be understood and described as they emerge through the situated conversational interaction of their members

Looking back, the “father” (David Fearon, Sr.) in this session’s parody of a father and son talk earned his PhD in 1973 under the mentorship of Peter Vaill, who is one of those visionary management educators who developed his teaching in the earliest OBTC’s. An undergraduate Sociology major graduating form Colby College in 1965, the father has nurtured a career-long fascination with human being organizations. Teaching, consulting, and writing about effective organizations and teaching Organizational Behavior, the father seeks better ways to show learners and readers how they are also sources of the organization theories they put into practice.

Looking forward, the “son” (David Fearon, Jr.), also an undergraduate Sociology major also graduating in 1989 from Colby College, devoted the first 17 years of his career to the study of social organization with emphasis upon close analysis of human interaction. He is attuned to his father’s love of the question of effective organizational behavior, but is rightly dissatisfied with now traditional and conventional organization science answers. Now an academician and researcher, the son has created a perspective and methodology he terms social enaction. It is rooted in the conversational analysis methodology, also drawing upon complexity and emotions research. He points OB researchers and teachers to a particular operation of talk that performs social ordering and brings forth a social domain of organization which is the organization as it exists in the moment.

The social enaction view is of all members continually designing and practicing their talk-in-interaction to bring forth a social context for their joint actions. They behave the organization by talking to each other, accomplishing social order as it is performed.

Talk-in-interaction is an ordinary operation requisite to practice of any kind. The practice of talk enacts social organizations readily familiar to OB learners. A class meeting, for example, is an encapsulated form of social organization which they can be taught to observe a co-procreators. This may be a promising way to redirect OB learner attention from a traditional outside-in view of organizations representing organizations as things made by the few to govern the work of the many to an inside-out view of live organizations,

made fresh daily by the many with appreciative guidance to and from the few referenced by them as managers or teachers.

The gradual and troubling realization by the senior Fearon is that he has been teaching OB and Management with standard theories that are largely representational in nature. Researchers build models and symbols for learners and practitioners to grasp as if what is modeled is what a social organization is – a structure, a culture, or other prominent reoccurring patterns. The troubling aspect is not that these theories are wrong nor wrong to teach; but, do they take the management learner deep enough to where they can see procreation happen, as has the son, in real-time constitutive moments of an organization life? Are organizations what authorities – scholars and managers – say they are? Do OB learners have enough ways to make up their own minds about how organizations are made? Is it possible that they, themselves, are the makers of experience also known as their social organizations?

Father asks son, Can OB learners benefit by discovering how their talk-in-interaction constitutes social organization and its transformation? What difference might it make to their outlook on their future in business organizations, if OB learners can see that the very act of organization procreation is under their personal management and of all whom they would lead and manage?

Perhaps so, replies son. Perhaps organizations are not “things” to be built according to external rules for practice, but are living practices of participants enacting social organization by making references recognizable, indicating relevant next actions, assessing prior actions, adjusting to troubles, and remaining accountable to criteria members negotiate with the interaction itself.