In Chapter II I briefly introduced the concept of diagnosis as a way of analysing practice, dealing with the question of
“who are we, now?” Implicitly chapter three can be read as an analysis which through the search for the ideology of competence came up with several possible answers to the question of who we are today. In this chapter I shall extend and make explicit the diagnosis of the present as my analytical strategy for studying the performative power of competence. Here an analytical strategy is seen as a strategy for how one observes; how the object of a study is constituted as an object52. Earlier in my note on scientific nature by reference to Hastrup (2003:402) I identified the analytical strategy as a “plan or criterion for what is to count as material and how it is selected”. To address the issue of criterion I begin by discussing the gap between theory and practice and review science as an anarchistic enterprise, a concept I draw from the works of Paul Feyerabend. I then go into more detail about what is a diagnosis, what it is for Foucault and what it is for me and provide an example by pointing to the event of Healthy Resource Management. Finally, by exploring Robert Cooper’s notion of institutional thinking I discuss how organisations come to think in certain institutionalised ways. Viewing competence as a social technology is a productive way in which we
52 By taking point of departure in an analytical strategy, the study defers itself from the view that theory, methodology and method can be distinct and separable. These are not abandoned, but fuse and reemerge in the practice of the analytical strategy. As has been noted by (Esmark, Bagge Laustsen & Åkerstrøm Andersen 2005:11ff) this way of accounting for methodology and method is in keeping with the poststructuralist idea that the symbolic level is basic to our
possibilities of accessing the social world and most explicitly formulated by Lacan in his
trichotomy between the Real, the symbolic and the imaginary but is also found in both Althusser and Foucault.
IV
can question the way institutions unthinkingly think about competence in terms of activities for separate entities, i.e. individuals or groups.
On the theory and practice gap
Concepts create, Deleuze says. Events, language, reality, are all made up by concepts. And as such, every concept consists of a paradox (Deleuze 2006:166). In the previous chapter I presented competence as one such example. Competence is paradoxical in the sense that it promotes a calculable future (it predicts desirable forms of subjectivity) and holds a performative force (it produces a sense of uncertainty, undecidability, reflexivity, and never ending search). The discussion of the ideology of competence is hence an account of or a way of questioning our present work life situation. Networks, projects and ever moving changeable subjectivities are, as we saw, all important features in this situation. If the subject is only observable as movement, when competence is actualised, and if competence itself is performative, it will be impossible to locate the competent subject in any kind of simple or fixed structure. We will have to develop a way of talking, seeing and studying the mutual creation of competence and subjectivity, which does not begin with entities, essences or structures. The ambition of this chapter is to account for the study’s approach to this problem.
Scholars, consultants and companies alike often find themselves in the dilemma of being caught up between re-presentation and experimentation. The problem of whether we are to trust our senses and simply go looking for competence or rather should let us guide by reason and equip ourselves with the most precise rational definition echoes an age-old, lengthy debate in the history of science and philosophy from John Locke (1632-1704) and onwards. C. Wright Mills wrote in his The Sociological Imagination (1959) about a spectrum that at the one end had abstracted empiricism and at the other end grand theory. What Mills saw as a major problem to sociology in the 20th century was that too many scholars in his time either gave very specific accounts of large-scale quantitative studies or engaged in building grand theories, with overarching concepts which contributed very little in terms of how we are to make sense of the way people live their lives, they lacked sociological imagination.
In the previous chapter I sketched a history of competence aiming at an intermediate position (according to Mills spectrum) with which I arrived at my
diagnosis of the present. The “position” operates in terms of the analytical strategy by pointing to relays or relations working with assemblages of theories and empirical fragments. Theory here is not a set of rules or regulations to be followed instrumentally, neither is practice that in which we try out or test our theoretical assumptions, rather:
Practice is a set of relays from one theoretical point to another, and theory is a relay from one practice to another. Representation no longer exists; there is only action – theoretical action and practical action which serve as relays and form networks (Foucault 1977b:206f).
Hence, the role of the researcher is not to distance himself from the object of study, but to take active part in the formation of it, the production of knowledge and truths; the tensions and struggles. The researcher is not an innocent observer, but plays an important part in figurational games of truth, power and knowledge. To clarify the consequences of this approach, an example from one of my institutions, the Centre for Higher Education (CHE), may suffice. From the outset the competence programme in the CHE was aimed at studying action learning as a lever for individual learning and organisational change. As it developed it became clear to me that the programme revealed mechanisms of project work. To further explore the characteristics of project work I conducted follow-up interviews, performed after the action learning project had ended. The point was twofold. First, the object of study emerged in action and might change, as the programme evolved. Second, the analytical strategy generated a unique analysis bound to the specific practice in which it is conducted, and might draw on methods accepted in this practice.
The shift in study object in the CHE (from action learning to project work) is of great interest to me, as it seems to underline a relation between theory, method and practice as a co-constituting and constantly evolving process. Thus, this study serves neither to provide descriptive, nor prescriptive accounts but to develop what may be called an anarchistic enterprise.
Science as an anarchistic enterprise
The production of knowledge behind this thesis will be easier to relate to if one sees science as an anarchistic enterprise rather than any law-and-order science.
Feyerabend has developed such a view in stating that “We may advance science by proceeding counterinductively” (Feyerabend 1979:29). In commenting on the
debate between the rationalist position of his friend Imre Lakatos and his own, Feyerabend famously claimed that anything goes, by which he meant to provide a ground for scientific progress that does not inhibit progress but on the other hand does not fall into the rationalistic trap of setting up binding principles (1979:14).
It is worth noting that Feyerabend’s arguments against method was written to his friend (and declared rationalist) Lakatos, with the intent of provoking and stimulating debate. Contrary to what has been claimed Feyerabend’s so-called anarchistic theses can be seen as more than wicked phrases and attempts to provoke, indeed it seems reasonable (sic) to suggest that they are part of his independent scientific position (Lakatos, Feyerabend 1999:x). This of course is not to say that Feyerabend rejects progress or reason, but in the foreword of the book he never lived to finish Conquest of Abundance he does suggest a special way of working with concepts and analyses:
I avoid “systematic” analyses: the elements hang together beautifully, but the argument itself is from outer space, as it were, unless it is connected with the lives and interests of individuals or special groups.
Of course, it is already so connected, otherwise it would not be understood, but the connection is concealed, which means that strictly speaking, a “systematic” analysis is a fraud. So why not avoid the fraud by using stories right away? (Feyerabend 1999:vii).
Feyerabend goes on to wonder why it is that so many people look for surprises behind events? Why they are dissatisfied with what they see and why the hidden world is deemed more real, than the world from which they began (Feyerabend 1999:vii)? His main idea is that people reduce the abundance of possibilities that surround and confuse them, and with his book he intends to emphasise the essential ambiguity of all concepts. “Without ambiguity, no change”, he says. It could be said that Feyerabend does his best to be as systematically unsystematic as possible, yet paying very close attention to and suggesting innovative, anarchistic
“solutions” to the problems of how we should account for phenomena like
“method” (1979), “scientific knowledge” (1982), “progress” and “development”
(1988) and “reality” (1999).
To take up Feyerabend’s idea of doing science as an anarchistic enterprise I point explicitly to one theme: Foucault’s project of diagnosing the present. My diagnosis of the present is closely connected to Foucault’s concept of dispositif (apparatus),
which I earlier analysed as a key element in Foucault’s take on subjectivity. Thus, by the term diagnosis of the present I join and draw upon Raffnsøe and Gudmand-Høyer (2005) in pointing out that the dispositif has been a neglected, but most important category from which we are to understand Foucault’s analytical practice.
Nevertheless I maintain the term diagnosis of the present since I want to point to the active process of diagnosing society and organisational life in the here-and-now. It allows me to illustrate the process I have been through studying organisations both as a consultant who was one kind of diagnostician and as a researcher reflecting on and diagnosing my role as consultant. Further it seems appropriate since I wish to extend Foucault’s view and supplement my analytical strategy with other thinkers. Though I do wish to use the term a diagnosis of the present in a very specific way, one that deviates from what historians have suggested, I do not claim that my use of the diagnosis of the present is new, thus Roth back in (1981) identified “Foucault’s history of the present” as a general theme that straddles his work.