Rumbling on performativity_Frits Simon

le, more or less constant phenomenon which can be managed in more or less rational
ways. The result of the project is nil and maybe another example how public money is
spilled in Higher Education.
However, I think the money is spent well. Dissent is an important issue - given the
criticism on Higher Education and the announced Ministerial measures - and it is
important to understand about what we were talking and what the possibilities
would be.
In a process-like perspective an organization is approached as an evolving and uncertain
phenomenon which is what people do. In a process-like fashion an organization is
approached as far more a narratively than a managerial effort. If you want, a far more
discursive or conversational effort, however with no guarantee on a planned success.
Then conversations of people are interpreted as trying to understand what you are
doing. However, understanding takes places somehow on a different - not quantifiable
- timescale. It is to imagine as a timescale in which uncertainty and unpredictability
are seen as basic for the emergence of something new. Maybe something unexpected,
something surprising emerges which cannot be reduced in a causal way to what
preceded it. Maybe the project makes a difference somehow and somewhere. Novelty
comes out of differences, not out of dissent (Dalal, 2012; Mowles, 2011).
This process approach of time is a defining characteristic of a complex responsive
process-approach (Johannessen, 2012) and implicates a different approach of managerial
practices. Instead of an organization one could speak of organizing, understood as
“… essentially a conversational process, an inescapably self-organizing process of
participating in the spontaneous emergence of continuity and change.” (Shaw, 2002:
11). Our reality is understood as a conversational reality (Shotter, 1993). Management
becomes taking close interest in what people are doing, will be far more iterative and
self-reflective about what management is doing itself, will be about engaging in the
politics of everyday life in organizations and will be to be aware of the richness and
potential of experience (Groot, 2010b; Mowles, 2011). If experience is disregarded
Prigogine & Stengers would articulate “… if the understanding of the world leads
towards the denial of that what makes this understanding possible … that is no miracle
but an absurdity!” (1988: 48).
6.6 Yet a happy end? The challenge “to interrupt”
Although I broke off the narrative at a point where no joint conclusions were drawn,
my reflections on time have a connection with what happened in the joint meeting of
the think-tank and the board. I wrote that what surfaced in the meeting I captured in
the word: interrupt! It came to mean to interrupt what you are doing, to take the time
to dwell upon the subject and then carry on. Practical implications could be more
reflexive conversations, asking more often questions about the practicality of plans,
6. A case of consent about dissent | 169