Ronald E. Purser

The influence of deliberations on learning in new product development teams

Abstract Organizational learning in new product development involves the development of a knowledge base that can inform technical problem solving and decision making. We contend that learning processes in new product development can be studied by examining deliberations, that is, the patterns of exchange and communications which RDE are conducive to knowledge sharing and active inquiry; which expose more people to the “big picture” of how the overall product system functions; and which utilize a participative approach to decision making. We conclude by discussing the managerial and research implications of these findings.

Mindfulness Revisited A Buddhist-Based Conceptualization

Recent scholarship on mindfulness has narrowly focused on attention enhancement, present-moment awareness, and its stress reduction effects. Moreover, current operational definitions of mindfulness in the literature differ considerably from those derived from classic Buddhist canonical sources. This article revisits the meaning, function, and purpose of Buddhist mindfulness by proposing a triadic model of “right mindfulness.” A Buddhist-based conceptualization of right mindfulness provides both a theoretical and ethical corrective to the decontextualized individual-level construct of mindfulness that has informed the organizational theory and practitioner literature. We argue that a denatured mindfulness divorced from its soteriological context reduces it to a self-help technique that is easily misappropriated for reproducing corporate and institutional power, employee pacification, and maintenance of toxic organizational cultures.

Unfreezing the Future Exploring the Dynamic of Time in Organizational Change

Episodic attempts at organizational change have proven to be unable to keep pace with continuous change. The challenge of emergent and continuous change calls for newways of understanding time, particularly with regards to knowing the future. This article begins by reviewing classic organizational change theory in terms of its underlying temporal assumptions along with its epistemological stance toward effecting change in time. Drawing on the ideas of Henri Bergson, an alternative view of time as a dynamic flow— or duration—is presented, suggesting that linear, detached, and episodic methods lack knowledge of the future as a temporal dynamic and that popular visioning approaches that rely on future perfect assumptions fail to engage that dynamic directly. The authors propose that the future is unconditioned, what they refer to as the future infinitive. Knowing the future directly through deep improvisation bypasses sense making in favor of cultivating presence and acting in real time.

Miles Davis in the Classroom: Using the Jazz Ensemble Metaphor for Enhancing Team Learning

This article reveals how the jazz ensemble is a useful metaphor that does not suppress individual creativity yet also demands high degrees of interpersonal sensitivity and group cooperation. The utility of the jazz ensemble metaphor for teams is demon-strated through the application of a novel experiential exercise that involves students listening to a cut from the Miles Davis jazz sextet. This experiential learning exercise provides an opportunity for students to simulate the conditions facilitative of dialogue. By enacting the behavioral and attitudinal qualities of jazz ensemble musicians, students leam how to temporarily suspend their assumptions and opinions, thereby reducing defensive and self-oriented behaviors in their teams.

THE TIMES OF CAUSE AND FLOW IN ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE

New ways of managing change have run aground on the uncritical acceptance of a limited view of temporality, identified here as causal-time. Because it emphasizes identity and state-transitions, causal-time is inherently static and past-centered. An alternative view, called flow-time, emphasizes the dynamic of the always arriving future. The claim is made that a future-centered temporality gives access to the knowledge change agents need to cope with accelerating and ongoing change.

From Global Management to Global Appreciation A Transformative Epistemology for Aperspectival Worlds

This article begins by deconstructing the rhetoric of sustainable development and global management, revealing such schemes as furthering industrial imperatives. Further analysis shows that a global management perspective is guided by an epistemology of abstraction, hidden power relations, objectivism, and a technological bias. Environmental degradation and societal turbulence are consequences of a restrictive focal setting on space, time, and knowledge. To counter the limitations associated with modernist objectivist knowing, a new vision of reality is needed. This article argues that transformation to a sustainable society requires a global appreciation for the space and time in which we live. Such appreciation amounts to the emergence of a transformative epistemology that can open up restrictive focal settings. This aperspectival view is offered as a means to enhance environmental sensitivity and access to wisdom and creativity.

Redesigning the knowledge-based product development organization: a case study of sociotechnical systems change

Abstract Many R&D organizations of U. S. corporations are beginning to search for more effective ways to organize the knowledge-based product development process. Unfortunately, there are relatively few comprehensive methods for redesigning knowledge-based product development organizations. This case describes how sociotechnical systems (STS) methods were used to redesign a sophisticated chemical-based product development division of a high technology organization. STS methods provided R&D managers and professional employees a structured, analytic and highly participative approach for managing change in their division. Based on STS design principles, a change team consisting of professional employees designed and administered an organizational audit for assessing the effectiveness of current work practices and the factors which delayed research projects. Results from the audit indicated that delays to research projects were caused by organizational rather than technical factors, and that significant changes in organizational structure and work practices were required. The change team proposed the division be redesigned into a permanent team-based product development organization.

Confessions of a mind-wandering MBSR student: remembering social amnesia

Based upon a first-person experience of a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, this article provides a critical reflection on this clinical intervention within the context of late capitalist society. It draws inspiration from Russell Jacobys critique of contemporary psychology, what he referred to as ‘social amnesia’, a form of collective forgetting, manifesting as a tendency to repress, forget, and exclude the larger social, historical, and political context of therapeutic interventions. With its fetishization of the present moment, MBSR is predicated on a politics of subjectivity that assumes stress is localized to the failure of the individual to regulate their emotions.

Zen and the creative management of dilemmas

The management of dilemmas can be enhanced by learning from Zen Buddhism, particularly the meditative practice of working on koans. Zen koans are the recorded sayings, teachings, and encounter dialogs between Buddhist masters and students. The paper begins by first examining the nature of dilemmas and how various modes of thinking differ in their effectiveness in achieving a creative reconciliation. Next, Zen koan practice is explored as a means of providing insights into the human capacities required to perceive and resolve organizational dilemmas. The state of the mind required to resolve Zen koans is only different in degree from the mental capacities managers need to develop for reconciling organizational dilemmas. Next, the capacities of mind required to reconcile dilemmas is examined, which involves a new logic of ambiguity that is the basis of creative insight. Finally, the Zen koan pedagogy and Zen training are discussed in terms of its implications for research and management education.

A Buddhist–Lacanian Perspective on Lack

The historical and contemporary dialogue between psychoanalysis and Buddhism is examined to advance theories of self-representation. This theoretical foundation provides for a reinterpretation of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory as it applies to the unconscious lack that haunts human subjectivity. The inevitable failure to construct an enduring and permanent sense of self is linked to a chronic feeling of lack and cultural malaise. Drawing upon the work of Buddhist philosopher David Loy, the article proposes that this feeling of lack is symptomatic of a more fundamental and primary repression: a fear of no-self, or egolessness. Both the Buddhist tradition and Lacanian methods rely on unconventional and indirect methods for circumventing the will of the ego. Such unconventional methods are employed to decenter our familiar and common modes of representational discourse in order to deconstruct the ego.