Cybernetics, Critical Realism and the Dissemination of Praxis

Cybernetics, Critical Realism and the dissemination of Praxis Mark Johnson, University of Bolton (mwj1@bolton.ac.uk) Abstract In this paper, I suggest that the central problem for the methodological application of critical realism is the fabric of referentially-detached concepts within which an explanatory critique inevitably resides. This, I argue, can unwittingly lead to a monovalent interpretation, divorced from the embodiment of the initial stages of the dialectical process that leads to the emergence of concepts, and as such it is unlikely that such conceptually-bound knowledge alone (however much ‘better’ it is than its forebears) can yield the emancipatory fruits promised by a critical realist investigation.

We draw attention to the work of Stafford Beer, amongst other cyberneticians, who advocated an approach to social research based on models. Rather than emphasis being on the concept, here the emphasis is on the relationship between an observer and a phenomenon. The substitution of a phenomenon with its model still maintains (if it is a good model) essential elements of this embodied relationship. More importantly still, the dissemination of a model depends on codified descriptions of its components and its structure: a process which nevertheless leaves the essential embodied relationship between an observer and the model in tact. This, I argue, allows us to talk about a genuine dissemination of praxis.

By way of illustration, the use of this technique in current research in e-learning is described. The results of this work shed light on a new and significant body of questions which, I argue, merit serious consideration by those working in the social sciences from a realist perspective.

Introduction The problem of how to disseminate action, or praxis, rather than merely concepts has been a theme of constant concern within those fields of practice where the effectiveness of interventions are crucial to organisational viability. In this paper, I wish first to consider the problems of disseminating action through explanatory critique. The purpose of explanatory critique is to highlight the ontological mechanisms behind social phenomena with the aim of clarifying misunderstandings of those mechanisms and helping to ensure that effective interventions may be made. However, I argue that it often appears, as Gergen (1994) has commented, that explanatory critique is only a vague guide for action. The reasons for this I suggest lies in the nature of the language in which the critique is expressed, and in a mentality within the research community that sees mechanisms as objects for conceptualisation: a mentality which fails to account for a realist praxis-based conception of knowledge.

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In contrast, I draw attention to the field of management cybernetics where efficacious action is a fundamental concern in response to the real practical problems of effective intervention in organisational scenarios. As a method for dealing with the real communicational challenges involved in effective organisational transformation, I discuss the cybernetic modelling techniques of Stafford Beer and it is with these techniques that I give an example of realist approach to research using models within the domain of elearning. Through the contrast between these different approaches to realist research, I hope to be able to establish the nature of the cause of difficulties with explanatory critique and the ways in which those problems may be addressed through modelling.

The Explanatory Critique of Trust and Control relations As a typical example of explanatory critique in realist research, I will use Reed’s (2001) analysis of the relationship between trust and control within institutional structures. Reed, following others, establishes the concepts of ‘trust’ and ‘control’ as key players in mechanisms which can in their differing structural relationships generate explanatory critiques for the transformations of public sector working practices and institutional organisation. Reed articulates that trust, from a realist perspective, is “a particular form of social relation based on a backdrop of generalized attitudes and predispositions in which social actors engage in reciprocal interactions based on mutual rights and obligations”.

Trust is therefore a highly complex mechanism where “normative/cultural (trust) and material/political components (control) are combined and re-combined in complex ways to form enduring structures of domination”.

The central question here is whether this language which expresses the complexity of the nature of the relationship between ‘trust’ and ‘control’ can effectively convey that complexity in a way that is useful. On one level, Reed’s description is clearly compatible with Bhaskarian social ontology (Bhaskar, 1979). However, in order to be socially efficacious, the critique must be subject to a process of codification within the wider social science community, with the eventual referential detachments that are entailed by this, but in a way which does not compromise the complexity of the concepts and mechanisms involved.

At this point, the ontology of the language through which the mechanism is presented must also be considered. The very words ‘trust’ and ‘control’ have their own ontological grounding, at least part of which lies outside the conceptualisation that is presented within the critique. Elster (1982) has pointed out, for example, that statements of particular social relationships like “capitalists fear the working class” cannot be reduced to the feelings of individual capitalists about individual workers. In a similar vein, we might contrast the perceived ‘lack of trust’ between managers and their workers with the trust relationship between an individual manager and worker. In essence, such words play a role in both public and private life (as Reed points out by asserting the importance of normative/cultural influences), and with regard to the latter in particular, the complex mechanisms to which they belong may be very different from those which play out in the public sphere. Furthermore, a realist interpretation of the interplay between private and public language must account for the emergent effects of those private mechanisms on

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their interpretation in a public sense. But this creates a fundamental problem: for it is the language of critique which is the source of this difficulty, and therefore no linguistic intervention could address it.

This language is also, in origin, personal to the observer/researcher, therefore the critique may implicate mechanisms which relate both to the personal relationship to words such as ‘trust’ as well as to the public codified relationships with such concepts. This embedding of the observer’s relationship with the domain within the language used within the critique is an issue of fundamental importance, reflecting as it does the insight of second-order cybernetics expressed by Maturana (1980) “everything said is said by an observer”. It becomes more significant when we consider the issue of dissemination of an explanatory critique. The dialectical process of establishing truth (Bhaskar, 1992) from the normative-fiduciary relationships with the critique to its eventual codification as referentially detached concepts is a process whereby those personal aspects of the researcher to concepts such as ‘trust’ are distanced in favour of a generally and more widely acceptable codification. And yet, such a codification does not prevent new individual perspectives on such concepts carrying with them their own individual histories of personal relationships to words such as ‘trust’. Ultimately, this all amounts to ‘difficulties of interpretation’ which give the ground to critics of critical realism to argue that the critique is less than useful.

With regard to the efficacy of a critique such as Reed’s, there are of course many levels.

Much realist critique has served to situate realist arguments against other methodological and philosophical approaches. Reed, for example, contrasts the realist representation of trust with the systems theory representation as “generalized system resource fulfilling the functionally equivalent role of power/control”, or against structuration theory representing trust as “the capability drawn on by social actors with diverse and conflicting ends, in order to negotiate some form of ‘temporary social order’”. This sort of efficacy in reawakening an engagement with ontological issues across methodological practices is of course useful – although one may argue that the same objective could be achieved with a generic presentation of realist ideas, rather than a specific engagement with a domain.

The specific-ness of the critique’s engagement is used to criticize existing configurations of trust and control in different domains. Within the health service, for example, it is seen as moving health-service organizations “towards a more ‘low-trust’ culture in which collaborative relationships become more difficult to assemble and sustain (Kitchener 1998)”. Reed argues, as a result of his critique, that it is important to ensure that “the ensuing power struggles between contextually constrained stakeholder interests is a move along the trajectory of organizational change and development”. And yet this high-level (and somewhat vague) recommendation for action should be contrasted with the day-today operation of health services and other institutional operations where there are many actions that could be taken which might improve the interrelationship between trust, control, personal autonomy and effective organization. Yet these practical small-scale actions seem to have escaped the explanatory critique presented. In contrast, we can now turn a cybernetic technique which situates itself around the domain of those actions.

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Cybernetics and The Viable System Model The problems we have discussed with regard to the dissemination of explanatory critique were very much the concern of Stafford Beer as he sought to develop management cybernetics as a means of instigating efficacious transformation of institutional practices.

Beer was himself very clear about the philosophical implications of his work (Beer, 1975), and yet his work in cybernetics appears to be located in a space somewhere between philosophy, psychology and the day-to-day problems of management. His fundamental concern was to share a complex conception of the workings of an organisation with the members of that organisation so as to achieve an effective reorganisation. In particular, he recognised the shortcomings of conventional representations of organisational structure (typically hierarchical diagrams) which whilst lending themselves to straightforward dissemination – tended to only represent power relationships, rather than functional roles. On the other hand, the communication and dissemination of ideas about the complexity of an organisation required a fundamentally different approach to the manner in which that complexity was conveyed: one that ensured the complexity was retained throughout the dissemination process. To this end, he identified that a model-based approach was most effective in both communicating complexity and in surviving the dissemination processes.

Armed with the basic cybernetic concept of VARIETY (the measurement of complexity), and the associated ‘rules’ for handling VARIETY (for example, Ashby’s ‘law of requisite variety’ (1956) which argues that the effective control of a complex system requires the agency of system of equal complexity), he analysed the component parts of an organisation. In the process, he identified those components of the business which had to handle large amounts of complexity and consequently were failing to cope, and those components which did little. From this analysis he attempted to reorganise the functional unit of the organisation to ensure the complexity of each individual component, as well as that of larger components and the whole organisation itself could be managed effectively.

The implementation of this reorganisation rested on dissemination of this analysis, and the nurturing of similar insights into the complexities of the organisation within the staff.

As a means of achieving this, Beer developed a graphical technique to represent the management of complexity within the organisation: the ‘Viable System Model’ (VSM) (Beer, 1972). The VSM is a generic graphical representation of the management of complexity. It comprises a ‘management unit’ (which itself is broken down into 3 different aspects of management: day-to-day, forecasting, strategic decision-making), and a number of components which are coordinated by the manager, and where the viability of the whole system is dependent on the effectiveness of this coordination. There are three channels whereby this coordination is effected: a ‘command channel’ whose fundamental role is to negotiate the conditions under which viability is maintained – this usually takes the form of a ‘resource bargain’; a ‘control channel’ whose role is to attenuate the VARIETY of the components to maintain viability; and a ‘monitoring channel’ whose role is to monitor the viability of components, feeding information back to the manager, who may or may not take action through the control channel.

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One of the most important aspects of the VSM is that it is recursive. The components that are coordinated by a manager have themselves the same structure (manager, components, channels). Beer’s main objective was to instil insight into the business organisation processes in its employees. This he claimed to achieve through the recursiveness of the VSM, and the fact that bodily coordination could also be characterised as a VSM. This allowed, in the dissemination of the business model, an appeal to individual introspection with regard to variety management which could then be projected onto the larger model that was presented. Thus the complexity of the VSM for the business could be disseminated with some success.

Within the VSM analysis, the focus was always on the extent to which complexity could be managed: Beer argued that the ‘actualities’ of the components identified were less important than the mechanisms built up around them. Thus, we might say that a business is a coordination of different components (say finance, sales, marketing, etc): but questions as to whether these are the actual components matter less than the fact that their complexity must be managed. Rather than focus on actual components of an actual mechanisms the model seeks to give a picture of a mechanism, and between an observer and this picture, a relationship would develop. This relationship would, if the mechanism portrayed was relatively accurate, bear some similarity to the relationship with the real situation.

This emphasis on the relationship between observer-model/observer-reality reflects the fundamental difference between cybernetic techniques and the approach adopted through the construction of explanatory critique. For Beer, knowledge is praxis-based – as much visceral as conceptual. To have knowledge of a complex mechanism like ‘trust’ is to explore in an embodied way one’s reaction to an abstract mechanism which has some isomorphic relationship to it. To an observer, the model presents a ‘domain of actions’ where the observer may explore their reactions to the changing of parameters and model structure. The extent of the success of the model depends on the extent to which the observer can relate this domain of action to the actions they might undertake in the real situation. The dissemination of the model is facilitated not only by this focus on the ‘relationship’ between it and an observer but also by the fact that a model comprises a set of components all of which can be codified and reassembled: the process of dissemination does nothing to the actual relationship between an observer and the model.

An Example of a Cybernetic representation of Critical Realist Ontology: The Personal Learning Environment To illustrate how a cybernetic approach would work in practice, I wish to draw on recent work in e-learning which has sought to characterise the impact of technological change on educational institutions and learner behaviour, and provides a model that is both a framework for understanding recent technological and social change in education, as well as predicting future developments and their likely impact on institutional organisation.

This work makes an interesting comparison with Reed’s because the issues of trust and control also play a large role in educational processes at all levels. Yet the approach of the cybernetic analysis has been to focus on the nature of the coordinations of

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components at all levels in the educational domain, from those performed by the learner, to those performed by educational institutions and national agencies which coordinate them. At the same time, the characterising of the Transformational Model of Social Activity (Bhaskar, 1979) within the cybernetic model has been a key concern, for without this key realist element, the models produced would not reflect the causal impact of discourse and the historical dimension which are more often than not outside the control of a particular institutional or personal coordination of components. In doing this the realist credentials of a cybernetic approach are maintained in showing that a cybernetic mechanism can be constructed which includes the reproduction and transformation of the transitive domain through individual action.

The ‘Personal Learning Environment’ (PLE) is a name given to an emerging phenomenon in e-learning which builds on current developments in technology whereby the control of technological resources for learning gradually passes from institutions to learners. Learner-driven coordination of technology is presented as a solution to a viability problem that resides in the current institution-driven coordination of technology, where large expense and potentially unmanageable complexity within the domain of learning technology creates barriers for students and teachers alike.

This learner-driven coordination of technology is facilitated by recent technological developments which enable the separation of an electronic ‘tool’ into a ‘service’ component and an ‘instrument’ component. The instrumental component provides the physical ‘interface’ that the user must acquire biological dispositions to use; the service is the domain of action to which the tool might be deployed. Prior to this development, any electronic tool contained an instrument and a service which were inseparable, in the same way that physical tools (like spades, or cars) are: to use a different tool was to use a different service. This means that both the biological disposition to use an instrument and the knowledge of how to put it to work had to be coordinated by a user. At a time when the requirement to use electronic tools (as well as other tools) has never been greater, this creates complexity for the user to the point that new tools may present new barriers in the form of greater complexity, rather than new opportunities.

Therefore, behind this characterisation lies the basic characterisation of a conventional educational setting where learners are coordinated by a teacher and each one has to coordinate their access to the services they require through the management of their dispositions to use various instruments. This we represent through the (slightly simplified) VSM diagram in figure 1.

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In this diagram the teacher (1) Figure 1 coordinates their learners through reaching a ‘resource bargain’ with them (3) – an agreement of the resources, obligations, and rewards pertaining to the educational engagement. The teacher monitors the variety of the learners (4), and attenuates behaviour as necessary (2).

Learner themselves (5) are similarly structured as a coordination of their own components. These components are the dispositions to engage with the various technologies they must use to perform the tasks that are necessary to their learning. Difficulty in coordinating these technical dispositions will therefore impact on the viability of the learner’s engagement within the class and the teacher’s ability to coordinate it.

Added to this, there is continual influence from an environment which constantly contributes to new ‘perturbations’ which threaten the viability of learners and teacher.

The Institutional View As the teacher’s responsibility is primarily to coordinate learners, the responsibility of the educational institution is partly to coordinate teachers, as well as manage the provision of courses, technology, funding, etc. This is shown in figure 2.

Figure 2

Here we see a characterisation of the institution coordinating students, courses, teachers, funding – the list is not exhaustive – the important point is that in this coordination, technology within the institution plays a vital role, for within each of the communities of practice that are coordinated, each has particular technical practices which

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must be resourced correctly. Failure to coordinate any aspect of this technology will impact on the viability of the particular component involved, and have a knock-on effect on the viability of the institution.

Currently, within the institution’s coordination of these different communities of practice, there is centralised control of both the instrumental and service aspects of technology.

The central problem with this is that it creates complexity for learners and other technology users situated within the institution: individual users have no choice as to how they use particular technologies – they simply have to learn the various instruments that are presented to them. New technologies, upgrades, security threats and measures to counter them all have an impact on this personal technological coordination. In addition to this, the increasing ubiquity of technological practice in all areas of life means that those technological practices that are learnt for work purposes have to fit around those technological practices that are learnt for activities outside work. Learners, for example, may participate in online communities, or use other technological services which themselves require new technological skills to be coordinated. Furthermore, as learners move from one institution to another, a new set of skills must be acquired to use a new set of instruments. On the institution’s side, the maintenance of centralised control amounts to increasing effort and expense in providing technological services which meet the needs of an increasingly diverse student population, providing services which often duplicate services outside the institution (like email) whilst at the same time security concerns prevent the provision of access to some of the more innovative services that are currently emerging - much to the frustration of learners.

The potential impact of the Personal Learning Environment The intervention of the PLE aims to exploit the potential of the separation of tools into services and instruments, by providing the learner with a ‘toolkit’ that allows for access to a wide variety of services through a single simplified set of instruments which are in the control of the learner. This means that the complexity of managing the biological dispositions to access many different services can be considerably simplified. At the same time, the emphasis on ‘access to services’ means that the provision of instrumentation by the institution is no longer required. Furthermore, the focus on services together with learner’s new-found ability to coordinate services from a variety of sources, means that institutions engage in a process of careful examination of the services that they provide, ensuring that such services do not duplicate those services which are adequately met elsewhere on the internet. This amounts to an opportunity for the divestment of technology by institutions.

Thus at both the level of the learner, and at the level of the institution, there is a considerable reduction in complexity. However, at this point it is instructive to consider the models produced against the backdrop of Bhaskarian social ontology. Both diagrams so far produced assume relatively closed systems, apart from the influence of an ‘environment’ where the mechanisms are not specified. For a more realistic picture, we can expand the model to shed some light on the nature of this relationship with the environment.

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Figure 3 The diagram shown here is similar to figure 1, showing the teacher’s coordination of learners. However, this diagram makes it clear that the coordination the teacher performs is of those aspects of the learner which participate directly in the learning. Yet these aspects are merely fragments of the ‘whole person’ of the learner where many other ‘fragments’ exist outside the domain of the direct coordination by the teacher. And yet, many of those external communities of practice to which the learner might belong also have as some of their components aspects of the learner’s components which are directly affected by the teacher’s actions. This means that the teacher’s action in coordinating those fragments engaged in learning, can also impact on the other external communities of practice that the learner is engaged with (conversely, it also means that external communities of practice out of the control of the teacher may impact the student’s learning). It is through this mechanism that we can gain an insight into how, through the action of teaching, a reproductive force is unleashed in the form of the coordination of learners, but that this reproductive force also sets in motion processes with other external communities of practice, which in turn feed into an environment to which a teacher, or an institution has to react. In other words, that reproductive force also entails a transformational process.

What does this mean for the Personal Learning Environment? One aspect of this analysis is the conclusion that the greater the complexity at all levels within the education system, the greater the scope for impacting external communities of practice, and the greater the likelihood of rapid changes in an environment within which educational institutions sit.

At a time of rapid change in education, and great internal complexity within the educational system, this reading would appear to have some validity. The PLE intervention is about reducing complexity at all levels of the system. The hope is that this might at least act as a break on the constant tide of transformation that sweeps education.

Yet this deeper model also highlights the very real issues involved in transitioning to a personal technology model for education. In particular, the capacity for communities of practice within institutions to sustain themselves pathologically at the expense of wider

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systemic viability is a well-known phenomenon (Scott, 1997). What would counteract such pathological behaviour is the emergence of real environmental threats to force change on the institution. With the increasing costs of higher education, and the widening range of learning opportunities outside the institution, together with improving technological means for coordinating learning with life may mean that there are significant changes in the life-choices made by individual students and their parents. This would amount to a significant environmental threat to pathological practices within educational institutions.

Reflections of the Model as a Domain for Actions The model we produced for the PLE makes an argument for a technological transformation which is, to a large extent, already in progress. It was, however, never the intention that the model should ‘advocate’ this technological approach. Instead, our approach has been to articulate ‘how we think the world of education is’ from the perspective of technology viewed through the VSM. Having articulated this, and explored the explanatory power of this characterisation, we have then considered how it might be if we exploited the potential of new technologies on offer to us. This argument is in itself, of course, part of the discursive mechanism that might lead to the emergence of the PLE, but the real focus has been on establishing an effective model.

The PLE model, in its full incarnation with networks of external communities of practice and transformational processes as off-shoots of institutional and personal coordination is far more difficult to read in terms of being able to advocate a particular intervention that will ‘definitely’ work. What the model presents is a domain of possible actions where particular interventions might be applied (the PLE is one) which are effective in improving the complexity management situation of the system as a whole.

It is this domain of possible action and its ensuing praxis-based conception of knowledge that the greatest contrast can be seen in comparison to the approach by Reed. The language of an explanatory critique specifies the components and mechanisms of an ontology: it states what the mechanism is, but in doing so it does not account for the role of the researcher or the reader as an observer. The components of the PLE model matter only inasfar as they situate a complexity management problem within a particular domain. What does matter is the dynamic relationship between those components, their managers at different levels of recursion and the relationship an observer has to them.

This does not attempt to tell us ‘how it is’ but rather to present a dynamic situation which in its relationship with an observer suggests possibilities for action which have some bearing on similar actions within the real situation.

Conclusion To summarise my arguments I have highlighted that a realist ontology entails a praxisbased conception of knowledge. I have argued that the focus on explanatory critique as a method of realist research inevitably suffers from issues pertaining to the language that is used to express it, and to the fact that the position of the author of the critique as observer

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is not accounted for. These issues mean that the process of dissemination in the move from fiduciary relationships with a critique to eventual referential detachments entails a distancing of the authentic praxis-based origins of the critique towards a totally conceptualised non-praxis-based representation.

In contrast, a modelling approach is advocated where the observer-problem is addressed with an emphasis not on description, but on the reproduction of a particular relationship through the creation of an abstract mechanism. The defining character of the model and the measure of its effectiveness is its ability to reproduce a domain of possible action to which actions in the real world can be related. With such an emphasis on action, the model preserves its essential praxis-based character whilst at the same time possessing a component construction which can be disseminated without effect on the fundamental relationship between itself and an observer.

The example of the Personal Learning Environment is useful on a number of levels.

Firstly, it provides an opportunity to demonstrate the compatibility of realist ontology with cybernetic techniques. Secondly, the PLE presents itself as an intervention which is effective at reducing complexity and giving freedom to learners to coordinate their own technology. In this light, it may be seen as illustrative of the ways in which cybernetic approaches may effect real emancipatory social transformation. In such a light we might hope to create a link between the emancipatory discourse of critical realism and the social cybernetic emancipatory hopes that Beer expressed in his “Platform for Change�.

References Beer, S (1975) Platform for change: a message from Stafford Beer London, Wiley Beer, S (1972) Brain of the firm : the managerial cybernetics of organization London, Allen Lane Elster, J (1982) Marxism, functionalism and game-theory: the case for methodological individualism Theory and Society Maturana, H; Varela, F (1980) Autopoiesis and cognition : the realization of the living Boston studies in the philosophy of science ; vol.42 Bhaskar, R (1979) The possibility of naturalism : a philosophical critique of the contemporary human sciences Bhaskar, R (1990) Dialectic: the pulse of freedom Gergen, K. J. (1994) Realities and Relationships: soundings in social construction Cambridge, MA Kitchener, M (1998) The bureaucratization of professional roles: the case of clinical directors in UK hospitals Cardiff Business School, Public Services Research Unit, Working paper 1, January Reed, M (2001) Organisation, Trust and Control: a Realist Analysis Organization Studies Scott, B (1997) Inadvertent pathologies of communication in human systems Kybernetes: The International Journal of Systems & Cybernetics, Volume 26, Number 67, October 1997, pp. 824-836

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