Practice Makes ___________!

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Practice Makes ___________! Michael Kaethler There’s a lot of hullabaloo these days around topics of collaboration, collectives, co­production and so forth. It’s a pretty safe bet that these are being framed normatively, as ‘good’ in and of themselves. After all, there’s that classic piece of wisdom, ‘two heads are better than one’, which from the outset is rather difficult to argue against. But in what way are two heads better than one? And is it really this easy? In the forgotten and neglected universe of ‘organisation studies’ (clearly the least sexy of disciplinary titles), there have been over two decades of discussions on questions quite similar to our ‘two heads’ quandary. What these scholars are hung­up on is how does one begin to organise how these two heads can interact, share knowledge and ultimately work as one head. Because, after all, the assumption is that two heads are working together and not ‘apart’ (bickering like unhappy pensioners). Can we re­conceive this phrase? Are two mouths better than one? Certainly not at communicating if they are both speaking at the same time. Synchronicity of speech or developing a way for two to speak simultaneously and not over each other might then make two mouths better than one. But why is it that with heads we are so willing to accept congruence and communication of thinking as natural? Humans are cultural beings; we view the world according to multiple overlapping narratives, which gives meaning and sense to our lives. We construct an understanding of the world based on these narratives and the singular causation therein. Knowledge, as that which motivates action and justifies belief, is rooted in an invariable amount of assumptions about the world and constructed in coordination with those who share the world around us. From young on, we build an epistemic platform, upon which we stand and from where we look out at the world. These platforms are being continuously renegotiated. When we communicate with someone we use shared language as a way of mediating what we know into a comprehensible form. Much of what is communicated is misunderstood in the process of being translated from one epistemic platform to the next. This happens on an individual level and also between epistemic ​ cultures​ , as is evident between disciplines today, whereby we find severe discordances in understandings of the world and whereby we can observe that language itself has evolved in very different manners according to disciplinary logics. An easy example would be the word ‘development’ as understood between economics, humanities, and the sciences, each demonstrating a broad disparity of contextual and conceptual recognition.


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