Governance of Knowledge (GovK) and of Organizational Learning (GovL)

Since the mid-twentieth century, knowledge and organizational learning have taken a leading role in public and private organizations, since their value has been acknowledged for building and maintaining competitive advantage and for effective implementation of innovation. Knowledge management monitors, facilitates and manages the processes of creation and internalization of knowledge at the levels of individuals, as well as the sharing, storage, dissemination and institutionalization at the level of groups and organizations, in order to help overcome knowledge-dependent organizational challenges and promote transformation. According to Freire et al. (2021):

Transdisciplinarity is a relatively recent term: it emerged in 1970 in France during an event held to discuss the role of multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in university settings, entitled ‘L’interdisciplinarité: problémes d'enseignement et de recherche dans les universités’. During the event, three participants presented and discussed the new concept of transdisciplinarity. Jean Piaget and Andre Lichnerowicz focused on disciplinary relations, while Erich Jantsch addressed the concept from the perspective of social purpose.

The event proceedings (Apostel et al. 1970), with more than 300 pages, were the most important source of reference in the field for a long time, until two other theoretical frameworks were published (Klein 2013): Mode 2 Knowledge Production of Michael Gibbons, Limoges, Nowotny, Schwartzman, Scott and Trow (1994) and Basarab Nicolescu's Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity (1993).

All perspectives, moreover, sought to understand the multidimensionality of reality and the inclusion of social values that dismantle the division into academics (i.e., the experts) and non-academics, fostering new partnerships between university and society. The valorization and increment of these forms of interaction in the pursuit of the unity of knowledge signalled a new form of integration between society and academia, especially for the conduct of scientific research.

The pursuit of the unity of knowledge, in fact, is the epistemological problem highlighted by transdisciplinarity. It dates back to the time of ancient philosophers and has never ceased to be a relevant topic of study. In Morin's words, it flows through time:

In this context, transdisciplinarity is involved in a series of changes that have become necessary to transcend and integrate disciplinary paradigms.

By the later eighteenth century, the domestic Picturesque Tour across the British Isles and Irish Isles had emerged as an alternative to the Grand Tour, with remote parts of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales offering exciting destinations for tourists. These regions would become highly attractive during the Napoleonic Wars, when much of Europe was inaccessible for British travellers. Exploration of the wild peripheries of Britain and Ireland was fuelled by the growth of antiquarian interest in Gothic architecture and ruins, and a fascination with the sublimity of nature. Continental Europe offered awe-inspiring landscapes, medieval cathedrals and classical ruins, but William Gilpin's writing on the picturesque suggested that rural Britain could match the wonders of Grand Tourism and the Alps. Domestic picturesque tourism inspired by Gilpin and others provided the opportunity for aesthetic discovery and encounters with cultural difference at manageable risk for the traveller: these ‘localised itineraries’ appealed to a desire ‘to discover closer at hand what is unfamiliar, yet at the same time to harmonize, homogenize, and extend the purview of home’ (Colbert, 2011: 1). Malcolm Andrews has noted ‘something of the big-game hunter in these tourists, boasting of their encounters with savage landscapes, “capturing” wild scenes, and “fixing” them as pictorial trophies in order to sell them or hang them up in frames on their drawing-room walls’ (Andrews, 1990: 67). As Benjamin Colbert comments, this privileged perspective could ‘elide all questions of identity politics into an aesthetics of landscape’ (Colbert, 2011: 2).

The portrait of the ‘unfortunate Chief of Glennaquoich’ and Edward Waverley at the end of Walter Scott's Waverley (1814), presenting the Scottish Highlands as a place of raw beauty and glamorous adventure, might appear to epitomise such a tendency:

It was a large and animated painting, representing Fergus Mac-Ivor and Waverley in their Highland dress, the scene a wild, rocky, and mountainous pass, down which the clan were descending in the back-ground.

It was taken from a spirited sketch, drawn while they were in Edinburgh by a young man of genius, and had been painted on a full length scale by an eminent London artist … Beside this painting were hung the arms which Waverley had borne in the unfortunate civil war. The whole piece was generally admired (Scott, 2011: 361).

The verbal repetitions that flicker through Joyce's free indirect style in Dubliners arouse the interpretive unease that Margot Norris describes as an effect of Joyce's style, and point to the intersubjective and ideological make-up of the narration. Norris's vacillation between personifying the narration of the different stories or “merely endow[ing] it with a function” indicates some of the difficult questions raised by Joyce's narration (which are also questions endemic to free indirect style): where do these particular words come from? Do they (and how do they) give rise to the impression of a unique, cohering mind, of a character? While these questions might prompt us to assign words to either a character or a separate function of narration, as is the standard critical response to the braid of free indirect style, this kind of textual unravelling entirely misses the point: Joyce's intricate free indirect style entangles narration and character, such that they produce, respond to, and incorporate one another. Joyce's free indirect style both acts in accordance with a character's needs and desires and destabilizes their self-conception, but even this threat cannot be severed from the character. The free indirect style of Dubliners reveals, and revels in, the textuality of thoughts, such that the characters are produced by a machinery of contagion and repetition that violates any supposed autonomy or self-containment. The culmination of Joyce's repetitions in the final paragraph of “The Dead” highlights what his technique always generates: the simultaneous dissolution and unification of the subject. Like Norris, I consider the narration of Dubliners to be either in “collusion or conflict with one or another figure in the story,” but, for me, that collusion or conflict plays out within the subject itself: if the narration bolsters the character, that bolstering is part of their own defensive strategies; if it undermines the character, that undermining cannot be separated from their internalization of being observed.

Norris's approach to Dubliners examines its “writerly” (following Barthes) composition, finding that since the 80s “we have more and more the sense that in the process of reading the text we are completing it, producing new versions of it, writing it anew.”

Setting the Glocal Scene

Recent decades have seen much talk about globalization. Yet, the term is often treated with little definitional care. What is more, there appears to have been a significant recent shift in the connotations intended by many of those who speak about “globalization.” Until not long ago commonly used as a neutral or in some cases celebratory shorthand for a growing degree of interdependency and interconnectedness spanning national and other boundaries, globalization has of late acquired more negative connotations to many. For instance, in his 2018 speech to the UN General Assembly then-US president Donald Trump set up a dichotomy between “patriots” and “globalists,” unambiguously siding with the former and finding deep fault with the latter. Almost instantly UK Brexiteer Nigel Farage tweeted his support for Donald Trump's speech and with it, one assumes, for the ideological binary it had contained (Euronews, September 25, 2018). In further illustration of how ideas today spread with a previously unknown speed and geographical reach, it did not take long for this juxtaposition of “patriots” to (negatively evaluated) “globalists” to also feature in statements made by Hungarian nationalists and Italian EU sceptics. Reflecting the circulation of figures of speech, the worldviews and political blueprints they contain and help articulate, this was merely one instance, albeit a particularly high-profile one, of some of the phenomena that define our era. These phenomena include our technological ability to share but also contest ideas instantaneously and across vast stretches of space. The issue at hand extends further to a paradox, namely the fact that some of the very illustrations of our global interconnectedness, ideational and technological, simultaneously contain a strong critique of such interconnectedness. The politicians just mentioned thus self-consciously also addressed transnational, if not even global audiences, and they did so by employing the very technological means that partly define our global era, only to advocate a return to something “smaller.” It is safe to conclude that to each of the politicians in question this “smaller” domain is that of the nationstate, which—in such statements—is shorn of all the historical guilt, or even of awareness or any memory of the many atrocities committed in the name of “nations” over the last 200 years.

Attentive readers will have noticed an intertextual allusion in the title of this book to Gabriel García Márquez's novel Love in the Time of Cholera. Where the latter's title centers on love, this book focuses on sociology; and the syntactical place of “time of cholera” is here taken by “times of glocalization.” The allusion is not accidental. Its intention is easiest to read with regard to the historical moments invoked by Gabriel García Márquez and this book, respectively. The former depicts an earlier historical moment, which—like present circumstances—was also characterized by far-reaching social shifts, experienced as deeply unsettling by some of the novel's protagonists; by environmental degradation, particularly the problem of waste and the depletion of natural resources; and, as the novel's title makes clear, an epidemic constitutes the backdrop to García Márquez’ story of entwined biographies and loves. Set in a very specific geographical location and in a different time (i.e., in Colombia from the late nineteenth to the early decades of the twentieth centuries), the historical circumstances that frame Love in the Time of Cholera offer intriguing points of similarity, difference and comparison for the here and now.

The allusion is more subtle when it comes to love and sociology. What, if anything, might love and sociology have in common? Without wanting to stretch the analogy too far, sociology—like love—demands commitment, care, and passion. Like love, sociology requires focused and personal investment, namely in the “social.” Whatever else love is, and I certainly will not attempt a comprehensive definition of love (if such a definition was even possible), it needs a purpose, an “object” or a “recipient,” it is directed at something or, more often, at someone. Like those in love, sociologists need to be invested in that which constitutes the focus of their attention. We need to be invested in the social; the social—which by definition implicates others and transcends any individual—has to intrigue and pull us in. It needs to matter to us. Without a fascination with what happens in the spaces and relations between people, between individuals and their wider worlds, it would seem impossible to do sociology. To be fascinated by something means that we pay sustained attention to “it.” Quick, purportedly easy answers will not do for those who are fascinated. Our era's obsession with asking individuals for quick soundbites of “what they think” is not sociology.

There is strong case that social scientists ought to keep diaries. The keeping of a field diary is an intrinsic part of the ethnographic craft. It is where and how ethnographers have long captured the steady stream of events and impressions they encounter and experience in the course of their fieldwork; further, field diaries enable reflexive accounts of how the field impacts the ethnographer as well as, vice versa, of how the ethnographer—as a participant observer with a background and history of their own—impacts back on the people and settings around them. Diaries can also serve other purposes. C. Wright Mills famously demanded that sociologists “keep a journal” as a core part of their intellectual craftsmanship: in the sociologist's journal, “personal experience and professional activities, studies under way and studies planned” join; it is there that we reflect upon both what we “are doing intellectually” and what we are “experiencing as a person”; we give ourselves space to relate our quotidian to our “work in progress” and to “capture ‘fringe thoughts’ […] [or] ideas which may be by-products of everyday life, snatches of conversation overheard […] or […] dreams. Once noted, these may lead to more systematic thinking” (Mills 2000: 196). More recently, in advice directed primarily at PhD students but relevant to all social scientists, Les Back (2002: 3.5) has made a similar case for our ongoing recording of life around us and our reflections on “it.” Often in the “the middle of a creative drought,” Back (2002: 3.5) argues, “you will be doing something else […] and an idea will come into focus. My advice is be ready for this unexpected visitor. Carry a notebook all the time, keep a record of these ideas. You need to devise a system to record how your thinking evolves over time.”

In this spirit, and in continuation of a long-tradition of sociological journalkeeping, let me set the scene for this chapter with an extract from my own diary recorded in March 2020:

The essays, review-essays and brief reviews collected here were written over the last half-century and published in various leading publications of their moment. In relationship to Yeats, they trace the dance of contemporary theory-inflected criticism—its practices and personalities (including my own) over that period. For different reasons of space (both of this book and of each short individual piece) a few of them have been dropped. But their significances are either already evident in other longer pieces or are captured throughout in revision.

The major theme of the book is exemplified by Yeats’ “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.” It is one of four poems he wrote on Major Robert Gregory, the only son of Lady Gregory, Irish poet, dramatist, folklorist and Yeats's long-time patron. The other three poems include “Shepherd and Goatherd;” “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” an elegy aspiring to overtop Milton's “Lycidas;” and “Reprisals,” which was first published posthumously, as much about the seemingly endless troubles of Ireland due to British rule and its aftermath, as about a bitter remembrance of Gregory's loss. As it is in the public domain, here is “Irish Airman” entire:

What Yeats identifies in his later work of poetry and visionary imaginings on the tragic human condition (especially in modernity) as “death-in-life” and “life-in-death,” is herein dramatized. The sublime moment of singular, individualizing feeling—“A lonely impulse of delight”—is the dance of death, as Holbein, Strindberg and Freud might envision as represented in their works. All conditions—national, local, global, gender, sexual, medical or what-have-you—pale before what Yeats, as in most of his middle and later poems, puts front and center on the stage of this remarkable poem.

In the final two chapters of this book, we turn our attention to what might be called a ‘Politics of self’. The self becomes a key site of dialectical interplay between the apersonal and what Barthes calls the ‘for-me’ of Nietzscheanism. The apersonal is not, however, to be taken as a complete erasure of the subject (Lordon 2013). Rather than ‘dropping the subject’ (Goh 2015, 1–23), Barthes proceeds to radically relativize its position, using various strategies of decentring, re-ordering and exempting, in particular in the notion of the Neutral. This search for a non-determinism of self, a suspension of stereotypes of the person's image, is naturally dependent on the rising fame in the final decade of his life:

Furthermore, as we saw with the ‘double grasp’ in Michelet's writing of history and then its development in the writing on Japan into the ‘no wish-to-grasp (aucun vouloir-saisir)’, saisir, a synonym in French for both ‘understand’ and ‘record’, is slowly but surely decon-structed: it is the search for ‘peace’, away from the ‘images’ that the Other and society in general attach to the self, that leads Barthes to opacity.

No Wish to ‘Understand’ nor ‘Grasp’

Reminiscing, towards the end of his life, about his friendship with Barthes, the Moroccan sociologist Abdelkébir Khatibi (1997, 25) describes an intriguing, regular exchange: ‘Barthes would say to me privately, in response to a reproach frequently made to him: “When someone tells me to be clear, what they really mean is be like me”’. Revealing not so much a tetchy theorist of semiotics as an astute commentator on interpersonal relations, the retort from Barthes summarizes two decades of critical — and often complex — research on language.

I do not like shopping. Department stores quite literally tire me. I find trips to supermarkets, though necessary, tedious. And I have caused many a family disagreement with my inability to enjoy the practice of walking city centers and comparing similar items of ultimately the same thing. Buying souvenirs has always been my least favorite part of traveling, and I have often been embarrassed by the fact that my gifts to others are more modest than theirs for me. Neither has online shopping made purchasing commodities any more enjoyable for me, thoughts about what happens behind the scene (or behind the screen) prevent this, though they have not prevented me from joining the global ranks of online shoppers. Email requests to provide customer feedback on items just bought annoy me more than I can say: why does an economic transaction no longer suffice, why does this now get symbolically protracted into pseudo-reflexive “satisfaction-ratings,” I regularly ask myself. (I know why, of course, to help sellers’ self-advertising via their social media channels and, perhaps, to help potential future customers make their decisions. The problem is that I do not find those answers convincing, so I just routinely ignore the emailed feedback requests.)

These confessions of an arguably “flawed consumer” (Bauman 2005), or perhaps merely an overthinking one, still leave room for occasional surprises. Months ago, in a furniture shop I had no interest in visiting myself, I spotted an object that caught my attention and imagination: an incredible work of craftsmanship, sturdy yet elegant, a nostalgic invocation of premodern rurality that would, even I was immediately convinced, enhance its future owner's quality of life and aesthetically enrich any twenty-first century living room. The object in question was a sofa, one we did not need and did not buy. Yet, I found myself doing two things I would usually be extremely reluctant and unlikely to do: I asked the shop owner about the sofa's history, its materials and production; and I even took a picture of this particular piece of furniture. What was so beguiling to me was more than the object's apparent beauty. More fascinating was a deep contrast between its appearance and its history: the sofa oozed authenticity and local belonging. Made of Harris tweed and leather, it materially and semiotically referenced the Outer Hebrides.