Organizing Reflection

Michael Reynolds, Russ Vince, Russ Vince

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351913249
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Comportamiento organizacional

Through a series of leading-edge contributions from pre-eminent international scholars in the field, Organizing Reflection makes a stimulating and distinctive contribution to the study of reflection. By doing so, it offers the first shift from the individual reflective practitioner to processes of collective and public reflection. The unique and varied contributions focus on the development of notions such as public reflection, collective reflection, and critical reflection. In doing so, they provide critical insights into new thinking and approaches to the role of reflection in organizations, as well as the conceptualization and delivery of learning and change. Organizing Reflection will be of interest to scholars working in business, professional, management and organization studies, to human development academics, and to scholarly practitioners in organizations.

Chapter 1

Organizing Reflection: An Introduction

Michael Reynolds and Russ Vince

The idea for this volume emerged from our shared critique of the current theory and practice of reflection. Our motivation is to show the potential for developments within this field, to bring together some of the best thinking and writing, and particularly to extend perceptions of reflection beyond the enduring notion of the ‘reflective practitioner’. The starting point for our critique is that reflection has been seen primarily as a key element of individual learning and the application of learning, rather than as an organizing process. In practice, the responsibility for reflection is often located with the individual, either to do it for her/himself (when there’s time), or to be responsible for the review of other individuals’ performance, mostly in relation to people within subordinate roles. In other words, reflection has been primarily concerned with individual rather than organization development. Our aim is to bring together a collection of chapters that can help to underpin a shift in thinking about reflection and what reflection involves in practice. Our view is that less emphasis needs to be placed on reflection as the task of individuals, and more emphasis needs to be put on creating collective and organizationally focused processes for reflection. Another way of saying this is: less about the individual reflective practitioner and more about organizing reflection.

The chapters we have chosen to include within this book provide stimulating reading on how the organization of reflection might be accomplished and the various issues that are likely to need to be addressed. Collectively, the chapters further both the theory and practice of reflection. They discuss notions such as communities of practice, collective reflection, critical reflection, practical reflexivity and reflexive dynamics; they focus on power relations, experience, emotions and dialogue; they contribute to the development of the theory and application of reflection in management education, adult education, organization theory and pedagogy. Through their contributions, the authors share with the editors a desire to open out the concept of reflection to discussion and debate, to represent the complexities and subtleties of reflection as an organizing process, and to highlight the ground from which further research and insight can be developed.

On Reflection

The idea of organizing reflection owes a great deal to authors who have made reflection a central concept of management and organizational learning. Donald Schön’s work in developing the idea of the ‘reflective practitioner’ has explicated the tacit element involved in learning and has influenced thinking and practice in both Adult Education and Management Learning. At least as much must be said of David Kolb whose scholarly work drawing on Dewey, Piaget and Lewin has arguably contributed more than anyone to furthering research and development of theory and practice in management and organizational learning. The tradition on which authors such as Kolb and Schön have drawn is a conception of learning that emphasises the crucial role of experience – particularly appropriate as the foundation for understanding the processes and approaches of professional development. These authors have acknowledged in particular the work of the educator and educational philosopher John Dewey, and it is instructive to discuss his ideas and those of others who have contributed to the understanding on which it is the intention of this project to build.

In this section of the introduction we provide a brief review in order to set the broader context for the discussions of reflection that are included within this volume. After a summary of foundational ideas in experiential or reflective learning we will mention two further developments which are related to this volume and that we believe are important for future thinking about reflection as an organizational rather than individual process. These are: first, the relatively recent concern with a critical interpretation of reflection and second, and related to the first, an emphasis on reflection as a collective approach, which takes account of social, organizational and cultural processes.

Reflection: Learning from Experience

A close reading of theories that emphasise reflection reveals why it has come to occupy a position of such status in accounts of professional and managerial learning. Schön (1983) describes his concept of ‘reflection-in-action’ as consisting in:

on-the-spot surfacing, criticizing, restructuring, and testing of intuitive understanding of experienced phenomena; often it takes the form of a reflective conversation with the situation (pp. 241–242 emphasis added).

Similarly, in Kolb’s (1984) theory of experiential learning, learning is depicted as a process in which ‘ideas are not fixed and immutable elements of thought but are formed and reformed through experience’ (p. 26). Kolb’s work has amply illustrated the importance of John Dewey’s ideas and their contribution to theoretical and practical developments in understanding learning. Dewey (1916) wrote of learning as the ‘intentional pursuit of a course of action’ (p. 138), of the relation between trying things out and reflecting on the consequences. Anticipating contemporary thinking, Dewey described the process of reflecting on experience:

Thinking includes all of these steps, – the sense of a problem, the observation of conditions, the formation and rational elaboration of a suggested conclusion, and the active experimental testing (p. 151).

Largely based on Dewey’s ideas, and particularly influential in the field of adult education, Eduard Lindeman (1947) also stressed the significance of experience in learning. He wrote of engagement in education as being a process of ‘utilising knowledge, feelings and experience in problem-solving’ and of making ‘increasing use of experience’ (p. 53). Learning was considered to be primarily a process of problem solving in which ideas and theories are applied or developed at the point where they become necessary in making sense of particular situations, problems or events. For Lindeman, experiential learning complemented other, more familiar educational methods because it prepared people for action.

True learning, that is learning which is associated with the problems of life, is a twofold process which consists of knowledge on the one hand, and the use of knowledge on the other (Lindeman, 1935, p. 44).

These ideas in turn, have provided the foundation for later developments, notably those of Malcolm Knowles (1984), whose notion of ‘self-directed learning’ was one in which ‘learners discover for themselves the gaps between where they are now and where they want to be’ (p. 56).

Given its emphasis on reflection, action and problem solving, it is no surprise that experiential learning theory, including the concept of reflection, has been so influential in the context of the workplace. It provides the platform from which have been developed theory and practice: self-directed learning; action learning; problem-based learning; and – most recently of all – organizational learning. It is within this broad tradition that Organizing Reflection and its contributory chapters belong. The ideas we have briefly outlined in this section lend themselves particularly to understanding learning as a process which can be set in the context of the workplace as well in the classroom or training centre. ‘Action Learning’ is a foremost example among experiential approaches (see for example, Pedler, 1983 or Raelin, 1999) and experience is similarly made central to the concepts of ‘informal’ or ‘incidental learning’ (Marsick and Watkins, 1990). Dewey and Lindeman’s emphasis on educating for democracy have not travelled as well into the development of management and organizational learning however.

Critical Interpretations of Reflection

Perhaps because of its obvious relevance to professional and organizational learning, reflection has become unquestioned as a concept, achieving the status of shibboleth. Ask managers about reflection and they are likely to say both that reflection is something that needs to be done, and that the failure to reflect undermines the ability of an organization to survive (Hammer and Stanton, 1997). However, the implementation of processes for reflection, especially those that move beyond individuals’ responsibility to ensure that reflection happens, remains a poorly developed aspect of organizational experience and action. Until recently, critique and development of experiential learning theory have been mostly within the adult education literature (see for example Jarvis, 1985; Bullough, 1989), although there have been examples of work within management studies designed to move on from primarily individually focussed models of reflection and learning from experience (see for example Holman et al. 1997; Reynolds, 1998; Vince, 1998). Some of these developments have been brought together and have themselves been critiqued in a recent paper by Kayes (2002), one of the contributors to this volume.

Reinterpretation of reflection from a more critical perspective has carried forward ideas worked out by scholars such as Kolb and Schön but puts particular focus on the range of ideas on which people draw as part of the reflective process. The point of this reinterpretation is to emphasise that reflection should be more than a technical or organizational analysis of problems and more than a selection of alternative choices – however disciplined and thoughtful – as necessary preparation for action. In addition, reflection should take account of social, political and cultural considerations. The impetus for such reframing of reflection derives in part from acknowledging that within the workplace vested and often contradictory interests shape the way policies and decisions are understood and enacted. At the core of recent and more critical concerns in organizational theory has been the belief that insufficient account was being taken amongst management academics of the influential and ‘interested’ role of managers and other professionals.

As a social group this class have immense influence on the direction and quality of peoples’ lives, on communities and on the environment. Their efforts are not neutral or disinterested – the contexts in which they operate are not without conflict and contradiction. A ‘narrow, instrumental form of rationality’ (Alvesson and Willmott, 1992, p. 1) is an inadequate basis for analysis of the process and problems we work with in such a context. The role of reflection should be to raise questions about purpose and intent and about the assumptions and taken-for-granteds on which organizational policies and practices are based. Hence the need to develop the practice of reflection from a critical perspective, not simply as problem solving, but with a commitment to asking questions which may be neither comfortable or welcome. From a critical position it is therefore imperative that reflection should draw on ideas and analytical perspectives which are capable of deconstructing these interests and political processes.

In similar ways, the idea of ‘critical’ reflection has been developed in adult education literature (see for example Mezirow, 1991). And even earlier than this, Dewey (1916) had expressed the concern that learning should not be primarily focussed on shaping people for ‘industrial callings’ (p. 119). As Brookfield (1987) in his collection of papers by Lindeman observes, this author had anticipated the idea of critical reflection by at least forty years in proposing that reflection was not just about making sense of experience, but should involve questioning the preconceptions implicit in the way it was conducted. Later, and as a management learning theorist, Schön (1983) wrote of the need to find:

an epistemology of practice implicit in the artistic, intuitive processes which some practitioners do bring to situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value conflict (p.49).

Schön anticipated contemporary critical management thinking when he stressed that the technical rationality implicit in organizational problem solving paid insufficient attention to ends and means (1983, p. 39). An example of the critical alternative can be seen in Willmott’s proposals (1994 and 1997) for developing action learning on more critical lines than has usually been the case in management development. Willmott stresses the value of action learning as an approach because it is grounded in organizational events, but argues for an alternative to the narrower, usually psychological perspectives applied to the analysis of them (see also Pedler, 1997). In the same way, Coopey (1995) has made the case for foregrounding questions of power and politics within Organizational Learning.

A Collective Approach to Understanding Reflection

The overall theme of this volume is to develop ways of thinking about learning and reflection as a collective rather than a primarily individual process. As we argued in the previous section, taking account of social and political processes has not been given as much attention as it deserves in studies of learning and reflection. Not only has reflection been thought of as primarily an individual activity,¹ but also experience – the focus for reflection – has been cast in a way which takes insufficient account of its social, organizational and cultural nature. In experiential learning, the social context is seen as an influence on the content of experience, rather than experience itself consisting of culturally constructed values and beliefs (Hudson, 1983). As Brah and Hoy have observed,

Can experience ever be constituted outside of social relations? We do not think so. Each of us, though unique as individuals, are positioned within society alongside hierarchies of power constructed around such factors as class, caste, racism, gender, age and sexuality (1989, p. 71).

There are schools of thought which have played an important part in theorising organizational processes and which do emphasise a social perspective, notably in the contributions of psychoanalytic theory (for an overview see Gabriel and Carr, 2002), systems psychodynamic theory (Neumann, 1999; Vince, 2001; Gould et al. 2001) and group relations (French and Vince, 1999; Gutmann, 2003). All of these approaches share the assumption that ‘organizations, as parts of society, become sites where broader social and cultural dynamics are enacted’ (Gabriel and Carr, 2002, p. 355) and that such dynamics have a profound impact on the complex emotional, social and political relations and actions that are involved in organizing. More specifically in relation to management and organizational learning, writing on social and political theories of learning and organizing (Gherardi et al. 1998; Gherardi and Nicolini, 2001) has provided further insights into the ways in which learning stems from the participation of individuals in social activities. This sociological perspective has been particularly important for notions of reflection and reflexivity, especially in pointing towards the ways in which reflection both interrupts the flow of experience to produce knowledge and continues to reflect existing ways of seeing, giving rise to the institutionalization of knowledge (Gherardi and Nicolini, 2001, p. 35).

These thoughts provide further explanation of why we are using the phrase organizing reflection, which is to represent our view that reflection is best understood as a socially situated, relational, political and collective process, and that there are both theoretical and practical advantages to this perspective – especially in relation to management and organizational learning. Transforming current thinking about reflection from its focus on the individual practitioner was the theme we wanted to develop, and it was this that gave rise to the invitation to which the contributing authors in this book responded. Our aim was to bring together different ways in which academic colleagues in different contexts are reinterpreting and developing ideas about reflection which assume that it is a social, relational and collective process as well as an individual one.

In summary, and before outlining the chapters which follow, our intention in this introduction has been to acknowledge the considerable contribution of earlier writers in education and in management theory who have established the concept of reflection as central to the theory and practice of management and organizational learning. The research, debates and generation of theory that has stemmed from this work have provided the tradition within which the papers in this volume are situated. We have also briefly outlined two related themes in organizational learning theory that we see as central to this project. These themes are the recent preoccupation with critical perspectives as a necessary development in management theory and practice, and a concern to conceptualize the organization of reflection as a critical and a collective process. Both these themes are further explored within this volume and both, as a number of our contributors illustrate, are of theoretical and practical significance. In particular, the position broadly taken by this collection of essays reinforces the importance attached to experience and of situating reflection as integral to working and learning in a professional and organizational context. There are, as we shall see in the chapters that follow, implications here for theory and professional practice and many questions are raised for educators and for managers engaged in attempts to learn and to organize.

The Contributions in this Volume

Ann Welsh and Gordon Dehler focus on the process through which critical reflections become organi...