Steve,
Phil -
This is a very timely reference. I often find that "Survey"
papers, especially from outside of the field I am working in, but on a subject
overlapping said field can be very illuminating. They help to
provide a common-sense perspective on the problem... help to remove me from the
"trees" enough to see the "forest", as it were.
[ph] Yes, just my thought, that it seems to be a good survey by
a management science person. The paper has actually been cited 750 times
since it was published in 91. Clarifying the forest by
getting a good look at separate kinds of trees is also one of the things I
found interesting in writing my short encyclopedia entry covering all the
approaches to complex systems science and practice. I may have left
out just a few things… of course… but it did force me to look at the
subject from several different time tested orientations.
Your comment about the discontinuities are
often observably in the mode of explanation used
and not the physical process might be a corollary of Kierkegard's
Life must be understood backwards; but... it must be lived forward.
[ph] Well, that certainly applies to the discontinuity between foresight and hindsight, when in the one you’re looking for choices and in the other you’re only looking for excuses… you might say. :-) I’ll have to read Gersick more carefully to understand what she defines as the discontinuity displayed by “revolutionary change” but what I was thinking was more that once you see the finished form you suddenly see the whole effect of the distributed events coming together, that would have been all undeveloped and incomprehensible before. Most of them you also would never have seen before because they were distributed, and so not occurring where you were looking too, as well as because they were undeveloped as a whole and so would be naturally meaningless too. So even if the distributed process was continuous and developmental, you would necessarily miss most of it happening, and then be distracted by the false simplicity of hindsight to boot.
It is my (anecdotal) experience that many people
live through, or even participate in revolutions without realizing it until
(long?) after they are over. Often the turmoil that is attendant to the
"Revolution" is not a new experience for them, a series of tumultuous
periods lead up to it, and it is only the actual "breaking through"
that ultimately marks it as a "Revolution". To the extent
that that "breaking through" is an emergent phenomena, it is often
not visible at the scale of the individual observer, especially an observer who
is steeped in the old way of experiencing things.
[ph] What that
suggested to me was that a parcel of hot air might be locally experiencing a
gradual decrease in air pressure, and not much else, as it rose along with an
air mass as part of a large accumulating column of air breaking through an
inversion layer to become a great erupting cumulus cloud. Widely
scattered things become unobservably connected is the first step as far as any
part may be concerned. So for emerging “revolutionary change”
might it sometimes be that neither the parts nor outside observers could know
about it?
Phil
- Steve