The Double Prison

Abstract

All of the practitioners and thinkers so far discussed in these pages – Benner, Dreyfus, Shotter, Wittgenstein, Boje, Bakhtin, Stacey, Mead and Elias – are for me pointing in a common direction. They are all encouraging us towards a world in which we can move beyond the distracting fantasies, idealizations and isolating tendencies of our past, to seize and take advantage of the depth and breadth of the connections between us, so that we can put our collective energies and knowledge to work for all of the various purposes that galvanize us (in Shotter’s words, so that we can “go on” together). In different ways, each of these writers helps us to recognize the great extent of our interdependency, past, present and future, in contrast to the prevailing (and greatly limiting) view of the human person as essentially self-determining and “responsible,” above all else, for their own individual lives.

This chapter reflects the realization that has been growing on me as I have been writing these words that the “stuckness” of management thinking cannot be explained by the events of the past thirty – or even the past one hundred – years. Something far more deep-rooted is involved, and will not easily be shrugged off. The purpose of this chapter is to try to understand what that “something” might be.