RE: Ch 5

From: Bill Barowy (wbarowy@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Jun 18 2001 - 05:21:17 PDT


--- Phillip Capper <phillip.capper@webresearch.co.nz> wrote:
> That is not our experience. We find that the use of the DWR methodology can
> (but does not always) make visible the underlying structures of which Bill
> speaks. What it cannot do - at least at the level of the individual
> institution - is create a strategy for changing it.

Good point -- I think Senge refers to this issue as one of divergent vs.
convergent problems -- that divergent problems evoke many solutions. While the
economic modeling of Senge's approach is strong, it does not include an
historical analysis, and so may significantly constrain solutions to those that
will assume the deep extant economic structures, rather than providing a
perspective of how those structures and relations evolved to their present
form. Senge does provide mediational forms for seeing patterns in the economic
dynamics -- the system archetypes can be used to model and examine the
interrelationships leading to characteristic patterns, but I anticipate that
B&G might claim the thinking remains within the deep economic structures of a
capitalist system.

Phillip's point of DWR not providing ready made means for developing solutions
to institutional dilemma's can be taken further. It is not clear that either
DWR/LBE or 5th Discipline (Senge) approaches help participants of institutional
change reveal and challenge the deep economic structures that Bowles and Gintis
strongly claim is necessary to reach egalitarian reform in schools. B&M are
considering change of a scale that is greater than mesogenetic, however, with
corresponding increase in complexity.

As a side note, the categories in LBE of consumption, production, distribution
and exchange provide the form to relate the system dynamic modeling that Senge
promotes (and complex systems modeling as well), so those developments can be
readily appropriated into one's theoretical toolbox.

What chapter 2 of LBE provides beyond the 5th discipline, are ways of looking
at the relations between individual and institutional development -- for
example the points that "Production is always also consumption of the
individual's abilities and of the means of production. Correspondingly,
consumption is also production of the human beings themselves." can lead us to
see how in our case study of development in Raymond, it was necessary for Cindy
to take a new job at ESD113 to continue her professional growth. She had
reached a point where the school setting limited the actions required for her
continued development, and so she sought to sell her labor to ESD 113 instead,
which in turn provided demands of the sort she wished to pursue, and which in
addressing those demands, she shaped her own abilities. This is one of the
qualitative transformations that the 5th discipline just does not provide a
handle for.

bb

=====
"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful."
[Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]

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