Rumbling on performativity_Frits Simon

The research-programme of the Complexity Track is group-based. The learning group
of 4 students and 2 supervisors form a research-community in which everyone participates
in each other’s research. The programme or better: the participants in your
learning group invite you to reflect upon and to make sense of your own experiences,
to develop some understanding of group dynamics, power relations and role formation
in your organization and to apprehend the normality of uncertainty. As a student
you are immersed in an iterative cycle of reading, writing, thinking, and reflexivity and
rewriting. Reading, writing etcetera is about your own experiences in your own practice.
As a student you are challenged to understand and to accept what it is to act into
the unknown, into the unpredictability of daily organizational life. I estimate that the
learning group met twenty times in 4 years.
To write, to analyse and to reflect upon your narratives
Research in the context of the Complexity Track comes down to writing in a rather
elaborated way about what you are experiencing in your work and trying to understand
what is happening by reflecting on your experiences. Discussing these reflections
within the learning group and confronting it with existing literature adds to your
understanding. The research process is practised similar to your daily organizational
life in which you act, engage in conversations with other people, read and gather
information, get feedback, get angry or happy, negotiate, reflect, gossip, take decisions
and keep on being engaged. The research process mirrors the constructional, conversational
and rather evolving character of daily organizational life, which at its turn is
mirrored in the narratives you write.
Vital to note is that my research did not depart from a clear cut problem, neither from
a theoretical or conceptual frame nor does it aim at clear cut generalizable solutions.
The important subjects for my research appeared to be ‘performativity’, ‘time for
interruption’ (see chapter 7) and ‘bricoleur’ (see 5.5 and chapter 7) and emerged in due
course during the research process. I really worked into the unknown, leading to some
understanding of my practice. It is quite revealing to learn to understand that you are
influencing what is happening in your daily work, that you are part of what is happening,
that you experience that you do not and cannot control what is happening and
that due to your research you learn to understand what is happening. In learning to
understand what is happening in your work, you also learn to understand what it is to
do research from a complex responsive process perspective.
Narratives about your experiences are the logical and obvious empirical core for this
way of doing research. The daily social and mundane activities are the living experience,
are the ‘raw material’ in which your life comes true. When organizations are
interpreted as co-created conversational social realities, as a fluid pattern constituted
by rituals, passions, myths, fantasies, gossip, rumours, formal and informal speech,
habits and routines (Stacey, 2007) or as polyvocal and fragmented (Homan, 2005)
then narratives provide a basis for describing and understanding what is happening.
1. Introduction: research into performativity from a ‘personal’ perspective | 19