Rumbling on performativity_Frits Simon

that the little wing-beat of a butterfly in Brazil can cause a hurricane in Texas vulgarized
these new sciences for a broad audience (Hijmans, 1990).
In due course insights from the complexity sciences were transferred to the domain of
OMS. One might speak of a complexity turn (Johannessen, 2009). A widely known
transfer of insights from the complexity sciences is a complex adaptive system-approach.
A complex responsive process-approach is another perspective which evolved.
Within both perspectives an organization is approached an emerging pattern; the
biggest difference is the assumed manageability of an organization. A complex responsive
process-approach departs from radically unpredictability, due to the unpredictable
behaviour of human beings. A complex adaptive system-approach departs
from an interventionist perspective on organizations, assuming that human behaviour
is somehow to be influenced to generate efficient social patterns. A Dutch representative
of a complex adaptive approach is Zuijderhoudt (2007), according to Van Ginneken
(1999) a pioneer to introduce a complexity approach in the domain of OMS in the
Netherlands. Recently Groot (2010b) introduced a complex responsive process-approach
in the Netherlands.
Responsiveness and process
Although from an era in which complexity was not yet a subject within social sciences,
within a complex responsive process-approach the notion of unpredictability of human
behaviour is taken up from the work of Mead and Elias. In the work of the social
psychologist Mead responsiveness is central. In what Mead (1934) calls the conversation
of gestures, he clarifies that social processes are constituted by an ongoing exchange
of gestures and responses, in which it is even impossible to make a difference
between a gesture and a response. What I do (gesture in a response to someone or
something) is interpreted by someone else to what he or she reacts (response and
gesture). In this interpretative process of gestures and responses a social reality emerges,
building up to general social patterns. However, these general patterns - called
social objects by Mead (1938) – are not some things which exists on themselves. The
continuity of social patterns is realized in a continuous functionalizing and particularizing
in the many social interactions in daily life. When the UAS is approached as a
social pattern regarding Higher Education, this pattern exists in the many ways it is
sustained and it evolves in daily organizational life. It exists in what the persons involved
actually are making of it.
However, one must realize that what the persons involved are making of it, is not a
matter of rational and deliberate design. Although persons involved may qualify their
behaviour as rational and deliberate, one could say that the social emerges ‘behind the
back’ of the involved. For this perspective on social processes the work of Elias is
founding within a complex responsive process-approach. In his history of western
civilization Elias (1969) exemplifies that what we call civilized behaviour nowadays, is
not the consequence of a deliberate choice regarding our behaviour. In the West
according to Elias our present day civilized behaviour is moulded in the historical
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