Rumbling on performativity_Frits Simon

failure of change-projects is that not enough attention is paid to the stubbornness of
self-evident routines in human behaviour.
I am not stating that the self-evident routines are to be interpreted as annoying
obstacles. Self-evident routines contain precious benefits of experience and develop
through interactions in ongoing practice. Therefore successful enduring change is
dependent on the way self-evident routines are addressed during periods of change.
This addressing is open to many alternatives. I was convinced that change is something
which will take place in a self-organizing way if the involved human beings are
taken seriously and are not subordinated to clear-cut managerial prescriptions. I even
was convinced that change would have better results if you give some sort of self-organization
a chance. However, how to understand and to take advantage of self-organization
is an ambiguous question because of the inherent paradoxical nature of this
phenomenon.
In a nutshell this was my paradigm in 2010 in which my actions were incorporated. It is
an amalgam of philosophical and scientific notions, amongst others about language
and communication. My paradigm contains ideas about micro-power, self-organization,
co-creativity, social constructionism and conversational approaches. Generally I
can be characterized by an anti-authoritarian orientation, a certain philosophical
detachment of everyday life, a problem-solving attitude, alongside an ongoing curiosity
for new trends and developments. I feel connected to recent concepts like the
wisdom of the crowd, prosumerism or crowd sourcing. These concepts proclaim that
joint efforts of experts, consumers or citizens give more effective results than the
traditional way of design, production and consumption (Leadbeater, 2009; Li and
Bernoff, 2008; Tapscott, 2008).
I call these notions my default assumptions, a concept I learned from the cognitive
sciences in 1987 (Minsky, 1986). I qualify them as default because I am aware that what
I think is true as long as it is not refuted. However, refuting is not done easily, because
my defaults are dear to me. They are strong and mostly unconscious habitual interpretation
of what is happening. My defaults are my paradoxical originality: they are who I
am as a unique person and at the same time they are the ongoing result of interactions
within the environments I grew up. They are my identity. Now getting acquainted
with the work of the social psychologist Mead I compare my defaults with the ‘me’s’ as
defined by him. Within a naturalistic tradition Mead (1934) defined a ‘me’ as an organized
attitude, of which some are activated within interaction. Mead defined the ‘I’ as
the present and identifiable mixture of attitudes, what a person presents during
interaction. So, I interpret who I am and what I do not as a deliberate choice but as an
activation and ongoing development of some of my defaults in interaction with my
fellow human beings. Simultaneously I am an identifiable, a shifting and an unsettled
human presence amidst other shifting and unsettled human beings.
3. My taken for granted assumptions as a researcher | 67