Rumbling on performativity_Frits Simon

This questioning of my job is connected to the question of what is happening during
and due to the deliberations in the coordination team. Metaphorically it seems that
together the members of the coordination team are travelling in a train, planning a
trip of which meanwhile we all know it will not reach its planned destiny. None of us
leaves at a minor station nor does anyone of us use an emergency brake. To me this is
a very intriguing situation because the process of producing a meaningful advice
evolves in the process of cooperation. Why and how do we establish and maintain our
own, and combined definition of the situation? What makes us going on? Exploring
the dynamics of our cooperation within the context of the programme of identitymanagement
could clarify why no one is willing or able to use a brake.
Of course my position as an adviser and the way we cooperate does not occur in
isolation. Things are embedded in former choices regarding the policy of identity-management
in the UAS. Things are embedded in idiosyncrasies of the interactions of the
different participants in the discussions. And things are connected with governmental
policy regarding Higher Education. In a still broader sense these processes are embedded
in societal discussions around Higher Education and the social-economic welfare
of the Netherlands. So I wonder what was really manageable during the four months if
the actual interactions of the members of the coordination team are embedded in earlier
and other processes?
4.4 A discursive and defining battle in the background
The mentioned themes implicate a host of subjects to reflect upon. In a general sense
subjects like identity-management, advisory positions and institutional policy are
themes emerging in processes of interaction among people and in which attempts are
made to define a common reality. Defining reality is an ongoing process in which we
are all involved (Berger and Luckmann, 1966). For me to uncover the subtleties of these
processes is intriguing. After all definition and practice are connected in what is stated
in the maxim of the self-fulfilling prophecy: “The social process, as involving communication,
is in a sense responsible for the appearance of new objects in the field of experience
of the individual organisms implicated in that process. Organic processes or
responses in a sense constitute the objects to which they are responses; that is to say,
any given biological organism is in a way responsible for the existence (in the sense of
the meanings they have for it) of the objects to which it physiologically and chemically
responds.” (Mead, 1934: 77). I see defining reality as politics on a micro level, with
potentially huge organization-wide effects if definitions become dominant or become
social objects as Mead would say. If in organizational conversations things are taken
for real, organizational members tend to act according to its definitions.
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