Dancing at the Edge: Competence, Culture and Organization in the 21st Century

Maureen O'Hara & Graham Leicester Dancing at the Edge: Competence, Culture and Organization in the 21st Century Axminster, United Kingdom: Triarchy Press, 2012Reviewed by Howard A. DoughtyThere are, it is commonly said, two kinds of people in this world: those who think that there are two kinds of people, and those who don't.An inveterate foe of simplicity and an advocate of almost endless ambiguity, I fall heavily into the second camp. Nonetheless, I also acknowledge that small numbers have a certain expediency. is especially good for purposes for purposes of bringing things together into a comfortable whole (Lease, 1919). It famously forms the spiritual Christian trinity (Father, Son and Holy Spirit). It outlines the Weberian analysis of authority (traditional, charismatic and rational-legal), the Freudian approach to the psyche (id, ego and superego) and Kohlberg's ascending ladder of morality (pre-conventional, conventional and post-conventional). It can be found in various manifestations of the occult, e.g., MacBeth's witches), but it shows up in Habermas' roster of human knowledge (historical-hermeneutic, empirical-analytical and emancipatory) and Trow's postsecondary educational landscape (elite, mass, universal). Three makes matters all very tidy and excludes as much haziness and as many alternative explanations and descriptions as possible, while also providing at least the illusion manageability, if not total truth and wisdom. Personally, although I prefer the Scottish options in criminal trials (guilty, innocent and unproven) to the O. J. Simpson coin flip of guilty versus not guilty), I pretty much restrict my affection for to the theory of intransitive preference-nicely demonstrated in the theory of intransitive preference and expressed in the children's game of paper, scissors, stone.More than becomes complicated. Five-stage models are not too unwieldy as Kubler-Ross's stages of grief and Maslow's well-known hierarchy of human needs (in which, O'Hara and Leicester assure us, even Maslow didn't believe) demonstrate; they do, however, require some focus and concentrated attention to get them right and in the right order. So, except for various twelve-step self-help programs, it seems best to keep things simple. (Buddhism, with its four noble truths, five paths, and so on may constitute a splendid exception to all this ...)When such elegance as three provides is deemed unnecessary, of course, we often try to reduce complexities to bipolar, mutually exclusive pairs: the Taoist yin and yang, Kierkegaard's either/or, the ancient Manichean heresy of the war between the immovable object of good and the irresistible force of evil, the modern split between the arts and the sciences or the more enduring and even more toxic Cartesian dichotomy between mind and body. Mostly, however, setting up polar opposites creates more problems than it solves; in the case Dancing on the Edge, however, I think we can get away with it. In any case, I shall try.When looking at social problems or challenges, in today's almost compulsory corporate happy talk, there are two ways to approach a topic: from the inside (social-psychological) and from the outside (political-economic). Since addressing questions of interest to inherently self-interested corporate entities-both public and private-can lead to the possibility of dangerous self-questioning and examining too seriously critics of the bureaucracy involved, it is always best to avoid the big questions and concentrate on the specific. When, however, this doesn't work because the size, complexity and urgency of the issues involved are too pressing, the next best thing is to bring up the question of inevitable, unavoidable and certainly irreversible change. No one need get too precise about the origins, dynamics, directions and ultimate consequences of ubiquitous and pervasive change; it is usually enough to attribute it to some recognizable abstraction such as technology or culture in order to focus attention on adaptability and thus turn the discussion into a matter of individual or definable group response. …

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