The Emergence of Complexity: Rethinking Education as a Social Science [1st ed. 2019] 978-3-030-31837-6, 978-3-030-31839-0

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xviii
Front Matter ....Pages 1-1
Locating Our Enquiry (Paul Hager, David Beckett)....Pages 3-12
Agency and Expertise (Paul Hager, David Beckett)....Pages 13-30
Issues Concerning Practice (Paul Hager, David Beckett)....Pages 31-53
Issues Concerning Related Topics Such as Skills, Competence, Abilities and Capabilities (Paul Hager, David Beckett)....Pages 55-81
Understandings of Learning (Paul Hager, David Beckett)....Pages 83-124
Front Matter ....Pages 125-125
The Concept of the Co-Present Group (Paul Hager, David Beckett)....Pages 127-153
Complex Systems and Complexity Thinking (Paul Hager, David Beckett)....Pages 155-183
Complexity Thinking and Co-Present Groups (Paul Hager, David Beckett)....Pages 185-218
Front Matter ....Pages 219-219
Fresh Approaches to Agency and Learning (Paul Hager, David Beckett)....Pages 221-247
Fresh Approaches to Practice, Skills, Competence and Expertise (Paul Hager, David Beckett)....Pages 249-280

Citation preview

Perspectives on Rethinking and Reforming Education

Paul Hager David Beckett

The Emergence of Complexity Rethinking Education as a Social Science

Perspectives on Rethinking and Reforming Education Series Editors Zhongying Shi, Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China Shengquan Yu, Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

This book series brings together the latest insights and work regarding the future of education from a group of highly regarded scholars around the world. It is the first collection of interpretations from around the globe and contributes to the interdisciplinary and international discussions on possible future demands on our education system. It serves as a global forum for scholarly and professional debate on all aspects of future education. The book series proposes a total rethinking of how the whole education process can be reformed and restructured, including the main drivers and principles for reinventing schools in the global knowledge economy, models for designing smart learning environments at the institutional level, a new pedagogy and related curriculums for the 21st century, the transition to digital and situated learning resources, open educational resources and MOOCs, new approaches to cognition and neuroscience as well as the disruption of education sectors. The series provides an opportunity to publish reviews, issues of general significance to theory development, empirical data-intensive research and critical analysis innovation in educational practice. It provides a global perspective on the strengths and weaknesses inherent in the implementation of certain approaches to the future of education. It not only publishes empirical studies but also stimulates theoretical discussions and addresses practical implications. The volumes in this series are interdisciplinary in orientation, and provide a multiplicity of theoretical and practical perspectives. Each volume is dedicated to a specific theme in education and innovation, examining areas that are at the cutting edge of the field and are groundbreaking in nature. Written in an accessible style, this book series will appeal to researchers, policy-makers, scholars, professionals and practitioners working in the field of education.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14177

Paul Hager David Beckett •

The Emergence of Complexity Rethinking Education as a Social Science

123

Paul Hager Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences University of Technology Sydney Sydney, NSW, Australia

David Beckett Melbourne Graduate School of Education The University of Melbourne Melbourne, VIC, Australia

ISSN 2366-1658 ISSN 2366-1666 (electronic) Perspectives on Rethinking and Reforming Education ISBN 978-3-030-31837-6 ISBN 978-3-030-31839-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31839-0 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword

Starting with the Relational How generous of two philosophers to invite a psychologist to write the foreword to their book, albeit one who walks in the cultural-historical footprints of Vygotsky. But this psychologist soon found herself amongst old philosopher friends, including Brandom, Derry, MacIntyre, Sellars, Spinoza, Taylor and Winch, as well as key players in practice theory and, of course, complexity theory, which Hager and Beckett prefer to call complexity thinking. Brave forays are also made into the minefield of capacities, abilities, skills and competences, and we are given some glimpses of sociocultural approaches to learning. In each area, the focus is relations and relationships, the work that they do and how they are recognised, interpreted and unfold. It is therefore an ambitiously wide-ranging volume, questioning the key tenets of respected approaches in these fields and offering what the authors term ‘novel accounts’, which draw on features of complexity thinking, but which are also substantially supported by the arguments of our philosopher friends. The accounts they present have themselves emerged from a long-standing relationship, where Hager and Beckett have, together and with others, endeavoured to release the notion of relations from the black-box where more often than not it is hidden away. They are, however, clear that by their very nature, the relations and relationships they are uncovering are not entities, but processes or relational activities from which ‘progress emerges’. This attention to progress is justified both by the educational focus of much of the discussion and the authors’ concern with telos. The wide range of topics is necessary if the arguments are to be coherent: shifts in one field need to be reflected in adjustments within adjoining areas. A coherent account of necessary shifts and adjustments is achieved, not simply through the help of largely common structures to chapters in each section or through distinct purposes for the three parts of the book, but also through the focus on ‘co-present groups’. These are key to the non-reductive accounts of agency, affect,

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commitments and judgements that are woven through the chapters. Let us therefore spend a little time with the idea, as the account of these groups is comprehensive. Co-present groups, it appears, will have had some face-to-face real-time contact, but may persist over time with contact in the virtual world or in ‘e-places’. Of most importance is the relationality, which can be traced back to within group interactions, and interactions with other groups. This approach gives ontological priority to the relationality of the whole group, so de-centring the notion of individual agency and indeed of interactions. The examples of the work of co-present groups that are offered are largely co-located and include: the deliberations and judgements of juries; the attention to learners given by small staff groups in schools; mother–infant dyads; and the performances of musical groups. At the same time, Hager and Beckett admit to the possibility that individual changes will also be involved. Indeed, the unfolding relationality in systems of informed judgements may give insights into individual ways of being. Reflecting the subtitle of the book, there is always an educational intent underpinning these arguments about starting from the relational to understand the individual. For example, in connection to workplace learning they suggest: This self-determination is about coming to be in the world. In its intentional decisionality, it generates and re-generates groups’ and their members’ selfhoods or identities. Understanding this connection, which runs from the epistemological to the ontological, or from practices to identities, marks the transformation a group or a member goes through in undertaking workplace learning of the deeply reflective and broadly experiential kind, and provides insights into how to encourage it.

So far so good, but what does this focus on agentic relationality in co-present groups give us and what might be missing? The book opens by pointing to a world in which robots have replaced humans, leading to the argument that our capacity for being relational keeps us ahead of robots (at least currently), especially when dealing with complex problems. As the descriptions of these groups unfold across the chapters we see how affect, commitment, motives and judgements shape and are shaped by the activities of the group. These groups are located in place or space, sensitive to situations, persist over time, they may be distributed with relationships sustained in joint activities and ongoing conversations. Yet this is not merely a matter of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts, relationality does useful work. It is here that complexity thinking comes into its own, with emergence as a way of explaining relationality in the work of co-present groups, pointing to how it shapes changes in practices over time. Two features are, however, missing for me in this focus on co-present groups. The first is a lack of attention to people coming together, sometimes only fleetingly, from different practice backgrounds, who do not form groups, but do manage to collaborate on complex problems. Engeström has tackled this topic though his use of ‘knotworking’ to describe the ‘rapidly pulsating, distributed, and partially improvised orchestration of collaborative performance between otherwise loosely connected actors and activity systems’ (Engeström 2008: 194). In my own work, I have tried to operationalise these kinds of relationships when discussing the

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challenges of ‘the relational turn’ that arise in sites of intersecting practices (e.g. Edwards 2010, 2017). These sites are where practitioners and clients need to quickly understand each others’ motives and use that mutual understanding of motives, what I term common knowledge, to mediate their collaborative interpretations and responses to the problems they are tackling (Edwards 2011, 2012). What anchors the collaboration are a shared long-term goal, which could be quite loosely articulated, and respect for the motives and commitments of their collaborators. The actors do not need to be bound by place or sustained by joint activities and conversations over time; yet they are likely to learn from these encounters and adjust future responses to similar problems in the light of what they have learnt. The fairly frequent reference to sensitivity to situation and contextual factors in the lives of co-present groups points to a second gap: the lack of an overtly dialectic lens. Working with cultural–historical approaches, my research grapples with capturing the dynamic relationship of people and the practices they inhabit. Context is not simply something to be sensitive to or be taken into account; instead, there is the potential at least for the interpenetration of person and practice. Leont’ev summarised the relationship somewhat opaquely as ‘society produces the activity of the individuals forming it’ (Leont’ev 1978: 7), whilst Hedegaard has helped us operationalise the dialectic by recognising the mediating function of institutional practices. She summarises her contribution thus: ‘what is missing in this [Leont’ev’s] theory is the conceptualisation of the historical institutionalised demands that mediate this process’ (Hedegaard and Fleer 2013: 200). Given the critique that Hager and Beckett offer practice theory, they are likely to enjoy Hedegaard’s ‘wholeness approach’ in her analyses of learning and development (Hedegaard 2008). Does what is missing matter? In cultural–historical analyses, practices are located in institutions, have histories, carry knowledge and values, have purposes and make demands on those who inhabit them—making fleeting collaborations across practice boundaries far more challenging than those that mark within group interactions. The focus on co-present groups allows the prioritising of relationality to avoid accommodating the kinds of just-in-time collaborations across practice boundaries that are features of the modern life I study. The co-present groups seem to sit somewhere between historically located practices of, for example, violinists or physics teachers and the responsive collaborations that mark knotworking or occur in the sites of intersecting practices. The groups clearly have, or are making, their own histories through their joint activities and conversations and can therefore shape and be shaped by actions in those activities in ways that are unlikely in the more fleeting encounters. In brief, Hager and Beckett have perhaps wisely limited their question, if emergence is to be the answer. But I find far more common ground than points of difference with the authors. Not least is our shared concern with opening up the black-box of relationality. In that task, Hager and Beckett, because of their focus on the work of groups, are able to prioritise the agency of the whole group in their analyses and thereby offer new understanding of professional practice, skills and expertise. There are some possible connections to be made here with how Engeström has long thought about expertise

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as the ‘…ongoing collaborative and discursive construction of tasks, solutions, visions, breakdowns and innovations’. (Engeström and Middleton 1996: 4). Engeström, however, keeps his gaze firmly on the collective, a focus that continues in Sannino’s recent work on the collective transformative agency evident in the kinds of change laboratory work undertaken by Engeström and his colleagues (Sannino et al. 2016). My own work has been an attempt to reveal what happens in the purposeful interactions that comprise the collective interpretations and responses, and which operate at the level between the collective and the individual, whilst recognising that these interactions constitute the collective (Edwards 2009). Hager and Beckett make a similar argument, focusing on judgements that are made in the workplace: ‘…individualistic agency is embedded in, and contributes to, the agency of co-present groups at and through work’. The key question is whether complexity thinking adds anything to this analysis. The authors make a strong case that it does because it can open the way to seeing relationality as the ontological basis of claims to be made about agency and learning. Their analyses begin with the relations and not individuals, and this is what makes their approach novel. In brief, they find they can move from the relational to the individual through attention to the commitments and judgements that mark complex thinking. Chapter 9, where they unpack collectivity and connections, is the high point of the book for this reader. The arguments wind their way through Spinoza’s wilful rationality; the work of Sellars, Brandom and Derry on ‘spaces of reason’, knowing and judgements; my work on the relational turn and Barad on what they term ‘holistic practical reasoning’. But they go further than any of us in their argument that: ‘whatever reductive moves are made, they “flow” from holistic accounts of relationality which have already affectively engaged the purposes of a co-present group’. This is the intellectual contribution that is built consistently and persuasively across the chapters. It has left me with some serious reflections as I too have drawn substantially on the concept of spaces of reason when considering how common knowledge is built, seeing that the asking for and giving of reasons can explain how motives are made clear and common knowledge constructed (Edwards, in press). But unlike Hager and Beckett, my gaze has been fixed at the interactional for these analyses, as it would seem has been the case for Derry when writing about reasoning and learning and Barad in her work on relationships. Finally, have Hager and Beckett succeeded in rethinking education as a social science, as the subtitle of book suggests? I am much in sympathy with this aim, having long thought that education is more than a field in which the foundation disciplines are applied. Rather, it should aim at being recognised as a social science in its own right, emerging from the interplay of the problems of educational policy and practice and ideas initially developed in the foundation disciplines. These newly refined educational ideas about, for example, learning, knowledge and knowing, and others starting purely from educational analyses, should constitute the new social science. I think the authors have sustained a commitment to this aim,

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accomplishing the creative interplay of the educational concerns of workplace learning, complexity thinking and philosophical reasoning. It has been a complex and no doubt daunting task, but both stimulating and worthwhile. Anne Edwards University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

References Edwards, A. (2009). Agency and activity theory: From the systemic to the relational. In A. Sannino, H. Daniels, & K. Guttierez (Eds.), Learning and expanding with activity theory (pp. 197–211). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edwards, A. (2010). Being an expert professional practitioner: The relational turn in expertise. Dordrecht: Springer. Edwards, A. (2011). Building common knowledge at boundaries between professional practices. International Journal of Educational Research, 50(1), 33–39. Edwards, A. (2012). The role of common knowledge in achieving collaboration across practices. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 1(1), 22–32. Edwards, A. (Ed.) (2017). Working relationally in and across practices: Cultural-historical approaches to collaboration. New York: Cambridge University Press. Edwards, A. (in press). The dialectic of person and practice: How cultural-historical accounts of agency can inform teacher education. In J. Clandinin & J. Husu (Eds.), International handbook on research on teacher education. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Engeström, Y. (2008). From teams to knots: Activity theoretical studies of collaboration and learning at work. New York: Cambridge University Press. Engeström, Y., & Middleton, D. (Eds.). (1996). Cognition and communication at work. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hedegaard, M. (2008). Developing a dialectic approach to researching children’s development. In M. Hedegaard & M. Fleer (Eds.), Studying children: A cultural–historical approach (pp. 30–45). Berkshire: Open University Press. Hedegaard, M., & Fleer, M. (2013). Play, leaning and children’s development: Everyday life in families and transition to school. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Leont’ev, A. N. (1978). The problem of activity in psychology. In Activity, consciousness and personality. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Retrieved April 29, 2004, from http:// Marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/leontev/works/1978. Sannino, A., Engeström, Y., & Lemos, M. (2016). Formative interventions for expansive learning and transformative agency. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 25(4), 599–633.

Preface

When the Wild Boars football team emerged from their frightening experiences over many days in the caves of Northern Thailand, the world justifiably applauded not only their bravery and resilience, but also the bravery and resilience of their rescuers: an international team of cave diving expertise. This vivid example of successful work carried out by a series of coordinated small groups (to rescue another small group—the boys and their coach) displays many of the main features of what this book calls ‘co-present’ groups. Characteristic of such groups includes commitments to a shared outcome, to the practical reasoning and group judgements that needed to be made on the way through the problem, and to the (in this case, literal) emergence of desired, though somewhat improbable, achievements. Each of the smaller groups carried out allotted tasks that contributed vitally to the success of the rescue effort as a whole. Those centrally involved in this unprecedented rescue have attested that out of this experience have emerged novel approaches to cave rescues and cave diving. This book is strikingly timely, and not just because this mid-2018 drama underscores that. The power of small groups for achieving desired processes and outcomes has been underrecognised in the Western world of scholarship and policy-making for several decades. Instead, skills, expertise, competence—indeed most learning in itself—have been traditionally ascribed to lone individuals, to each of which has been attributed the personal agency to ‘make something’ of oneself, usually by exercising her or his cognitive capacity. As Chap. 1 makes plain, this leads to anxieties such as ‘can automation, robotics and the e-world remove “my” prospects of a fulfilling work life?’ Many of us in education, and in the social sciences more broadly, dispute this fixation on the solo practitioner (where practices can be anything from the parental, into the community, and into the workplace, such as a school, an office, a factory, or an e-version of these). Complexity theory originated in, and has become particularly influential in, the natural sciences. This book develops an account of complexity (which we style ‘complexity thinking’) that is applicable to the social sciences in those instances where individual differences between humans matter. Complexity thinking, together with the notion of a ‘co-present group’, enables fresh xi

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insights into long-standing debates surrounding concepts such as agency, skills, expertise, practice and competence. In this book, we set out how the ‘emergence’ of complexity is itself conceptually emergent. The Wild Boars football team emerged from the caves due to the practices of what became a very large, coordinated team of expert divers, managers and other support staff. It is a stunning example of our belief that close and innovative attention to the power of particular kinds of small groups can generate the ‘emergence’ of worthwhile, even unanticipated, achievements, in daily life and work. We as the co-authors of the book are an instance of a co-present group. But neither we individually, nor our two member group, has worked alone. Both separately and jointly, we have participated in many other co-present groups whose outcomes have influenced this book. So whilst the final version of the book itself can be said to have emerged from our two member co-present group, some aspects of its contents have been shaped in part by our participation in other co-present groups. We particularly acknowledge fruitful discussions with Dr. Jeanette Lancaster, a Melbourne psychiatrist, educator and expert practitioner, who has written intensively on co-present groups and their affective functioning. Her influential work is referenced at suitable places in the text. Many other scholars have contributed much wisdom (perhaps unwittingly!), in many conversations with us over many years, conversations that have helped to shape this book. They include Dr. Dianne Mulcahy (The University of Melbourne), Dr. Mary C. Johnsson (University of Technology Sydney), Prof. Chris Winch (Kings College London), Prof. Bob Fecho (Teachers College Columbia University), Dr. Ann Reich (University of Technology Sydney), and Associate Professor Michelle Kelly (Curtin University). As well, the supervision of various research students’ projects has influenced our thinking for this book, particularly Ying Zhang and Ian Frost, whose work is utilised in Chap. 6. Sydney, Australia Melbourne, Australia July 2018

Paul Hager David Beckett

Contents

Part I

Situating Current Problems

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Locating Our Enquiry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Humans and Complexity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Prioritising Relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 The Seduction of Reduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 Complexity: Not Complicated and Not Chaos . . . . . . 1.5 Social Science and Complexity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.6 Four Familiar Small Groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.6.1 The Jury . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.6.2 Staff of Part of a School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.6.3 Mother/Baby Dyad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.6.4 Performances of Professional Musical Groups 1.7 Structure of the Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Agency and Expertise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 The Ideological Significance of Agency . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Traditional Understandings of Agency and Expertise 2.3 Agency Over Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Enacting Expertise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 What Are the Limitations of Traditional Accounts of Agency and Expertise? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6 The Prospect of ‘Relational Agency’ . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.7 Purposeful Reasoning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.8 Work(ers) in Progress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Issues Concerning Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Common Talk About Practice, Practise and Practices . . . . . . . . 3.2 Theoretical Understandings of Practice and Practices . . . . . . . .

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The Practice Turn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Various Construals of Practice in the Theoretical Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.3 Less Inclusive Understandings of Practice . . . . . . . 3.2.4 Other Theoretical Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Claimed Advantages of Practice Theory Over Previous Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Unresolved Issues Concerning Current Accounts of Practice and Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

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Issues Concerning Related Topics Such as Skills, Competence, Abilities and Capabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Skills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1.1 Common Talk About Skills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1.2 Theoretical Understandings of Skills . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1.3 Unresolved Issues Regarding Skills . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Competence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.1 Common Understandings of Competence . . . . . . . . 4.2.2 Theoretical Understandings of Competence . . . . . . 4.2.3 Unresolved Issues Regarding Competence . . . . . . . 4.3 Abilities, Capabilities, Dispositions, Capacities . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.1 Abilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.2 Capability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.3 Dispositions and Capacities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Unresolved Issues Regarding Abilities, Capabilities, Dispositions and Capacities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Understandings of Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Common Understandings and Assumptions About the Nature of Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Traditional Understandings and Assumptions About the Nature of Learning that Have Shaped Educational Practice 5.2.1 Learning as a Unitary Concept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.2 Learning as Something Done by Individuals . . . . 5.2.3 Learning as a Relatively Stable and Enduring Product . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.4 Learning as Independent of Context . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.5 The Replicability and Transparency of Learning . 5.2.6 Learning as Quintessentially Propositional . . . . . . 5.3 Learning Theories and Traditional Understandings and Assumptions About the Nature of Learning . . . . . . . .

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Sociocultural Theories and Fresh Insights About Learning . . 5.4.1 Active Social Mediation of Individual Learning . . . . 5.4.2 Social Mediation as Participatory Knowledge Construction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4.3 Social Mediation by Cultural Artefacts . . . . . . . . . . 5.4.4 The Social Entity as a Learner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5 Sociocultural Challenges to the Traditional Understandings and Assumptions About the Nature of Learning . . . . . . . . . . 5.5.1 Challenges to Learning Being Understood as a Unitary Concept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5.2 Challenges to the Assumption that Individuals Are the Exclusive Locus of Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5.3 Challenges to the Idea that Learning Is a Relatively Stable and Enduring Product . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5.4 Challenges to the Idea that Learning Is Independent of Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5.5 Challenges to the Ideas that Learning Is Replicable and Transparent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5.6 Challenges to the Idea that the Best Learning Is Propositional . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.6 Some Emerging Conceptualisations of Learning . . . . . . . . . . 5.6.1 Learning as a Process Rather Than a Product . . . . . . 5.6.2 Some Alternative Metaphors for Conceptualising Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.6.3 Understanding Learning as a Complex Phenomenon Requires Various Levels of Explanation . . . . . . . . . 5.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Infusing Complexity Through Co-Present Groups

The Concept of the Co-Present Group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 Four Examples of Familiar and Ubiquitous Groups . . . . . 6.1.1 Example 1: The Jury System and Common Law 6.1.2 Example 2: Staff of Part of a School . . . . . . . . . 6.1.3 Example 3: Mother/Baby Relations . . . . . . . . . . 6.1.4 Example 4: Performing as a String Quartet . . . . 6.2 What Do These Four Examples of Groups Have in Common? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 Underpinning Concepts of Groups that Are ‘Co-Present’ . 6.3.1 Finding a Place . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.2 Feeling the Affects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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6.4

Defining the Co-Present Group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4.1 Affective Functioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4.2 A Sense of Place-in-Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4.3 Particularity and Accountability . . . . . . . . . 6.4.4 Participation and Nonlinearity . . . . . . . . . . 6.4.5 Distributed Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4.6 Deliberation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.5 Co-Present Groups: Three Narratives . . . . . . . . . . . 6.5.1 Narrative One: Wine-Tasting and Judging . 6.5.2 Narrative Two: The Futures Trading Floor . 6.5.3 Narrative Three: TV Comedy Writing . . . . 6.6 Co-Present Groups and the Narratives . . . . . . . . . . 6.7 The Power of the Co-Present Group . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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140 140 141 144 145 146 147 148 148 149 150 150 151 152

Complex Systems and Complexity Thinking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1 A Brief Introduction to Complexity Thinking . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2 The Different Kinds of Complex Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2.1 Restricted Complexity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2.2 General Complexity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3 Key Concepts and Ideas in Complexity Thinking . . . . . . . . . 7.3.1 The Definitive Role of Relations in Complex Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3.2 Open and Closed Systems and Far from Equilibrium States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3.3 Emergence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3.4 Modelling Complex Systems and Self-Organisation . 7.3.5 Boundary Functioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3.6 Attractors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4 Concluding Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Complexity Thinking and Co-Present Groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.1 Some Ways Complexity Thinking Enriches Co-Present Groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2 Emergence Within a Co-Present Group (as a Complex System of Complex Systems) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2.1 Emergence Within a Co-Present Group as a Whole 8.2.2 Accountability of Emergent Processes and Performances Beyond the Whole Co-Present Group 8.2.3 Emergence Within Individual Members of a Co-Present Group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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8.3

Larger Scale Phenomena Involving Co-Present Groups . 8.3.1 Temporal Persistence of Co-Present Groups . . . 8.3.2 Individuals Being Simultaneously and/or Successively Members of Several Co-Present Groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3.3 Co-Present Groups Relating Constructively to One Another . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.4 Judgements in the Light of Co-Present Groups and Complexity Thinking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Part III 9

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Dissolving Problems as Complexity Emerges

Fresh 9.1 9.2 9.3

Approaches to Agency and Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The General Argument of Part III . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Constitutive Group Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Constitutive Group Agency and Spinoza’s ‘Wilful Rationality’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.4 Spinoza and Onto-epistemology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.5 Groups’ Agency and Holism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.6 Groups’ Agency and Judgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.7 The Co-constitution of Agency and Learning . . . . . . . . . . 9.8 Beyond Entanglements: ‘Going with the Flow’ of Agency and Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.9 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

10 Fresh Approaches to Practice, Skills, Competence and Expertise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.1 A Novel Account of Practice and Practices . . . . . . . . . . . 10.1.1 The Holistic Dimensions of Practice and Practices 10.1.2 How Our Novel Account Solves the Major Difficulties for Practice Theories Identified in Part I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.1.3 Our Novel Account Strengthens the Advantages of Practice Theories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.2 Novel Accounts of Skills and Competence (and Similar Concepts) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.2.1 A Novel Account of Skills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.2.2 A Novel Account of Competence . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.2.3 A Novel Account of Abilities, Capabilities, Dispositions and Capacities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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10.3 A Novel Account of Expertise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.3.1 Innovative Expertise as a Form of Excellence . . . 10.3.2 Innovative Expertise Within Co-present Groups . . 10.4 Perspiration and Aspiration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.4.1 This Book as the Outcome of a Co-present Group in Action Over Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.4.2 This Book as a Model for Employing Complexity Thinking in the Social Sciences . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.5 Finding the Flow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Part I

Situating Current Problems

Chapter 1

Locating Our Enquiry

Automation anxiety is rife. In one prediction, if we are not careful, humans could go the way of the horse! How likely is this? Economists at MIT and Yale describe this anxiety as a concern ‘that new digital technologies, artificial intelligence, and robotics will create widespread technological non-employment …’. But, they are sceptical: ‘there is no clear reason why the effects of new technologies will be different this time than in the past, when they did not create such widespread reductions in employment’ (Acemoglu and Restrepo 2016: 1). They reveal the shortcomings of earlier gloomy predictions, such as those by the eminent economist Wassily Leontief who, in the 1950s, predicted that human work will be increasingly replaced by machines, just as, a century earlier, the horse was replaced by machines. For Acemoglu and Restrepo, what is wrong with Leontief’s analogy between human activities and horsepower is that ‘humans have a comparative advantage in new and more complex activities’, whilst ‘[h]orses did not’ (1).

1.1 Humans and Complexity New complex activities are what this book is about, or, more accurately, ‘newly complex’ activities. We draw attention to the activities that have always been present in human life. Indeed, we claim that these very activities are overlooked because of their ubiquity. We will bring them to new prominence through the conceptual lens of complexity theorising. Our purpose is to show how ‘newly complexified’, familiar, activities can be better understood and, ultimately, how they can be made even more prominent in understanding human life and work. So, we claim that skills, competence, expertise, practices and even learning itself—all fundamental human experiences—will be distinctively and thoroughly recast in the chapters that follow. This book is the first comprehensive account we know of that takes ‘complexity’ beyond the natural sciences into the social sciences. We acknowledge and value the work of more specific initiatives: Davis and Sumara (2006) and Mason (2008) in © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 P. Hager and D. Beckett, The Emergence of Complexity, Perspectives on Rethinking and Reforming Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31839-0_1

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educational research and practices; Hutchins (1995) and Thagard (2019) in neurocognition; Zollman (2017) in mathematical modelling. Our more comprehensive account introduces and develops the notion of the ‘co-present group’. This approach is used to address seemingly intractable, persistent issues across the lifespan, which arise especially but not exclusively in workplace activities and performances. Human activities are ultimately not analogous to horsepower, so our relationship with automation in all its forms is different from the relationship of the horse to automation, and in fact is unique. But in addition, our relationship to each other is part of the complexity we investigate herein. In fact, at the outset, let us declare that relationships between all aspects of the socio-material world are our focus: by these, we mean the machinery of the world (its robotic, artificial and digital forms all included) as well as the embodied humanity of the world (its occupancy of time and space, just as machines occupy time and space). In working complexity through the socio-materiality of relationships, we are drawn to what another economist, Autor, calls ‘Polanyi’s paradox’, which is based on Polanyi’s claim (1966) for ‘tacit’ (inarticulable) knowledge: “We know more than we can tell.” When we break an egg over the edge of a mixing bowl, identify a distinct species of birds based only on a fleeting glimpse, write a persuasive paragraph, or develop a hypothesis to explain a poorly understood phenomenon, we are engaging in tasks that we only tacitly understand how to perform. Following Polanyi’s observation, the tasks that have proved most vexing to automate are those demanding flexibility, judgment and common sense – skills that we understand only tacitly. (Autor 2014: 8)

Leaving aside for now the inclusion of ‘common sense’ as a tacit skill (because what is taken as common sense can often be wrong!), we focus on the tacit nature of flexibility and judgement in life and at work. Importantly, Autor moves beyond the employment debates where ‘automation anxiety’ revolves around the substitution of human work by machines, into the more intensive relationship where automation complements work: At a practical level, Polanyi’s paradox means that many familiar tasks, ranging from the quotidian to the sublime, cannot currently be computerized because we don’t know “the rules”. At an economic level, Polanyi’s paradox means something more. The fact that a task cannot be computerized does not imply that computerization has no effect on that task. On the contrary, tasks that cannot be substituted by computerization are generally complemented by it. This point is as fundamental as it is overlooked. Most work processes draw upon a multi-faceted set of inputs: labor and capital; brains and brawn; creativity and rote repetition; technical mastery and intuitive judgment; perspiration and inspiration; adherence to rules and judicious application of discretion. Typically, these inputs each play essential roles; that is, improvements in one do not obviate the need for the other. If so, productivity improvements in one set of tasks almost necessarily increases the economic value of the remaining tasks. (Autor 2014: 8–9)

These various binaries are powerful because they are ‘complementary’: that is, they are greater in relation to one another, not as preferring one against the other. Both parts of the binary ‘play essential roles’. Each requires the other. Following Polanyi’s suggestion that ‘flexibility’ and ‘judgment’ are tacitly experienced and abundant in each of these binaries, we analyse how ‘complexity’ works this ‘Yin/Yang’ sociomateriality in relation to skills, competence, expertise, practices and learning, in life,

1.1 Humans and Complexity

5

and particularly in workplaces. Computerisation—embodied in a machine and its networks—is one currently anxiety-producing example of this materiality; embodied human ‘brawniness’ is another example of it. Our account of these ‘newly complexified’ activities thus starts with familiar experiences, hitherto overlooked, where, following Autor, what is socio-materially complementary has also been overlooked.

1.2 Prioritising Relations Not surprisingly, then, this book explores relationality, and it does this by giving ontological priority to relations themselves. We begin and maintain this analysis of the contribution of complexity theory to the social sciences by holding fast to the integrity of relations, from which particulars, or relata, are established. For us, the ontological claim we maintain is that the world is primarily constituted in and through relations, from which objects, entities and individuals are derived. This is not the traditional ontological perspective. In most Western philosophy, at least, the world humans hold on to is comprised of aggregations of particulars, assembled, as it were, from individualistic accounts of how things (noting that ‘things’ are exactly what are traditionally meant) appear to us (where ‘us’ is itself an aggregation of persons). Traditionally, relations are regarded as innocuous, and even as ontologically inert—just the subordinate links that keep the really significant stuff of life (the ‘things’) uppermost in our experience. By contrast, in this book, our ontological priority subverts that hierarchy to the extent that relations’ main work is to present the world to us, along with the particulars (the ‘things’) that ‘hang off’ relations in various ways. Natural languages in the West are an example of the contrast we wish to make. Traditionally, we pick out ‘things’ with nouns and then verbs work on these ‘things’ to produce actions-with-objects of knowledge. This atomised view of language (often reflected in ‘picture’ or ‘pointing’ ways of teaching languages, underpinned by a Lego ontology) does not reflect the significance of relations in shaping what they link. By contrast, in many parts of the world, linguistic relationships are the ontological priority. In Indigenous cultures, for example, the relation of ‘beach-on-ness’ is perceived first; whereas, for a Westerner, a boat is ‘seen’ on a beach (where perception already ‘reduces’ to the particulars of boat and beach), from which relationality—the ‘on-ness’—has a linking role to provide contiguity. In the subsequent chapters, we develop this ontology of holistic relationality, all the whilst supporting relational analyses at the level of the ‘whole’, rather than at the ‘sum-of-parts’ level. In short, we are advocating a less reductive account of relations. We, therefore, give groups an ontological priority. Human groups are ubiquitous sites of complementary activities, involving complex relations that advance skills, competence, expertise, practices and learning. To better deal holistically with these complementary activities, we have found Polanyi and Autor helpful in, respectively,

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bringing the tacit (or inarticulable) and the socio-material into a Yin/Yang relationship which resists ‘reductive’ relationality. But, we do not deny the significance of reductive relationality for getting on with life, as we now explain.

1.3 The Seduction of Reduction Maps are reductions of the real terrain. That is their chief virtue. If a map was on a 1:1 scale, it would be useless. Similarly, the newborn’s ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’ (William James) would be intolerable without our capacity to edit out what is not meaningful; good parents realise early that one of their main roles is to expedite this meaning-making so that their newborn can get on with the pattern recognition routines that psychologists tell us are essential for development. Groups meet and agree on tasks and roles and outcomes so that their time is productive. All of life is reducible to elements which help us progress our needs and interests. So, we do not dispute the need for reductive relations. But we do dispute reduction’s seductive promise, when it seems to require the evermore-fine granulation of important human activities involving skills, competence, expertise, practices and learning. These are human phenomena which are readily and ubiquitously experienced less reductively, that is, at the level of whole groups, where the relationality apparent in such groups both constructs the group and the individuals who participate in it. Our resistance to the seduction of reduction gives ontological priority to groups (not to individuals and not to aggregations of individuals) for these two reasons: • Groups are commonly acknowledged sites of power and possess sociocultural significance for the formation of skills, competence, expertise, practices and learning (but this important point is often overlooked). • Constructions of individuals’ identities (as persons who are skilled, are competent, are expert, are practitioners or are learners) emerge best from such groups (but this important point is also often overlooked). Part I of the book sets out why this twin disregard has occurred and what should be done about that. A less reductive and alternative account of these phenomena, which gives ontological priority to whole ‘co-present’ groups, is given in Part II of the book, underpinned by complexity theory and thinking. Part III of the book returns to the main social science phenomena with which we began and offers a fresh account of them, maintaining the ontological priority ascribed to ‘complementary’ relationality (or, as we will have named it by then, ‘general complexity’) that we have set out from the start, in this chapter.

1.4 Complexity: Not Complicated and Not Chaos

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1.4 Complexity: Not Complicated and Not Chaos Complexity as a theorisation of, and within, the natural sciences has been well set out by Cilliers (e.g. 2000). At its heart is the notion of relationships that cohere in systems, and that these relations constitute the phenomenon in question. All of life is complex, because relations are ubiquitous. By contrast, a ‘complicated’ phenomenon can be broken apart and put back together, such as a jumbo jet; there are rules that set out how the parts of the jet fit together, but no one argues that the jet is constituted in the relations themselves. Chaos, and its theorisation, is different again from both complexity and complication: chaos requires no rules and no relationships. It is random. Chaos, we modestly state, at the outset, is not part of this book! Complexity is apparent in the swarming of birds, the mobility of sand dunes, and according to a recent report in New Scientist, in ‘fluids teeming with living things … [such as] sperm cells on their way to an egg … [or] a fleet of bacteria on their way to your gut to stir up trouble’ (Ravilious 2017: 33). Ravilious continues: ‘cells often move in swarms, and it’s their collective motion that affects the overall flow’ (35). Quoting two researchers at Edinburgh University, she describes an experiment which investigated what may eventually become ‘laws of living flow’, which has also been extended into possible ‘tools of medicine’: In 2011, [Davide] Marenduzzo and his colleague Wilson Poon … showed that when they increased the concentration of a soup of E. coli beyond a certain threshold, the bacteria suddenly began to cluster … Curiously, the clusters always rotated, as if doing laps. This got Marenduzzo and others wondering if, once we have understood these flows, we could put them to work. … Roberto Di Leonardo at the Sapienta University of Rome … took E. coli that have been genetically modified to respond to particular wavelengths of light and herded them into pockets on a custom-built microscopic Ferris wheel, which rotates as they push. Arrays of these rotors might one day be tools of medicine. Di Leonardo imagines capsules equipped with arrays of these motors, some to propel them through the bloodstream and others to pump out a payload of drugs when they find biomolecular cues signalling disease … He reckons the bacterial pumps … can be engineered to self-regulate, adjusting the pressure they pump at, for different tasks. (35)

Whilst this E. coli example is a long way from falling under a law of ‘active matter’ or ‘living flow’, it nonetheless shows the relationality of fluidity in a system which is Yin/Yang, that is, complementary. Any reduction to the parts, or particulars (the fluid, the bacteria), would destroy the clustering phenomenon. You can only make sense of concentrated E. coli movement in its clustered complexity (‘beyond a certain threshold’), and there may be ways to engineer these clusters for human benefit. Where there is movement which is coherent in a system, with the subsequent appearance of a new phenomenon within that system, we claim this as an instance of complexity. Cilliers states, ‘complex things have emergent properties; complicated things do not’ (2000: 41). The natural sciences’ current laws are challenged to explain these emergent phenomena. Whilst science does not have a ‘law of living flow’, it has reasons to explore what this might be like.

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1.5 Social Science and Complexity The challenge is even more dramatic for the social sciences, since humans’ ‘living flow’ is a synonym for the experience itself. Our task in this book is to take seriously what ‘emergence’ means for thinking about various core human phenomena, through the broad epistemological discipline of the social sciences. E. coli is not agentive— as far as we know! Neither are swarms of starlings or sand dunes. However, as we affirmed at the outset, ‘new complex tasks’ will continue to require what Autor (2014) calls ‘flexibility’ and ‘judgment’. They are centrally found in the phenomena of the formation and exercise of skills, competence, expertise, practices and learning. These are, we claim, some main emergent features of groups, which help make groups so effective in the very formation and exercise of these phenomena. Human groups are not amenable to formulaic identification (in contrast to Marenduzzo and Poon, who were able to achieve this with their groupings of E. coli), and yet human groups have a similar life-affirming purpose to E. coli. Both human groups and, perhaps in the future, ‘packets’ of modified E. coli present examples of complementary socio-materiality (they each relate ‘things’). In doing so, each performs an evolutionary purpose which could change them (groups produce ‘new complex’ tasks; the E. coli packets rotate ‘as if doing laps’). However, human groups possess one massive ‘comparative advantage’ over E. coli (and horses) that the economists have drawn to our attention: humans can choose to make differences to the world through ubiquitous groups clustered around the formation of skills, competence, expertise, practices and learning. To the extent that these differences emerge from groups’ processes, they are all the more effective, and yet, the significance of this has hitherto been overlooked in Western social science. In a nutshell, humans can ‘go with the flow’; unlike E. coli, we know that we can do so, and do so very effectively, in groups. Groups can form purposes, ideals and outcomes which give this propulsion normative force. Humans are agentive creatures, just as forcefully in groups, as individually. Yet human agency has traditionally been regarded as an individualistic characteristic. Whilst not denying this main feature of human experience, we explore how groups expect to make differences in the world, at least insofar as skills, competence, expertise, practices and learning are possible. Thus, this is a book which raises how the social sciences and the humanities are ineluctably engaged in groups’ agency. As we have begun to establish in this chapter, we will further develop complexity thinking in the social sciences and the humanities by engaging with the agentiveness of less reductive relationality as it is apparent in the formation and functionality of groups. ‘Less reductive’ relationality is called this because it resists reduction to particulars whilst acknowledging that they are essential in making sense of the world. This book takes the common and quite small human group (as constituted in ‘less reductive’ relationality) as its unit of analysis. Complexity theory suggests that tightly knit relationality sustains and develops many systemic phenomena in the natural world and, we argue, this kind of relationality also underpins the socio-materiality of the social world. Humans and our machines and artefacts are all creatures of

1.5 Social Science and Complexity

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nature, yet with the crucial addition of agency, we are a distinctive part of the natural (that is to say, material) world. By this, we mean that human groups are systemic natural phenomena (like swarms of starlings or shifting sand dunes), but they are charged with normativity, that is, with purposes and functions (unlike starlings and sand). Our ‘flexibility’ and ‘judgement’ are built into our agency—it is the Yin of our relationality, complemented by the Yang of our socio-materiality. In this book, we will show how that relationality constitutes ubiquitous features of our lives together, with respect to skills, competence, expertise, practices and learning.

1.6 Four Familiar Small Groups To further situate this exploration, it will now help to introduce four examples of groups which are very familiar, and may not, at first glance, seem to have much in common. However, as we show later in Chaps. 6, 8, 9 and the closing Chap. 10, they advance the Yin-and-Yang of less reductive complexity by showing how agency plays out in central desirable aspects of skills, competence, expertise, practices and learning, from which all humans expect to benefit.

1.6.1 The Jury The jury has evolved over several centuries in the Western world and has shaped our understandings of law and justice and the fair exercise of power. When a jury meets to deliberate, it does not bring expertise in the technical sense; however, it does display a concentration of relationships not just within the jury room but also with what has occurred in the courtroom itself—these are socio-material contexts within which ‘flexibility’ and ‘judgement’ are required (and perhaps some ‘common sense’). It is a temporary grouping of ideally fair-minded ‘common’ folk who are required to take a less reductive view of what they have experienced in the courtroom and emerge from the jury room with a group verdict—whether the defendant is guilty or innocent.

1.6.2 Staff of Part of a School Most schools have structures within which important work they do with children and young people receives closer attention. Common examples are subject or disciplinebased departments (Science or Arts), which reflect wider curriculum priorities. But, there are often other structures that attend better to the growth and development of the students as future adults. So, as well as, and sometimes replacing, traditional age-grade or year-level groupings, there are often ‘sub-schools’, where small groups

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of various teachers develop pastoral relationships with the same group of students as years go by, as they progress through the larger organisation that is the school. Parents know that this smaller sub-school or ‘home-group’ or ‘house’ is their normal first point of contact with the school when their child needs closer attention. In these smaller groupings, more intensive counselling and advice are given, on the basis of better knowledge of particular families and particular teachers, over time. Thus, relationality is expressed through those closest to the situation of the students, who work most closely to achieve locally meaningful and holistic outcomes for them.

1.6.3 Mother/Baby Dyad This relationship, fundamental to human affective functioning, has a biopsychological basis (valuably investigated by Bradley 2005). Mothers process their own ‘affect’ right from the first day of their baby’s life, and this impacts back upon the baby’s own neural development. There are two minds sharing the same neurological development, shaped by the affective relationship which bonds them from the moment of conception. As humans grow and develop, this early affective functioning shapes our overall affective capacities—we develop an understanding of the social experience of empathy (arising from the ‘inside’, as it were); we grow a moral outlook on life. As we claim in Chap. 6, clearly this type of small group • is focused more on the relationships within the group rather than on its members as individuals—the singularity is of the group itself (as it is for the jury); • is centred on holistic aspects of human functioning, not merely on its cognitive manifestations (as it is for the sub-school); and • involves relationships and experiences that are constitutively social.

1.6.4 Performances of Professional Musical Groups Consider the relationships implicit within a string quartet (first violin, second violin, viola, cello), or, say, a jazz quartet. Disassembled, they are four individual players; they have an intense shared musical identity only when assembled as a quartet, within which their individual musicianship is at the service of the group, expressed through the single performance of a piece by the group itself. Successful quartet performances are frequently judged by the extent of the emergence of a single aesthetically pleasing experience, where individuals’ contributions are appreciated but only insofar as the whole performance is enhanced. Indeed, we will claim that the holistic and social relationality which is most valued in string quartets’ work (and indeed in all small groups) is the emergence of something new, ideally judged as advancing the group’s purposes. Emergence through performances is, thus, a core concept in the prominence given to the relationality of groups in this book.

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Across these four examples of groups, various main aspects of skills, competence, expertise, practices and learning are manifest. Each group has to warm to the task or role for which it exists: the whole focus is on the relationality which constitutes the group and its purpose in a particular situation; parts (the ‘things’), or particulars, ‘hang off’ the main unit of analysis (the group). Progress is expected to emerge from the holistic relational activities of the group: a verdict for the court, a learning outcome or improvement in behaviour at school, a growing neonatal interdependence shaping affection and maturity for both mother and baby and a performance by a quartet which is more or less aesthetically successful. These are all emergent from processes and functions which are, respectively, more or less skilful, competent and expert, and which shape practices and learnings across the duration of the group’s existence and way beyond. Underpinning these relational phenomena is an ascription of agency to the group itself: it knowingly ‘goes with the flow’.

1.7 Structure of the Book With these main considerations now outlined, we turn to the structure of the book. Parts I, II and III are intended to be ‘stackable’, in that the reader may move to the part of greatest interest depending on her or his level of knowledge or interest in the analysis we have just outlined. Part I identifies the problems of traditional accounts of agency (Chap. 2), practice (Chap. 3), skills and competence (Chap. 4) and learning (Chap. 5), so it situates the book for the infusion of complexity thinking which follows. Part II establishes the concept of the ‘co-present group’ (Chap. 6) as the preferred way to regard relationality in all its main features and in its widespread manifestation (here we expand on the four common groups just discussed). Then, complexity theorisations from the natural sciences are brought into the space of complexity thinking (Chap. 7) and are shown to engage well with the social sciences and humanities. Part II concludes (Chap. 8) with an extensive alignment of co-present groups with complexity thinking, thus establishing our main analytic claims. Part III returns to the main traditional problems raised in Part I and shows how they are dissolved by our approach in Part II. Agency and learning, as more fundamental phenomena, enhanced by complexity thinking are presented as ‘two sides of the same coin’ (the coin of relationality) (Chap. 9), then, practices, skills, competence and expertise are directly addressed (Chap. 10) to round off the challenges we set ourselves in Chap. 1. We close Chap. 10 with some reflections on the process of writing this book as an example of a co-present group which was always ‘going with the flow’. We also reflect on the book’s significance for the social sciences. Throughout the book, we seek to identify, respect and maintain a balance between, on the one hand, the need for relational reduction as a main feature of human experience (recall that a map with a 1:1 ratio would be useless), and, on the other hand, our view that less reductive (‘general’ or holistic) relationality is an underrecognised and yet ubiquitous human experience, found in small groups everywhere, which

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complexity thinking can lift to prominence. Our book gives great significance to the emergence of normative outcomes from the ‘affective functioning’ of what we have called ‘co-present groups’ and argues that, once these small groups, and agency and learning are better understood through complexity thinking, some seemingly intractable problems with skills, competence and practices are dissolved and replaced with better ways to act and better ways to learn.

References Acemoglu, D., & Restrepo, P. (2016). The race between machine and man: Implications of technology for growth, factor shares and employment (NBER Working Paper No. 22252). Cambridge, MA, USA: National Bureau of Economic Research. http://www.nber.org/papers/w22252. Accessed September 25, 2017. Autor, D. (2014). Polanyi’s paradox and the shape of employment growth (NBER Working Paper No. 20485). Cambridge, MA, USA: National Bureau of Economic Research. http://www.nber. org/papers/w20485. Accessed September 25, 2017. Bradley, B. (2005). Psychology and experience. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Cilliers, P. (2000). Rules and complex systems. Emergence, 2(3), 40–50. https://doi.org/10.1207/ s15327000em0203_04. Davis, B., & Sumara, D. (2006). Complexity and education: Inquiries into learning, teaching and research. Marwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Mason, M. (Ed.). (2008). Complexity theory and the philosophy of education. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell. Polanyi, M. (1966). The tacit dimension. New York: Doubleday. Ravilious, K. (2017, July 1). Find the flow: What are the rules that govern how living things flow? New Scientist, 33–35. Thagard, P. (2019). Mind-society: From brains to social sciences and professions. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press. Zollman, K. (2017) Learning to collaborate. In T. Boyer Wilson, C. Mayo-Wilson, M. Weisberg (Eds.), Scientific collaboration and collective knowledge: New essays. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 2

Agency and Expertise

Agency is the capacity that we humans have to ‘act’ in the world. Most of us warm to the basic idea that we can make of ourselves what we want, within the limitations of what is humanly possible. It can even be claimed that this capacity is what defines us as humans: we own our destinies. We shape and pursue our own ‘good life’, and this is what gives our individual lives their meaningfulness. So, to act is to strive for what you desire—or, as some have said, ‘to do is to be’, which means that through doing, we find out what we like, or desire, and, moreover, what we really are like. There is an existential significance to our agentive capacity. However, in this chapter, we leave aside the issue of ‘being’, as it raises some old debates about whether humans have ‘being’ as an ‘essence’ (which we discover or can identify and pursue) or whether we make it all up as we go along. We have a more modest aim. In this chapter, we are focused on agency itself and a specific version of it—the capacity to act insofar as our striving is intended to show an improvement in that capacity, in the direction of expertise.

2.1 The Ideological Significance of Agency It is helpful to remind ourselves of the ideological significance of agency. In the Western world, by and large, humans aspire to be free to captain their own ships across the oceans of life. Liberal democratic theory and governmental practices have evolved over the past few hundred years such that individuals are ascribed power to vote—and to shop! Capitalism and the globalisation of market economies continue to extend these versions of agency, not only in the West but also in the East and elsewhere. The globalising world is now heavily invested in locally agentive political economies—previously monolithically socialist regimes now embrace ‘mixed’ economies (e.g. Vietnam). ‘Thinking globally and acting locally’ is more than a slogan about environmentalism; it is a mantra for free-trading, networking nation-states, as they pursue the prosperity thought to follow from agentive international markets. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 P. Hager and D. Beckett, The Emergence of Complexity, Perspectives on Rethinking and Reforming Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31839-0_2

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Within this ideological scenario, individuals are agents of their own and their nation’s futures. To be captain of one’s self-directed learning has become the mantra of Western education and schooling, progressing individual ideas of the ‘good life’ or ‘livelihood’. Agency underpins this prodigious ascription of autonomy to the individual, and this ascription is universalised in the liberal democratic society Westerners formally share. Wikipedia states, “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” is a well-known phrase in the United States Declaration of Independence. The phrase gives three examples of the “unalienable rights” which the Declaration says has been given to all human beings by their Creator, and for which governments are created to protect. (Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ n.d.)

In the Western world, we embrace this fully agentive Self, both for a person and as an ideal of the nation-state. ‘I can get there’ or ‘Anyone can achieve what they dream’ are common mantras in the Western world. Sport, for example, is replete with active ownership of the pursuit of betterment. Sportspeople commit, single-mindedly, to the pursuit of high, but narrowly defined achievement. The excellence to which they aspire is constructed through robust and sustained agency. For example, in May 2010, at the age of 16 years, Jessica Watson completed solo yachting navigation of the globe. On her return to Sydney, she stated in a media interview, “I don’t consider myself a hero, I’m just an ordinary girl,” Watson said, adding that you didn’t have to be someone special to achieve great things. “You just have to have a dream, believe in it and work hard,” she said. (‘Jessica Watson our newest hero’ 2010)

We can easily acknowledge that Watson, whilst still a teenager, has bravely succeeded in a very risky adventure, but, in doing so, has naively located her success within her own agentive capacity, as if her success was entirely due to her efforts. This exemplifies the inter-twining of both the ideological and educative significance of autonomy.

2.2 Traditional Understandings of Agency and Expertise From the example of Jessica Watson, and from reflection on how at least Western nations have advanced their political economies along with their liberal democracies, we can see that constructions of identity (often framed as a proper noun, the ‘Self’), are traditionally ascribed to each individual. The traditional understanding of agency is that it is up to us, as a human population of individuals, to, singularly, ‘make something of our Selves’. Our expertise is, also, up to the individual to excel at what she or he strives for. So, the traditional view is that we make our ‘Selves’ through individual striving over the entire tapestry of our lives—in workplaces, education, families, communities, ethnicities, nations, and so on. Through our agentive single-mindedness, as

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exemplified in the prominent achievements of sportspeople, in their respective workplaces, we too can make something of ourselves. The individuality of this singlemindedness has the additional feature of temporality—the pursuit of what we desire, or wish to improve or even excel in, is stretched over time. Young folk are traditionally expected to know where they are heading, and broadly, what it will take to get there. They are, implicitly, taken as agentive in these respects. As Jessica Watson emphasises dreaming leads to action. Thus, we can summarise the traditional understanding of agency and expertise as having these features: • The human capacity to act in the world is manifest in what individuals do and aspire to do. • To enact our aspirations, we are embodied over time: what individuals do and aspire to do require persistent activity over time, with the present as the main temporal frame of acting. • What we each strive for is mainly up to each of us: within the present time, an individual’s agency is apparent in the decision-making that each individual ‘owns’. This chapter will problematise this traditional understanding of agency and expertise. In doing so, it will critique the enactment of individualistic aspirations towards expertise, as a singular concept. In taking issue with the sole and traditional attribution of agency to individuals, we herein suggest that a more fruitful conception of agency and expertise is the way socioculturally located relations arise in, or emerge from, common practices over time. In doing so, the chapter will often remind the reader of the most common situations in which we find ourselves, as members of groups: teams, families, organisations and various other common relationalities. These commonalities are actually ‘communalities’; from this, we can begin to build a notion of what we later explore as ‘group agency’. Of course, we need to acknowledge and preserve singular ways people can make something of themselves, as has Jessica Watson—a solo performer in the pursuit of excellence. However, what must be added to the ascription of agency to the individualised Self—in short, to an identity—is a sophisticated acknowledgement of the ways humans learn in and through environments where collective, socioculturally significant experiences are omnipresent, since these are rich in the ‘practices’ which are one main focus of this book.

2.3 Agency Over Time As has been suggested, temporality is already essential in the traditional understanding of agency and expertise: an individual’s life stretches over time (learning is often called ‘lifelong’ for this reason), and we want to work on this temporality in a less individualistic way. To progress this, we ask the following question: how do the past, present and future relate in daily human experiences, when we enact our aspirations?

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In an important and comprehensive overview of the concept of agency, at least as it has been regarded in sociological theory, Emirbayer and Mische define ‘agency’ as the temporally constructed engagement by actors of different structural environments – the temporal-relational contexts of action – which, through the interplay of habit [the past], imagination [the future], and judgment [the present], both reproduces and transforms those structures in interactive response to the problems posed by changing historical situations. (1998: 970)

Here, we have inserted the three indicators of this ‘relational’ temporality—past, present and future—to clarify Emirbayer and Mische’s construction of agency: there are actions we recount and justify, in the past, and actions we contemplate and foresee, in the future, which are held together in an account of the present, in which we weigh up what is to be done self-consciously. Naturally, our experiences privilege the present—we live ‘in the moment’, that is, day by day. Our human need to make sense of experience is most acute here and now. We make decisions on a daily basis about our future, taking into account our experiences in the past. The traditional understanding we just set out also includes the significance of decision-making in an individual’s account of her or his aspirational actions. But with the help of Emirbayer and Mische, we can broaden the traditional understanding of agency and expertise within what they call its ‘temporal construction’ in ‘temporal-relational contexts of action’. We argue that most of those ‘contexts of action’ are already socioculturally significant environments replete with actions within which individuals find themselves. So, the enactment of our aspirations is found in temporally constructed experiences (how we make decisions in the past, the future and the present) which ‘reproduce and transform’ the structures we already inhabit. Thus, our relations, or, as Emirbayer and Mische call it, our ‘interactivity’, shape how we, individually and collectively, manifest agency and expertise. How can this occur? Human agency is aspirational as the traditional understanding has it. But aspirations are normative and, socioculturally regarded as collectively normative. Groups share common goals and purposes. We are born into normativity of this kind. Families, communities, workplaces, organisations and nations are normatively framed (as the US Declaration of Independence exemplifies). And we are immersed in these normative relationalities from the first day of our lives. This is what the Enlightenment’s ‘social contract’ theorisation of democracy encapsulates; it is also what the Communist Manifesto expounds. Within this collective normativity, Emirbayer and Mische’s account of our daily experience of the present is broadly Aristotelian. For Aristotle, phronesis (practical wisdom or prudence), is widely exercised in human conduct, but is situated in the wise individual or ‘person’. They helpfully broaden it beyond the individualistic Self-conscious: In Aristotle’s view, practical wisdom can refer variously to means or to ends; it can be either strategic and calculative – in which case, he says we can speak of persons as being clever, crafty, or cunning – or it can be concerned with broader questions of the good life itself … Aristotle sees practical wisdom as intrinsically communicative in nature: that is, it

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entails a deep involvement and participation in an ongoing community of discourse. Far from being purely individual or monological, it remains open to dialogue and persuasion, and is profoundly implicated in common values, interests and purposes. (Emirbayer and Mische 1998: 995, emphasis added)

Indeed, this ‘profoundly implicated’ relationship in ‘common values, interests and purposes’ is really relationality in action. Humans find themselves being agentive across all experiences, as we seek to shape the present in its interplay with the past and with the future. Humans are meaning-seeking creatures; our efforts are almost never solo. Our relations with the past and the future both reproduce and transform what is habitual and imagined. The past and the future, as they are taken to be, are inscribed in the present consciousness, but none of these relations are adequately captured as My Agency. Rather, and despite the traditional accounts of agency as Self-consciousness-in-action (as in the case of Jessica Watson), we are creatures of ‘common values, interests and purposes’, as Emirbayer and Mische put it. In adult and lifelong learning scholarship, practical wisdom has become a central interest, largely because in most workplaces, temporality has intensified the work itself. We have ‘just-in-time’ training, ‘windows’ of time to enact opportunities for change, ‘learning trajectories’ which imply motion from less to greater states of knowing over time, and ‘seizing the moment’ which implies that we can atomise time and recalibrate it more productively through chunking work differently. Typically, underpinning these various intensifications there persists a traditional individualistic notion of human agency: if a worker really understands, or can be motivated to regard, the opportunities afforded by a more finely calibrated set of work activities over more finely calibrated time, then productivity will, it is hoped, improve. Thus, in terms of adult learning ideology, the self-directed nature of life, and the meaningfulness which should arise from it, will eventuate. So, temporality can be brought to the service of traditional agency; with it comes the finer granulation of experience. Slicing time and experience more finely is a reductive move which is often helpful—in many workplaces, industries and professions, we need to be more transparent about the nature of the work itself and bring our experience of that work to account, often literally, for its cost. Most obviously, human work is billable time, charged by the hour, or day, or project, for its worth. This kind of relational reduction, as for the traditional agency it assumes, is required by the political economy of late capitalism and by the evolution across the past century from Fordist to post-Fordist consumer societies, with neo-liberal management the main mechanism for ensuring growth. For example, reductive assumptions will often be apparent in the behavioural nature of finely granulated ‘competencies’ systems of working, and in the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) assessing performance within those systems (Beckett 2009). But a ‘KPI culture’ falls squarely within traditional accounts of agency and its utility in the phenomenology of the ‘present’. It is reductive in its relations, and to that extent helps us account better for human activities, but it fails by omission to bring to prominence that less reductive relationality which is apparent in other main human experiences, that is, in life overall, and in work practices in particular, namely when we are conscious of ‘common values, interests and purposes’. Complexity thinking

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can enliven these experiences as it prioritises less reductive relationality, as we will set out from Chap. 7 onwards. It is essential that closer attention is paid to how humans act in the contingencies of the present, in workplaces, through practical judgements that are less reductive, because they are in some way shared, owned enactments of ‘values, interests and purposes’. Our book attempts to provide this closer attention, since, overall, our focus is on practices which are complex holistic activities, ones that integrate … diverse items such as goods and virtues, activity, experience, context and judgement, with such integration often involving a significant temporal dimension. (Hager 2012: 27)

A decade earlier than Hager’s summary, Beckett and Hager (2002) argued for the centrality of practical judgements as a relational way of advancing a new epistemology of practice, one which decentres the traditional Cartesian, and even Platonic, atomistic epistemology (where, for example, an ‘atom’ of learning, that is, a proposition—from a book, or in libraries—is digested and regurgitated in written form to show how the mind, as memory, has been modified). And now, this current book takes ‘de-centring’ of the traditional notion of agency as fundamental to its purpose. Whilst the social sciences, and in particular, education, will always continue to value agentive individuality, we seek to move it sideways somewhat, to allow conceptual and practical room for a relational epistemology. As Part I of this book will reveal, educators in the Western tradition have assumed that coming to ‘know’ something is to arrive at a state of the individual’s mind. That state of mind is regarded as a changed state—there have been new inputs, new processing and some new outcomes. The main way this is traditionally evidenced is in accounts of what is cognitively the case—this is about whether the propositions are in place in an individual’s memory, as shown in examination papers, libraries, study programmes and so on. We continue to value ‘knowing THAT x…’ where x is some proposition, but we also bring to prominence ‘knowing HOW to x’, where x is an experience not fully captured by cognition: the affective (feelings, desires, wants and motives) and the socio-material (the embodied and shared nature of experience) are equally significant for this new epistemology of practice. Across the human lifespan, and the supposed ‘lifelong learning’ that persists, humans learn best when their experiences are taken seriously. The lowly academic status of the ‘tacit’, the intuitive, the reflective, the phenomenological, the embodied, and the socially efficacious leaves much human experience out of the educational vision, wherever it is, but especially for adults—and especially in the adult workplace. And the significance of temporality is central to this recognition of human experience—there is, phenomenologically, no time like the present. Our consciousness makes sense of the past (as far as it can be recalled), and the future (as far as it can be imagined), but always in the present. And our capacity to act, our sense of our agency, is, we argue, with help from Emirbayer and Mische, better regarded as a socioculturally significant phenomenon, within which individuals set out on their own aspirational, and normative, journeys.

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2.4 Enacting Expertise We have shown that, over time, but always in the present, humans enact (that is, exercise their agency) in what they judge to be ‘good’ (that is, normative) ways to move forward. This is a main feature of both the traditional understanding, and our new relational understanding of agency and expertise. The ‘good’ is both an efficacious ‘next step’, and also a telos, or ‘end-in-view’. These two senses of the ‘good’ are themselves relational: they engage in ways that are iterative and transformative. How the next step is regarded helps shape the one after that too, but the outcomes feed backwards and forwards: what is transformed is both the pursuit of the end-in-view (the telos), as well as the means by which it is sought. This is no mere conveyor belt, nor is it mere target practice. Neither is it individualistic, because typically humans’ experiences at and through work are co-temporaneously ‘common values, interests and purposes’, and these cannot be fully known in advance. Moreover, as time unfolds, we are always ‘in the present’, one of the most obvious opportunities afforded is to learn from experience. Such opportunities are frequently not recognised or built upon! By this we mean that often, mere repetition does not generate learning. This is one of the main ways that ‘practice’ is used: to repeat something is often taken to ‘drill’ someone in doing it better, but mere repetition cannot guarantee this. This limited notion of ‘practice’ is not what this book is about, except that it is concerned with the temporal significance of repetition, when the agentive Self, traditionally, tries to learn from this, and build capacities. How can doing something many times (that is, over time) tend to lead to better practices? One way to come at this is through the literature on the construction of expertise—the pursuit of the improvement of practice in the integrated or holistic sense we develop in this book. Experts are agentive. They are (individualistically) agents with highly regarded and sophisticated capacities in something valued by society. Along the pathway, or up the ladder (two metaphors) from Novice to Expert (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1986), capacities become more implicit, holistic and judgement-based and less technicist. Yet these still reside in the individual and are ascribed thus to individual experts, by the public and displayed publicly. The Dreyfus model is developmental, based on situated performance and experiential learning (Benner 2004). In this summary of the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition, we notice its assumption of individualistic agency, which persists as the hierarchy unfolds. Notice also that the first three stages reflect formal structures such as education and training regimes, but that the latter two stages reflect the informality of agency, as expertise emerges. At the top, the Expert, having climbed the ladder, kicks it away and ideally makes a confident holistic judgement. Our interest is in the extent to which this progression requires (because it ignores) sociocultural contextuality, to enable the enactment of expertise in any recognisable way.

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• Novice The novice stage is defined by rules. The instructor breaks down the task so that individual situations can be attached to clearly defined rules. These rules are not developed from practice or context; rather, they are imparted in rote form. The novice learner can begin making connections between a situation and a response, but limitations will appear almost immediately with the complexity of the real world. • Advanced Beginner Here, the learner begins to absorb real-world complexity by recognising additional aspects of given situations. The learner is now learning from the real world, moving beyond a set of rules. In particular, he or she begins to judge the magnitude of given situations, rather than simply identifying them. • Competent As the learner is exposed to the full real-world complexity, he or she must develop a perspective in order to prioritise what determines their response. Then, the learner must begin to determine how he or she should plan their response, rather than simply remembering previous instructions. With this independence comes ownership of the outcome—and this may be stressful, bringing an emotional response. • Proficient Only with ownership, not just of the task but rather the outcome, can a learner advance to proficiency. The learner will be exposed to positive and negative emotional experiences, honing their responses. But he or she must still decide what to do in each situation, without the experience to react automatically. • Expert The expert moves beyond decisions to intuition, having learned such a repertoire of situations that responses are automatically linked. The expert does not calculate or solve problems; rather he or she uses intuition built on exhaustive experience of the real world.

2.5 What Are the Limitations of Traditional Accounts of Agency and Expertise? The limitations of these individualistic assumptions are, for educators, apparent on a daily basis. The best expressions of agentive expertise arise from the sociality of the work (such as in a classroom, operating theatre or courtroom, or on a building site), and in the embeddedness of problem-solving in workplaces which present sophisticated problems often eluding the capacities of any individual to resolve: for example, group-based medical practices, or multi-storey building construction. In

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short, the traditional accounts don’t address teamwork (and learning in groups in general, such as classrooms) and the projects and the diversity of capacities that problems require. So, educators are very sensitive to the particularities of context: of course, all learning is contextual and all learning is socioculturally embedded. These are features of human life. And all individuals will learn differentially—this is as much a feature of their specific situation (in a ‘classroom’), as it is their broader location in sociopolitical structures such as ‘class’—the pun is not really a pun. Furthermore, as we emphasised earlier, Western society privileges traditional individualistic agency: we are, first, decision-making creatures, with high hopes for ourselves—with aspirations and purposes. Our agency is normative in the limited sense of ‘volition’ (to use an outdated and mentalistic entity for ‘willpower’) to ‘enact’ what we (that is: I, the Ego or the Self) want. Our desires are intended to be rational, even perhaps typical—what a ‘commonly sensible’ person expects of life. But ‘common sense’ is a low-status and obscurantist term. It is what we can call a black-box—a mysterious entity into which something important is fed, and from which something important emerges. In between these inputs and outputs, nothing much can be said, other than this: some things are entangled, or immersed, or are experienced. This is a very unhelpful relational reduction. In naming an entity as merely a bundle of relations, nothing is explained. Rather, a label is applied. A black-box is a metaphor we will return to, in this, and subsequent, chapters The main epistemological limitation of traditional agency, that is, its individualistic decision-making (the ‘Jessica Watson’ advocacy that you can become whomever you want to become), is that it ignores the affective as well as the social: taken together, it ignores the crucial socioculturally powerful drivers of normativity that all humans are born into, that we discussed earlier, such as family. These experiences push us from our aloneness into the ‘knitting up’ of relationality from which emerges life’s meaningfulness—we find this with others, not, typically, alone, and not solely through ‘my’ decision-making. The traditional understanding has the great limitation that all this does is justify to me, first and foremost, what I should do, and how I, mainly alone, should or could progress ‘my’ aspirations. And, to further develop this, a second epistemological limitation of this individualistic decision-making is the relegation of human embodiment and its pains and pleasures—and its potential as a material site of learning—to the margins. Embodiment is less obvious—which is very strange, given that it is ubiquitous. Thus, traditional agency implies traditional Cartesian binaries, and this implication is writ large in education: it is made explicit in systems of High vs Technical Schools, Mind over Matter, Professions over Trades and so on (Beckett and Hager 2002: 6–7). In pairs such as ‘thinking vs doing’ and ‘mind versus matter’, the latter term is the poor relation. But it is unhelpful to continue to think of these binaries as discrete ‘things’ in the world that stand in opposition to one another. Already we have inherited an ontological problem. How these binaries-of-discrete-things relate, or can be expected to relate, is downstream from their discrete ontological status to begin with. Thus, the traditional agency is underpinned by an atomistic ontology. There are two entities in this dualistic world, of which the second is low-rent. This has

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been detrimental to anything demonstrably crucial to human learning and practices, such as agency and expertise. Glaringly detrimental, we argue, has been the subjugation of what can be called the socio-materiality of learning. Human embodiment and its relationality with other human bodies is underdone in traditional accounts of learning and practices, not because it is ontologically discrete from the mentalistic or psychologised individual (although it is seen that way), but because relations which are omnipresent in human experience have, hitherto, not been given the ontological priority they deserve. Relations coming first, not last, would mean that ‘things’ (such as ‘minds’ and ‘bodies’) hang within, and off, or around, the relations. Relational priority drives what are purported binaries out of prominence. Yet, the traditional view of some main features of human experience has relations as subsidiary to things (entities). This has them not merely in descending but in condescending order: material experiences and the agency and expertise which accrues with their exercise are relegated merely as relational attributes of the capacities of an individual decision-maker. Ryle (1949; 15ff) famously referred to this ontological reduction as the ‘Ghost in the Machine’ and sourced it to what he called ‘Descartes’ Myth’ of the substantive separation of two entities, the Mind and the Body.

2.6 The Prospect of ‘Relational Agency’ In contrast to the traditional agentive Self, and the traditional notion of the Self-made expert, and the reductive ontology which underpins these, is there a prospect of a truly relational account? Recall that our quest in this chapter has already established the sociocultural significance of a more collectivist account of agency, which, over time, but always ‘in the present’ is about aspirations, by those who share ‘common values, interests and purposes’ (to recall Emirbayer and Mische). This is what subsequent chapters (and all of Part II) will show. Hence, moving on from the traditional accounts of agency and expertise, the main question for the rest of this chapter is: can there be groups that are agentive? Is expertise a socio-political achievement—and likely to emerge within such groups? In addressing these questions, we will develop a distinctive conceptualisation of ‘common values, interests and purposes’. This conceptualisation will resist reduction. It will start and stay with ‘us’ (the sociocultural plane), not the individualistic Self. This plane of conceptual innovation persists throughout Part I of this book, because our critical target is the traditional individualism we now regard as inadequate in shaping the future of practices, learning, and so on. And such a conceptualisation will contribute to the bedrock question of Part II of our book: how might complexity-informed relationality constitute this ‘Us-ness’? The chapter will, now, advance ‘group agency’, in this spirit: When philosophers are open-minded about the possibility of group agency, they accept … that a group of human beings can realise, or at least approximate, at the level of the whole

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group the same kind of rationality that is characteristically realised by normal adult human beings. (Rovane 2014: 1663)

Here, a warning already. Rovane is commencing a critique of List and Pettit (2011) who, she states, hold ‘in tension’ the views that, on the one hand, there is a realism about group agency which is not reducible to an individualistic ontology, but also hold that, on the other hand, this realism requires that such groups have the ontological status of ‘natural persons’, with all the legal rights and responsibilities that accrue to an individual person. Whilst we agree that there is indeed a realism about groups’ agency which is not reducible to an individualistic ontology (and indeed we are trying to progress this realism by attending to the ways complexity thinking offers less reductive accounts of practices, skills, agency and expertise), we do not wish to explore the implications for groups regarded as ‘natural persons’—an ontological status largely unhelpful if we are serious about the socio-material or embodied nature of groups, although as Pettit (2007) has shown, very helpful in exploring political and social freedoms. Rather, in the spirit of open-mindedness Rovane sets out, the re-framing of agency and expertise in what follows in this chapter will illustrate how difficult it is to establish a consistently less reductive, constitutive, account of these two—but that is no excuse for not trying. The limitations of the traditional accounts of both agency and expertise are obvious and have been exposed above. One significantly cogent engagement with less reductive agency and expertise which uses empirical and theoretical analyses together under the term ‘relational agency’ comes from Anne Edwards, who investigates the relational turn in expertise as professionals work in and between work settings and interact with other practitioners and clients to negotiate interpretations of tasks and ways of accomplishing them. The central argument is that the resources that others bring to problems can enhance understandings and can enrich responses. However, working in this way makes demands on practitioners. At the very least, it calls for an additional form of expertise … based on confident engagement with the knowledge that underpins one’s practice as a social worker or nurse, as well as the capacity to recognise and respond to what others might offer. (2010: 13, emphasis added)

An agentive claim is made up of the work of a group arising from the resources of others, which can bring enhanced ‘understandings and can enrich responses’. Expertise of a new kind emerges from this group dynamic, namely ‘confident engagement … as well as the capacity to recognise and respond to what others might offer’. For Edwards, therefore, a new account of agency and a new type of expertise are features of working together in a team environment. For us, examples are playing in an orchestra, contributing to a surgical operation in the theatre, or a legal team in the courtroom, working on the building site for new construction, and so on. There are also many associated capacities and skills often also described over the past two decades as generic competencies: communicability, problem-solving, conflict resolution, literacy, numeracy and so on, as Chap. 4 (Sect. 4.2.2) of the book analyses. ‘Relational agency’ is exercised through growing these capacities (towards expertise) over time. Not surprisingly, this entails explicit attention to the quality of the

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‘give-and-take’ apparent in the enactments of practices such as orchestral playing, or surgery, or building. Learning from doing these can be facilitated through many activities, such as simulations, role-plays, skills training, job rotations, formal studies and so on (see Beckett 2012). Entire industries (in the vocational education sectors, both public and private, of all nations) exist to improve the quality of ‘learning-fromdoing’. What is required in a non-traditionalist account of agency, in favour of groups as sites of a less reductive dynamic that strives to make meaningful differences in practices, is also an account of ‘confident engagement’ in that dynamic. Edwards calls this relational agency, by which she means that, in the workplace, responses and solutions to particular situations that arise there do emerge from the relations—the myriad, messy but purposeful decisionality that a group generates as it grapples with routine, non-routine and sheer unintended circumstances: in short, the happenstance of life at work. This purposeful decisionality is practical. Aristotle sets this out in his famous account of ‘practical wisdom’ (phronesis), which is a ‘true and reasoned state of capacity to act with regard to the things that are good and bad for man …; for good action itself is its end’. And the example is instructive: Pericles [the Athenian statesman and rhetorician] and men like him have practical wisdom … because they can see what is good for themselves and what is good for men in general: we consider that those can do this who are good at managing households and states. (Nicomachean Ethics: Book 4, Chap. 5, 1941 version)

Aristotle emphasises how ‘variable’ practical wisdom is (unlike the certainties of mathematics and science), and that ‘excellence’ is not available (unlike in art, where, for example, beauty is recognisable). Yet, it is a ‘virtue’ because it guides the soul to proper ‘opinions’. Phronesis—by definition an intelligent activity, so agentive—gets Us (the group) where we want to go. It contributes to ‘Us-ness’ because it shapes the group’s identity in encapsulating the common values, interests and purposes they have come to share—but this encapsulation is an emergent phenomenon. The group only knows its sense of agency through the very exercise of it, and it is through this exercise that the affective experience of ‘confident engagement’ is apparent. Confidence is an affective outcome of the group’s engagement with the messiness of practice, amidst the tensions between routine and non-routine responses to activities that are integral to the dynamic of the group. Judgements made within the group (for example, that a particular group response was the right one) emerge from the dynamics of the group, and manifest—and to a large extent, authenticate—the group’s agency. On occasions, the ‘right’ outcome may be termed the ‘appropriate’ outcome, which is a proxy for, and a hallmark of, successful group agency: the appellation ‘appropriate’ (or sometimes ‘inappropriate’) is a marker of a group’s judgement that some end-in-view such as beauty (for the orchestra), health (for the operating theatre), or justice (for the courtroom), is properly engaged by its quotidian agentive ‘right-ness’.

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2.7 Purposeful Reasoning But we need a rich account of purposeful decisionality if these practical judgements are to advance ‘relational agency’ for groups. As we showed earlier, we need to move beyond the individualistic tradition that only ascribed decision-making to a person—the solo Agent, the Self-in-Action. Here, Luntley’s articulation of the ‘conception of the subject as an agent with a capacity to commit to particular things in the environment’ is helpful (2005). Given that his focus is, nonetheless, on the traditional (individualistic) agent, Luntley’s words are noted: Put simply, the good reasoner is trying to get the world right, rather than trying to get rules right, or social practices right, or cultural roles right, etc. This provides a central role for attention in understanding the changes in view of the experienced skilful subject. The experienced subject attends to, and thereby commits her cognitive resources to, particular things and particular configurations of things, in her immediate environment. The upshot of this, if she reasons well, will be action that is answerable to analysis that reveals the general patterns of her behaviour and reasons. The patterns might turn out to be very complicated. What makes the expert a good reasoner, in the sense of someone bound to the oughts of good reasons, is that her reasons are general … In short, we are good reasoners, as opposed to merely consumers of good reasons, not because we are bound to abstract rules and laws, but because we are agents who bind ourselves to, and hold ourselves to finding, particular things worthy of our attention. (2005: 292, emphasis added)

The person or ‘reasoning subject’ (in Luntley’s terms) finds herself committed to particular and important aspects of the world: within her experience, she ‘attends’ to them. Her commitments are shaped by this agentive capacity to ‘see’ the world thusly and to act accordingly. These actions are ‘answerable to analysis’: we can get at what she is doing, from what we see and hear about. It is this sort of person which we find embedded in groups’ practices: ‘we are agents that bind ourselves to, and hold ourselves to finding, particular things worthy of our attention’. There the answerability for variously ‘reasonable’ commitments is located amongst one’s peers. Individual practitioners are answerable for their practical judgements to other practitioners, that is, to groups of ‘Us’, and the reasoning underpinning those judgements is expected as part of the justifications: ‘I did it this way (X) because I thought that we usually see this in that way (Y) and it was a case like Z …’. In this way, as the refinement of purposeful decisionality becomes more distributed (between and amongst peers, at work or in practice groups), the concept of agency also starts to look less exclusively subjective, and less individualistic. Luntley’s point that ‘[w]hat makes the expert a good reasoner, in the sense of someone bound to the oughts of good reasons, is that her reasons are general’ (292), is, in the case of expert practitioners, apparent in the general ‘oughts’ of normativity which mark out the practice (say, of nursing). Expert practitioners are constituted, not merely individually, but also, and first-up, as sharers of, ‘common values, interests and purposes’ (as Emirbayer and Mische stated). Their expertise emerges from the ‘commonality’ of appraisals, by their peers,

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that superlative attainment looks like (is ‘seen’ as) just the kind of thing the group is instantiating. This cascades down to what individuals then learn from, and towards which, they can better themselves: there are (as Luntley states) ‘particular things worthy of our attention’. In practice settings (say, an orchestra or an operating theatre), ‘our attention’ is constituted in the perception of peers (say, other musicians or medical staff). And, to reiterate, what is given attention is the dynamic of purposeful decisionality which the group is engaged with—‘What do we do now? Let’s look at it (see it) this way’—after which action ensues. So, agentive capacity, and its expert exercise, is as much a social characteristic as it is individualistic. The individual’s agency is best conceptualised within the totality of ‘commitments’ that human experience provides: we are ineluctably sociomaterial entities, powerfully and necessarily constituted by our reasoning capacity. But ‘reasoning’ in these sites of group practices such as orchestral playing, or surgery, is more than cognition. A ‘good reasoner’ is an individual or a group for whom the ‘oughts’ are shaped by good reasoning around ‘common values, interests and purposes’. Human experiences are holistic, no less so when engaged in groups, and the commitments we make in such groups just by being there. Luntley draws attention to ‘attending’, but this reasoning which it generates is equally affective as it is cognitive: we want and desire various ‘goods’. The group’s purposeful decisionality has a velocity—the motivation is betterment in the particular case—with an end-inview, or telos, which is normative (beauty, health, justice, for example). As we claimed earlier, all of life is normative (we are born into sociocultural structures that shape us), and the particularity of this—in locations of practice— no less so. The telos of nursing, for example, contributes to the decisionality of medical professionals in surgical settings. We claim that the group’s decisionality, or practical judgement-making, is driven as much by the normativity of reasoning and that this includes affective experiences. Indeed, these are intertwined. What counts (to peers) as a ‘good’ reason is, by definition, normative. Its ‘goodness’ is found in its (inevitably normative) ‘appropriateness’, according to the telos of the practice. In the messiness of groups’ practices, as agency ebbs and flows, and as expertise and outcomes emerge and disappear, human goods—practical purposes—are thus constituted in the quest to achieve them. Aristotle argues that judgements that are practically wise are about ‘what is to be done. For the originating causes of the things that are done consist at the end at which they are aimed’ (Nicomachean Ethics: Book 6, Chap. 5, 1941 version). So, we see how normativity constitutes groups’ practical judgements: the reasoning and the justifications for actions which peers and individuals have and can give one another are affectively enfolded within commitments to shared or common values: what it is to be not just a practitionerwithin-a-practice, but to be a group which is agentive. This embedded, constitutive agentive capacity is part of who we are, at and through our work. It gets our ‘Us-ness’ moving. Moreover, there is a larger claim. Groups’ agency helps to make our Us-ness ontologically distinctive—how (and how well), and with whom, we do our work, makes us who we are, and so identity is an emergent property, spinning off from deep

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within our evolving purposes—what Aristotle calls ‘good actions’. As Edwards sets out, identity is not a stable characteristic, but is dialogical, negotiated and accomplished within activities … which are in turn located in practices. But I suggest it is also more than that. One’s identity is also an organising principle for action: we approach and tackle what we think we are able to change and make changes in line with what matters to us: our interests. These interests are culturally mediated, but nonetheless experienced personally in terms of our commitments, standpoints and the resources available to us. (2010: 10)

It is no less true that human ‘values, interests and purposes’ are experienced as communally as they are personally, that is, individually, but it is fundamental to this book that their changeability, even their communal mediation, is a matter of giveand-take, in what Luntley calls our perceptual ‘commitments’, as our actions within practices evolve.

2.8 Work(ers) in Progress In a world increasingly sensitive to the ‘relational turn’, our individual and our group agency are both in the relational mix, and both are evolutionary. Practitioners act amongst the fluidity of daily work (and of course in the more general arena of daily life), so our individual and communal experience of our agentive Selves is itself a component in the construction of our identities. There is much that is ontological about work life. We ‘see’ our Selves as more or less agentive, depending on the exercise of that ‘relational agency’, and if Edwards is correct, it is increasingly seen as communal—we see our Us-ness as in flux. Any account of groups’ agency would need to take seriously the emergent, mediated and evolutionary nature of those experiences, not least because individual practitioners see themselves as work(ers)in-progress. According to Edwards, normativity is crucial to this ontological messiness: Relational agency … is concerned with the “why” of collaboration as much as the “how” … [therefore] more attention should be given to why people engage in collaboration and what are their “passionately held motives”. Here we return to the importance of values in professional practices … [these] are woven through the common knowledge that mediates fluid and purposeful responses and are recognised as crucial to how professionals interpret problems in practice. (2010: 69, emphasis added)

Developing the notion of group agency as ‘relational agency’ (along the lines Edwards articulates) brings to prominence the functionally holistic and normative aspects of agentive and expert experience. Aristotle brings epistemological depth to the purposeful decisionality which groups manifest in these respects. And this has helped to locate the quest for a less reductive account of these and related phenomena, such as skills, in complexity thinking. But there is a problem. Edwards’s relational agency does not give a completely robust account of groups’ agency. Her suggestion that ‘more attention should be given

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to why people engage in collaboration’ does not rise above agency as an aggregation of individuals—closely related, and collaborating, yes, but not yet communally agentive as a group. We still seek an analysis that articulates the ‘common knowledge that mediates fluid and purposeful responses’ of the less reductive kind we need. We cannot rest with the ‘fluid, mediated’ flux of purposeful responses to practice. This is a black-box of unknowns—an epistemological entanglement metaphor which does not progress past the identification of central and significant aspects of working together, albeit collaboratively, but not, yet, communally. Not, yet, with an ontological assumption that is at the heart of this book: that we start and stay with the less reductive functionality (or dynamic) of groups as genuinely communal—affectively, cognitively, socio-materially—and see this through emergent experiences which are shaped by meaning-making. Similarly, in her recent book Tollefsen (2015) sets out an account of ‘joint intentionality and collective responsibility’ (synonyms for Edwards’s ‘common values’, etc.). This depends on making sense of others by attributing to them ‘a unified perspective—a rational point of view—and that [because the group] shares our norms of rationality … we attribute beliefs, intentions and desires in the same way we do to individuals’ (2015: 104). Tollefsen claims our practice of interpreting the actions of groups is ‘just an extension of our practice of making sense of individuals’ (104). So, for her, the group is a collective, or collaborative, rather than a communal, entity. We need to be clear about the significance of this ‘relational turn’. It is especially this last entity (the communal) which carries well the ontologically less reductive potential which a focus on relationality will amplify. However, the other two, that is, the ‘collective’ and the ‘collaborative’, tend backwards, to the ontological priority of individuals, that can be easily ‘en-grouped’ or ‘crowded’ upwards into some thing. The relations remain, as it were, subsidiary, on that ontological assumption. We merely have more and different things-in-the-world. Similarly, Gallagher advocates an education in narratives, through which we ‘can and do understand and empathise with others … when we know their stories, when we can frame their behaviour in a narrative that informs us about their history or their situation’ (2016: 43). This ‘we’ starts with ‘me’, for Gallagher, which is akin to Tollefsen’s view that a group is a collective, an aggregation, of individuals, that gains its ‘group agency’ through its ontological compilation as an aggregation of like-minded, decision-making individuals. Both these accounts of the educative significance of sociality start with individuals’ teleologies and bridge across to groups and their narratives. Gallagher invokes Aristotle’s phronesis because ‘being with others’ can develop ‘a broader notion of the good’ (43). Tollefsen wants to show that groups can be treated as agents and deserve to be held morally accountable. Both are worthy relational analyses, but susceptible to the same criticism. This is that both reflect Edwards’s problem: the ‘communal’ entity is black-boxed as an entanglement. Thus, ‘relational agency’ is the efflux of traditional accounts of agency and expertise, the by-product of collectivist and, to some extent, collaborative, accounts of what is required in the world of normative relations of significance in

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the social sciences, particularly in workplace practices. By contrast, our book gives ontological priority to relationality. This second chapter has interrogated traditional understandings of agency and expertise and tried to show how the relational turn is indeed the way to improve on the tradition, but that it has two main limitations. To avoid black-box outcomes, we will need to address how complexity thinking offers a better way to take relationality of agency and expertise on to more innovative accounts of these central human experiences. In Part III, a more robust account of agency and expertise in relation to practice and skills will be given, in the light of current complexity thinking (expounded in Part II).

References Aristotle. (1941 version). Nicomachean ethics. In R. McKeon (Ed.), The basic works of Aristotle. New York: Random House. Beckett, D. (2009). Holistic competence: Putting judgements first. In K. Illeris (Ed.), International perspectives on competence development: Developing skills and capabilities (pp. 69–82). London: Routledge. Beckett, D. (2012). Of maestros and muscles: Expertise and practices at work. In D. Aspin & J. Chapman (Eds.), Second international handbook of lifelong learning (pp. 113–127). Netherlands: Springer. Beckett, D., & Hager, P. (2002). Life, work and learning: Practice in postmodernity. London: Routledge. Benner, P. (2004). Using the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition to describe and interpret skill acquisition and clinical judgment in nursing practice and education. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 24(3), 188–199. https://doi.org/10.1177/0270467604265061. Dreyfus, H. L., & Dreyfus, S. E. (1986). Mind over machine: The power of human intuition and expertise in the age of the computer. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Edwards, A. (2010). Being an expert professional practitioner: The relational turn in expertise. Netherlands: Springer. Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. (1998). What is agency? The American Journal of Sociology, 103(4), 962–1023. https://doi.org/10.1086/231294. Gallagher, S. (2016). An education in narratives. In D. Simpson & D. Beckett (Eds.), Expertise, pedagogy and practice (pp. 37–46). Abingdon, Oxford: Routledge. Hager, P. (2012). Theories of practice and their connections with learning: A continuum of more and less inclusive accounts. In P. Hager, A. Lee, & A. Reich, A. (Eds.), Practice, learning and change: Practice-theory perspectives on professional learning (pp. 17–32). Netherlands: Springer. Jessica Watson our newest hero, says Rudd (2010, May 15), NewsComAu. Retrieved from http:// www.news.com.au. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. (n.d.). Wikipedia. Retrieved May 22, 2018, from https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life,_Liberty_and_the_pursuit_of_Happiness. List, C., & Pettit, P. (2011). Group agency: The possibility, design and status of corporate agents. New York: Oxford University Press. Luntley, M. (2005). The role of judgement. Philosophical Explorations: An International Journal for the Philosophy of Mind and Action, 8(3), 281–295. https://doi.org/10.1080/13869790500219620. Pettit, P. (2007). Free persons and free choices. History of Political Thought, 28(4), 709–718.

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Rovane, C. (2014). Group agency and individualism. Erkenntnis, 79(S9), 1663–1684. https://doi. org/10.1007/s10670-014-9634-9. Ryle, G. (1949). The concept of mind. London: Hutchinson. Tollefsen, D. P. (2015). Groups as agents. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Chapter 3

Issues Concerning Practice

As was demonstrated in the previous chapter, human agency, as the capacity to make a difference, has strong conceptual links to the idea that humans engage in practices of many kinds. This chapter will investigate ‘practice’ and its cognate concepts. Not surprisingly, it will demonstrate that similar unresolved issues, of the sort that the previous chapter showed to surround the concept of agency, recur in the case of practice and its cognates. Recent decades have seen a growing interest in practice theory as an innovative way to understand all aspects of social life (see, e.g., Schatzki et al. 2001). Thus, practice has come to the fore as a crucial concept for advancing our understanding of particular sub-categories of social life, including those that are a particular focus of this book, such as professional performance in a workplace or attaining and maintaining expertise within a particular occupation (see, e.g., Hager et al. 2012). This chapter will highlight ambiguities in common usages of the term ‘practice’ and discuss reasons for this widespread ambiguity. It will be shown that considerable flexibility in the scope of the term ‘practice’ is also evident in more scholarly literature. Nevertheless, practice theory has been increasingly prominent in literature concerned with understanding human performances of all kinds. This chapter outlines the basics of several prominent practice theories and considers their strengths and limitations. It will conclude that major limitations of received accounts of practice are twofold. First, they fail to adequately recognise the vital role of relationality. This is so because they treat relationality in traditional reductive terms, thereby limiting its explanatory value. Second, they focus unduly on performances of individual practitioners, thereby overlooking the major significance of group performances for understanding practice.

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3.1 Common Talk About Practice, Practise and Practices ‘Practice’ as a noun has diverse meanings: to improve performance by repetition (‘practice makes perfect’), but it also designates particular kinds of activities, such as ‘a flourishing legal practice’, ‘traditional liturgical practices’ and so on. As well, it can refer to particular ways of doing things, for example, ‘our normal practice is to require a month’s notice’ or ‘the usual practice here is to take a 40-minute lunch break’. In addition, there are verb-related variants such as: ‘X is a practising solicitor’ or ‘Y practises medicine’. Thus, common talk encompasses a wide diversity of meanings of ‘practice’ and its cognate concepts. This diversity of meanings of ‘practice’ in common talk is evident even in literature that is supposed to be more precise and careful in its choice of words. Thus, although the term ‘practice’ appears increasingly in a wide range of writings, particularly in the social and behavioural sciences, there appears to be little or no discernible agreement on the meaning and scope of this term. In reaction to this situation, Green has suggested that the term ‘practice’ is ‘inescapably contested, if not essentially contestable’ (2009: 2). Yet, despite this diversity of meaning, most writers who employ the term ‘practice’ typically assume that its meaning is unproblematic. This assumption has prompted Green to observe further that ‘practice’ is ‘a “stop word” par excellence’ (2009: 2). A common example of ambiguous and unproblematised use of the term ‘practice’ is the following. ‘Practice’, in both singular and plural instances, is frequently conjoined with a preceding classifier, for example, legal practice, teaching practice, professional practice, literacy practice, confessional practices, discursive practices and political practices. In such cases, semantic attention is invariably focused on the preceding classifier with the idea of practice or practices being assumed to be unproblematic. Yet surely the scope of ‘practice’ is very different between (say) legal practice and professional practice, with both being different from editorial practice. These examples are typical of a widespread use of the term ‘practice’ in untheorised and taken-for-granted ways, even in more serious literature. Antonacopoulou has suggested two main mechanisms to explain this ubiquitous ambiguity. First, Antonacopoulou points to ‘a tendency to employ notions of practice to provide all encompassing descriptions of cultural characteristics on a macro level’ (2008: 114). Here, Antonacopoulou has identified a propensity to use the generic term ‘practice’ as a convenient name for a bundle of related macro-activities. However, in such cases, closer consideration typically reveals that the supposed name of a practice is actually a collective term for a whole host of disparate activities. Depending on the context, these disparate activities may or may not themselves be usefully described as practices, but even when they are, they are more plausibly regarded as somewhat different practices. For instance, ‘legal practice’ is a collective term for a diverse range of legal activities. Despite some surface similarities, the practice of family law is somewhat different in detail from the practice of criminal law; immigration lawyers require a significantly different set of abilities and skills than do property lawyers; and so on.

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Thus, though terms such as ‘legal practice’ are no doubt useful in certain contexts, using ‘practice’ as an all-encompassing label for a set of cultural characteristics or social activities is unlikely to be either explanatory or enlightening for theorising practices in general, or even particular practices. Nevertheless, it is very easy to fall into using the term ‘practice’ in this taken-for-granted macro-way. Even MacIntyre, one of the best-known theoreticians of practice (e.g. MacIntyre 1981, 1994), has on occasions succumbed to this lapse. He famously nominated construction as a typical practice, overlooking the wide diversity of human constructions, e.g. roads, bridges, domestic housing, cathedrals, boats and so on. Yet MacIntyre’s own detailed criteria that an activity must meet to count as a practice require that road building, boat building and cathedral building, for example, are all distinctly different practices (see Hager 2011: 550–552). Thus, MacIntyre’s own carefully developed account of the nature of practices rules out the idea that construction is a single practice. Instead, it is clearly a generic or blanket term for a multitude of very different practices. This first mechanism, highlighted by Antonacopoulou, serves readily to explain much of the scope ambiguity that characterises common usages of ‘practice’ and ‘practices’. But there is more to this story. Antonacopoulou (2008) proposes yet a second mechanism to account for the widespread use of the term ‘practice’ in untheorised and taken-for-granted ways. This mechanism operates at the micro-level. Here, ‘practice’ is applied indiscriminately as a descriptor of ‘specific activities on a micro level’ (2008: 114). This usage of the term ‘practice’ applies it to any instance of human behaviour, human activity or, even, human action. As Green noted, such usage is tantamount to equating practice with ‘just any kind of natural or material activity, … what might be deemed “brute” activity’ (2009: 7). Such profligate, atheoretical usage has the unhelpful effect of virtually draining the term ‘practice’ of any explanatory value. If literally anything that human beings do can be counted as a practice, then the concept ceases to be useful. In other words, a theoretical term that applies to everything applies to nothing. We turn now from common talk to more reflective accounts of practice and practices. Here, we will find that ambiguous use of these terms remains a significant issue.

3.2 Theoretical Understandings of Practice and Practices 3.2.1 The Practice Turn Though the terms ‘practice’, ‘practices’ and ‘practise’ have been long-standing common currency, in recent decades there has emerged a prominent trend for the concept of practice and its cognates to assume a major role in theorising within the humanities and social sciences. This recent trend, commonly referred to as the ‘practice turn’ (Schatzki et al. 2001), makes human practices the fundamental bearers of understanding, intelligibility and meanings within humanities and social sciences theorising.

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Thus, the ‘practice turn’ effectively discards the once-favoured mental entity concepts of earlier theorising (such as beliefs, desires, emotions and purposes), replacing them with concepts associated with human practices (such as embodied capacities, know-how, skills, tacit understanding and dispositions). The practice turn has gained strong impetus from the support of leading philosophers and social theorists. They include such notable figures as Dreyfus (2001, influenced significantly by Heidegger), MacIntyre (1981, 1990, 1994, 1999, strongly influenced by Aristotle) and Schatzki (1996, 2001, 2002, 2005, 2006, strongly influenced by Wittgenstein), Bourdieu (1977, 1990), Giddens (1984), Brandom (2001) and Taylor (1995). This practice turn has impacted significantly on diverse disciplines within the humanities and social sciences, such as philosophy, sociology, history, anthropology, cultural theory, and science and technology studies. These developments have led to the concept of practice figuring prominently in recent writings on education and learning. However, given the previous discussion, it is unsurprising to find that the term ‘practice’ is employed in ambiguous ways with varying scope within these literatures.

3.2.2 Various Construals of Practice in the Theoretical Literature As noted above, there is enormous variation in the scope of the term ‘practice’ as it occurs in common parlance. Seemingly, practices can range from highly structured and regulated activities, such as the practice of law, right through to any specific micro-level human action. As we saw above, Antonacopoulou has identified two plausible mechanisms to account for this unusually profligate ambiguity within common usage. As one might expect, the theoretical literature on practice and practices is marked by more careful usage of practice and its cognates. Theoreticians do tend to be relatively consistent in their own deployment of practice and its cognates. Nevertheless, an analysis of this literature shows that there is wide variation in the ways that different theoreticians use these terms. As well, it is evident that most serious writers apparently assume that their own favoured meaning of ‘practice’ is self-evidently the ‘natural’ one. In response to this diversity within the literature, Hager (2012: 18–27) identifies a continuum from ‘more inclusive’ to ‘less inclusive’ on which diverse understandings of practice can be located. Those accounts that apply the term ‘practice’ liberally to human actions of many kinds are located towards the more inclusive end of the continuum, whereas accounts that restrict the term to human activities that meet more specific and complex criteria belong at the less inclusive end of the continuum. The crucial point is that different theoreticians regard different kinds of activities as being practices. Here, the issue is not whose usage of the terms ‘practice’ and ‘practices’ is correct or incorrect. Rather, different writers are using these terms to do different kinds of theoretical work, in ways that best serve their own particular

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purposes. However, we can confidently assert that some understandings of practice are more useful than are others for thinking about a given situation. Practice theorists located at the ‘more inclusive’ end of the continuum of understandings of practice typically require that if behaviours, activities or actions are to count as practices, they must exhibit certain minimal features. For instance, Polkinghorne (2004) proposed that the minimum necessary feature of a practice is that it should be intentional activity directed to achieving a goal. Of course, most human behaviours, activities or actions are intentional, so this requirement implies that the field of practices is very large indeed. Moving a small way along the continuum, we come to theorists who propose that, in addition to being intentional, practices are fundamentally rule-governed routines. This proposal, one that is still fairly inclusive, suggests that the performance of a practice requires the performer to act according to the set of rules that together constitute the particular practice. It is usually accepted that some of these constitutive rules may be tacit (Searle 1995). Nevertheless, experienced practitioners are able to easily recognise whether or not these rules are being followed. This understanding of practice has been significant, not least because of its close connections with popular readings of key writings of Foucault (e.g. 1979, 1991). Foucault’s seminal idea of power being located in ‘regimes of practices’ is elaborated via notions such as imposed rules, taken-for-granted routines and rituals and institutionalised regularities being the basic mechanisms of governance and self-governance. Foucault’s work nicely illustrates the earlier point that different writers employ the terms practice and practices for different theoretical purposes. Foucault favours the relatively inclusive understanding of practices as rule-governed routines, because this usage serves a main aim of his groundbreaking work on power and governmentality, which is to problematise and dismantle larger social science abstractions such as ‘structure’. Even more inclusive deployment of ‘practice’ and ‘practices’ is evident in some writers strongly influenced by Foucault. For example, Usher and Edwards (2007) employ these terms with bewildering frequency throughout their book, at a multiplicity of levels of description. As a sample, they variously refer to: truth-telling practices, meaning-making practices, confessional practices, discursive practices, vocational practices, homemaking practices, learning practices, lifelong learning practices, educational practices, assessment practices, disciplinary practices, pedagogical practices, social practices, cultural practices, political practices, lifestyle practices, signifying practices and interpretive practices. Yet despite the ubiquity of ‘practice’ and ‘practices’ in their book, Usher and Edwards never address the import of these terms. Their significance is simply assumed to be obvious. This situation probably arises from unreflective adoption of Foucault’s deployment of the term ‘practice’. However, Foucault’s work does seem to regard practices as rule-governed routines, even if the rules are sometimes relatively unspoken. Yet when we consider some of the supposed practices discussed by Usher and Edwards, e.g. homemaking practices, learning practices, political practices and lifestyle practices, it is far from

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certain that they are rule-governed activities. These four supposed instances of practices are simply far too broad and generic for it to be plausible to claim that they are characterised by particular constitutive rules or standard operating procedures. Rather than naming practices, these four instances look more like generic terms for collections of practices, or, possibly, activities that themselves may be better not described as practices. If we were tasked with identifying constitutive rules or standard operating procedures for these ‘practices’, it would be necessary to identify some of the specific instances that fall under these generic terms, e.g. cleaning (a homemaking practice) or presenting seminars (a learning practice). But even then, the activities of cleaning or presenting seminars still look to be too broad and vague. The diversity of ways in which cleaning might be carried out or seminars presented is so wide that it might be unhelpful to regard either of these activities as a practice. Very few of the generic activities described by Usher and Edwards as practices are subject to constitutive rules or standard operating procedures. One is reminded of Antonacopoulou’s suggestion, discussed earlier, that a major cause of the prevalent tendency to use the terms practice and practices loosely is the propensity to apply these labels indiscriminately to bundles of related macro-activities. Moving a bit further along the continuum, a somewhat richer account of practice is due to Reckwitz (2002) who maintains that, as well as being rule-governed routines, practices are characterised by the interconnectedness of their various components. The range of components that Reckwitz sees as constituting a practice is evident from his characterisation of a practice as: the whole of human action … a routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understandings, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge. (2002: 249)

Reckwitz (2002: 250) further describes a practice as ‘a “block” whose existence necessarily depends on the existence and specific interconnectedness of these elements’. So, Reckwitz’s account adds a further dimension to the features of practices—a practice is a whole that depends on the interrelatedness of its parts. Although this is a richer understanding of practice than the ones discussed so far, Reckwitz’s account is still located towards the ‘more inclusive’ end of the continuum of accounts of practice. Primarily, this is so because, by insisting on the central role of routine in practices, Reckwitz distances his account from ‘less inclusive’ ones. In addition, as various writers have noted (e.g. Antonacopoulou 2008: 116; Hager et al. 2012: 3–4; Kemmis et al. 2012), it is not enough to merely recognise the interconnectedness of the various components of practice. Rather, any useful theorisation will need to describe the nature of these interconnections, thereby, for example, facilitating empirical investigation of these matters. This focus on the relational interconnections of the various components of a practice is one characteristic of theories located towards the less inclusive end of the continuum. Specifying the nature of these relational interconnections will be an ongoing priority in this book.

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But there is another crucial characteristic of theories located towards the less inclusive end of the continuum. These theories assert that invariant rule following is far too narrow a descriptor of less inclusive instances of practice. Practices involve much more-than-routine rule following. Rules do not apply themselves. For situations of any complexity, judgement is needed to interpret how the rules apply to the particular situation at hand (see, e.g., Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1986; Taylor 1995; Antonacopoulou 2008: 116; Winch 2010: 85–87). So, the claim that routinised activities are too thin to be numbered amongst practices clearly demarcates the more inclusive end from the less inclusive end of our continuum of practice theories. Taken together, these two characteristics of interconnectedness and more-thanroutine rule following ensure that theories located at the less inclusive end of the continuum view practices as being significantly complex activities. For these theories, micro-level activities, routine behaviours, specific actions and the like are all ruled out as possible practices. This situation reflects the major focus of theories at the less inclusive end of the continuum, which is description and analysis of occupations or activities that can be carried out professionally, where ‘professional’ is understood in its broadest sense. Typically, these theories are concerned to identify the many components of a practice that together underpin high-quality performance of that practice. Thus, for these theories something counts as a practice only if it meets a relatively complex set of criteria. As the topics that are the focus of Part I of this book indicate, our main interest also lies with the accounts of practice located at the less inclusive end of the continuum.

3.2.3 Less Inclusive Understandings of Practice There has been a large number of significant contributions to the project of developing a robust, less inclusive account of practice, one that will encapsulate the wide range of qualities and attributes that are required for high-quality professional performance of relatively complex human activities. Reflecting the spirit of the practice turn, there are some significant commonalities that characterise the work of these less inclusive practice theorists. Shunning traditional epistemological dualisms such as mind/body, mental/manual and theory/practice, practice theorists thereby reject all claims that human activities and performances are fundamentally cognitive enterprises. Rather, the intelligibility and meaning of such activities and performances come from humans’ interactions and engagements with the world. This offers a novel ontology of human social activity, one that displaces once-favoured cognitive explanatory concepts, such as propositions and mental representations. Notable contributors to this project include Schatzki (e.g. 1996, 2001, 2006, 2012), MacIntyre (e.g. 1981, 1994), Kemmis (2005, 2010), Green (2009), Rouse (2007) and Young and Muller (2014). Only a selection of these will be considered in detail in this section to present assumptions which are common across these diverse accounts. These choices also reflect the wide diversity of features that have been proposed by

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practice theorists as distinguishing marks of a practice. The theorists chosen to serve these twin purposes here are Schatzki, MacIntyre, Kemmis and Green. The work of others, such as Antonacopoulou and Rouse, will receive attention later in this chapter. MacIntyre’s Account of a Practice MacIntyre famously characterised a practice as any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partly definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. (1981: 175)

The key concept in this definition of a practice is internal goods. What sets internal goods apart is that they are those goods that can only be had by engagement in the particular practice (MacIntyre 1981: 176). For MacIntyre, ‘internal’ has dual connotations. First, internal goods are internal to a practice in the sense that they can only be specified in terms of the particular practice. Second, they are internal in that they can only be identified and recognised by the experience of participating in the particular practice. Hence, practice theorists and others ‘who lack the relevant experience’ of the practice ‘are incompetent thereby as judges of internal goods’ (1981: 176). MacIntyre illustrates these points using the example of the practice of fishing. The internal goods of this practice include the knacks, feels and know-how that successful fishing requires, as well as various affective attributes and dispositions, such as the desire to excel at fishing and the care to avoid over-fishing for the sustainability of future fish stocks. MacIntyre maintains that participants in the practice of fishing experience and appreciate these internal goods in a way that is not open to those outside of the practice. As well, he claims that internal goods serve to benefit the practice itself. For instance, the desire to excel at fishing encourages healthy competition within the practice resulting in fishing know-how being expanded. As well as realising internal goods, practices also achieve external goods. But external goods are crucially different according to MacIntyre. Whereas the internal goods of a particular practice can only be obtained by participation in that practice, the external goods can always be obtained in other ways: ‘their achievement is never to be had only by engaging in some particular kind of practice’ (MacIntyre 1981: 176). As well, MacIntyre stresses further important differences between the two kinds of goods. He maintains that realising internal goods ‘is a good for the whole community who participate in the practice’, whereas external goods ‘when achieved … are always some individual’s property and possession’ (1981: 178). In addition, both types of goods involve competition: competition to excel in the case of internal goods, competition for resources, which involves winners and losers, in the case of external goods. In his writings, MacIntyre commonly offers prestige, status and money as familiar examples of external goods. This propensity by MacIntyre turns out to be misleading, because it strongly implies that typically external goods are morally dubious. However, close acquaintance with the details of MacIntyre’s theory reveals that it is actually committed to the principle that many, probably most, external

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goods are morally neutral (see Hager 2011: 552–554). Consider again MacIntyre’s own example—the practice of fishing. Like human motives, the external goods of a practice are invariably a mixed lot. Clearly, a major external good for the practice of fishing is food, since it closely conforms to MacIntyre’s three stated criteria for an external good. Food can be had other than through the practice of fishing; the fishing catch is someone’s property, and, fishing for food is an instance of competition for resources. Yet, as an external good, food is clearly in a very different category than (say) prestige or status. One other significant part of MacIntyre’s account is the distinction that he makes between practices and the institutions that exist to support and enhance them. For instance, various professional associations represent and support particular professions. Any satisfactory account of practices needs to recognise the key role such organisations play in their maintenance and development. As was noted earlier, as we move from the more inclusive to the less inclusive along the continuum of understandings of practice, the interconnectedness of the components of a practice becomes a more prominent issue. In MacIntyre’s account, the key notions of internal and external goods address this issue. Higgins (2003, 2010) has provided a very helpful analysis of MacIntyre’s concept of internal goods in order to show the diversity within this category. He identified at least four kinds of internal goods in MacIntyre’s practice theory (Higgins 2003: 287–9): • outstanding work or performance (which the practitioner appreciates); • what it is like to be engaged in the practice (which the practitioner experiences as good); • an excellence of character (which the practitioner displays); and • a ‘biographical genre’—what it means to live as a practitioner (which shapes the practitioner’s life). It is noteworthy that the first of these internal goods is realised in the performance of the practice, whilst the other three pertain to the practitioner. So, internal goods serve to interconnect the practitioner with aspects of what the practice is achieving. Thus, MacIntyre’s theory singles out important relations between the individual practitioner and the practice itself. The significance of this move will be critically evaluated later as the crucial role of relations within practices becomes a major topic for this book. But there is a further way in which MacIntyre’s account of practice features interconnectedness. This concerns the significant relations between internal goods and external goods. At first glance, MacIntyre’s work might appear to posit a sharp divide between internal and external goods. However, these two kinds of goods are not as disparate as a first reading of MacIntyre’s work might suggest. As Hager (2011) demonstrated, MacIntyre’s account in fact often requires a very close interconnection between external and internal goods. Take, for instance, an iconic building such as St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. Considered in terms of external goods, it is an impressively built place of worship that is the property of the Church of England. But from a more aesthetic perspective, it is a beautiful building that exemplifies the internal goods of the various practices that went into its construction. In MacIntyrean terminology,

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it can be said that St. Paul’s exhibits the skills, know-how and virtues of the many excellent practitioners who constructed it. Thus, St. Paul’s Cathedral simultaneously exemplifies and exhibits both internal and external goods. MacIntyre’s practice theory serves to highlight two aspects of practice that will be prominent in the remainder of this chapter, as well as later in this book: first, that practices are very complex entities; and, second, that the relations within practices need to be included in any account of them, particularly accounts of less inclusive practices. We will be arguing that the second of these aspects in particular has not received the detailed consideration that it requires for more productive understandings of practice to emerge. Schatzki’s Account of Practice Schatzki posits practice as the crucial concept for understanding ‘both social phenomena and key “psychological” features of human life’ (Schatzki 2012: 14). So, for Schatzki, practices are the ‘site of the social’, where ‘the social is a field of embodied, materially interwoven practices centrally organized around shared practical understandings’ (2001: 3). Thus, the social is a complex mesh of practices, in which a practice is a ‘nexus of doings and sayings [that are] spatially dispersed and temporally unfolding’ (Schatzki 1996: 89). Schatzki further elaborates his understanding of practices, defining them as ‘structured spatio-temporal manifolds of action … that have two basic components: action and structure’ (Schatzki 2006: 1863–1864). A diversity of items is included within the important category of structure. It includes: • know-how (performance of the actions and activities involved in a practice); • rules (instructions and maxims that guide or specify performance); • teleo-affective structuring (the purposes, goals and emotions that underpin and direct performance of the practice); and • general understandings (information relevant to the performance in a particular job or case). Thus, practices comprise an integration of action and the diverse items that together comprise structure. For Schatzki, these various elements of structure are embedded in the performances of a practice, that is, the actions of practitioners. Schatzki notes the interrelatedness of the various material and non-material aspects of practices, which include artefacts, people, technologies and spaces (Schatzki 2006: 1864). He also recognises the interrelatedness of practices with other practices. More recently Schatzki (2012) has provided a more detailed account of his views on the relationality of practices. An elaboration of the roles of relations within his theory is timely, since a major feature of his account of practices has been its repeated use of key concepts that suggest some form of bland relationality—concepts such as ‘nexuses’, ‘bundles’ and ‘arrangements’. The relative vagueness of these relational concepts has encouraged the perception that Schatzki has, in effect, black-boxed relationality. However, Schatzki’s more recent account (2012: 16) is more expansive. He argues that the relationality of practices consists

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in just five kinds of relation: causality, prefiguration, constitution, intentionality and intelligibility. Schatzki offers examples of each of these kinds of relations and their roles in his overall theory. He explicates further the ontology of his account: ‘practices are nexuses of activities’ and ‘activities are events’ Schatzki (2012: 18). However, the key point for our present concerns is that, as Schatzki emphasises repeatedly, in all cases these relations are relations between practices and material arrangements. It is because of these relations between them that practices and material arrangements bundle. Embodied human individuals, including practitioners, are a sub-class of material arrangements. So Schatzki’s theory includes relational interactions between individual humans within a practice. For example, within the practice of teaching, a teacher has the intention that a student will learn, and, hopefully, the teaching will cause the student to learn. However, in contrast to Schatzki, we will argue later in this book that it is precisely through relational interactions between practitioners that practices evolve— that novel relations emerge. It is true that Schatzki also recognises that practices evolve over time (2012: 21–22). He attributes this to the indeterminacy of human activity. Our main disagreement with Schatzki stems from his assumption, endemic to Anglo-American philosophy, that the individual human is the basic unit for social analysis. This assumption prevents him from considering the possibility that the evolution of a practice stems from relations arising from interactions between groups of practitioners, rather than just the activities of a single practitioner. Although the focus of this book means that our interest centres on less inclusive accounts of practice, it is notable that Schatzki’s theorising encompasses both less inclusive and more inclusive instances of practices. This is evident from Schatzki distinguishing between ‘integrative practices’ and ‘dispersed practices’. Integrative practices, which match the topics of this book, are ‘the more complex practices found in and constitutive of particular domains of social life’ (Schatzki 1996: 98). Schatzki’s examples include cooking, farming and business. (These generic examples of supposed practices leave Schatzki open to the same critical response that MacIntyre’s suggestion of construction as a practice attracted earlier in this chapter.) Dispersed practices, on the other hand, recur in and across multiple domains and sectors of social life. They include activities such as ‘describing … explaining, questioning, reporting, examining and imagining’ (Schatzki 1996: 91). Generally, Schatzki notes, dispersed practices are much less complex than integrative practices. So, speaking broadly, his dispersed practices are located towards the more inclusive end of our continuum and integrative practices lie towards the less inclusive end. However, of course, precise locations on the continuum will vary according to details of particular cases. What counts as satisfactory describing or explaining, for example, will very likely vary with the details of the particular context. Nevertheless, it seems to be clear that Schatzki’s integrative practices are significantly more complex than the dispersed practices.

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Kemmis’s Synoptic Overview of Theories of Practice As well as theorists such as MacIntyre and Schatzki who have developed their own distinctive practice theories, there are those who have sought to distil a well-rounded understanding of practice from a comprehensive meta-analysis of the available literature. Kemmis (2010) has developed just such a synoptic view of theorisations of practice. Kemmis constructed a complex framework or grid to represent the many features that have been attributed to practice, whilst also taking account of the various traditions and approaches to studying practice. The latter point is vital for Kemmis since he believes that each of the many traditions and approaches can potentially contribute important principles and insights for understanding practice. He also maintains that none of the traditions and approaches can, by themselves, provide a complete account. So, as would be expected, the Kemmis framework covers the full continuum of accounts of practice, ranging from the more inclusive to the less inclusive. However, his overview does distinguish the narrower term ‘professional practice’ from its wider counterpart ‘social practice’. Of most interest for our present concerns is that from his framework for mapping accounts of practice Kemmis distils seven ‘key individual and extra-individual features of practice’. These are ‘Intention and meaning’, ‘Structure’, ‘Situatedness (contextuality)’, ‘Temporality’, ‘Systematic roles’, ‘Reflexivity and transformation’ and ‘Forms of reasoning’: I. Intention and meaning The main point about this feature is the idea that it is precisely the intentions and meanings of practices that make them richer than actions. The intentions and meanings of practices are closely connected to one another, since the intentions are shaped by the meanings that practitioners attach to a situation. As well, intentions and meanings will reflect practitioners’ own particular cultural and discursive resources. II. Structure Typically, practitioners take up practices that are pre-formed. Practices have their own particular ‘shapes’. These prefigured shapes will likely be experienced differently by different kinds of individuals participating in the practice. Practitioners themselves, e.g. nurses or teachers, will regard their respective practices somewhat differently from a patient or a student. At the extra-individual level, practices are pre-structured and prefigured in such things as discourses, social relationships and material-economic arrangements. III. Situatedness (contextuality) Practices are always situated in a specific context. For instance, practitioners often are required to tailor and deliver an integrated performance that meets the needs of this particular client, in this particular setting, under this particular set of circumstances. At the same time, there is the extra-individual level of situatedness—the cultural, discursive, social, material and economic dimensions of the particular context in which the practice is taking place.

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IV. Temporality Performances of a practice typically unfold through and over time. As well, the particulars of how a practice are performed are often significantly linked to considerations of a participant’s stage of life, for example, the teaching of children as opposed to adults, or the treatment of a particular medical condition in a forty-five-year old as opposed to a ninety-five-year old. At the extra-individual level, practices themselves change and develop over time, stimulated by cultural, social, technological, economic and other developments. Along with this, the composition of the community of practitioners engaged in the practice also evolves over time. V. Systemic roles At the individual level, many practices involve relationships between participants who occupy different roles within the practice. As well as the practitioners themselves, there are other participants, such as clients, patients, students and others. At the extra-individual level, these differing roles are discursively framed and understood in terms of theories and traditions that are internal to the field of practice. VI. Reflexivity and transformation Practices are reflexive in that practitioners can observe and appraise their own performance as they practise. This enables them to modify their performance appropriately as it unfolds. It may also result in learning that will serve to improve future performances in similar situations. Over time this reflexivity serves to modify the practitioner’s professional identity, and can, perhaps, lead to the meaning and significance of the practice itself being altered. So, reflexivity at the individual level potentially can act as a catalyst for changes at the extra-individual level. VII. Forms of reasoning Practices are engaged in for very different sorts of motivations. This leads to wide variation across practices with respect to the forms of reasoning that they employ: this variation is reflected in the kinds of dispositions, aims and actions that characterise the particular practitioner’s practice. Kemmis (2010) illustrates these variations with examples of diverse aims: • • • •

a theoretical perspective favours attaining knowledge or truth; a technical perspective favours production of some entity; a practical perspective favours wise and prudent judgement and action; and a critical-emancipatory perspective favours overcoming irrationality, injustice or suffering.

When these seven features, combining individual and extra-individual components, are taken as a whole, they serve to highlight that practices are very complex entities indeed. Given that Kemmis has distilled them from a comprehensive review of the literature, we can see that MacIntyre and Schatzki are not alone in emphasising the complexity of practices. However, also in common with MacIntyre and Schatzki,

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Kemmis’s framework does focus mainly on individual practitioners, though he does also acknowledge the roles of their individual clients or customers. Like them, Kemmis pays scant attention to relations between practitioners either as individuals or as groups. In addition, whilst the Kemmis framework is very strong on identifying the most significant dimensions of practices, it gives much less attention to the crucial nature of the relations between these many dimensions. Green’s Synthetic Overview of Accounts of Practice Starting with a more limited focus restricted to the literature about professional practice, Green (2009) offers a synthesis of theorisations of practice. Thus, unlike Kemmis, Green’s review reflects only understandings of practice located towards the less inclusive end of the continuum. He finds that this smaller class of theorisations of practice is underpinned by two distinct but interrelated ‘meta-traditions’. The first is the neo-Aristotelian tradition, in which the integrity of authentic practices is emphasised. The second is the post-Cartesian tradition of post-structuralism or postmodernism, in which subjectivity and related issues such as mind, consciousness and knowledge are problematised. MacIntyre’s account of practices is a notable example of the neo-Aristotelian meta-tradition. Kemmis’s framework shows strong links with the post-Cartesian tradition and its guiding principle that ‘practices are the constitutors of subjectivity’. According to Green, any satisfactory understanding of professional practice needs to draw upon principles from both of these metatraditions. Green maintains that practice is a complex concept that can be usefully understood in terms of three ‘distinct but interrelated categories’: activity, experience and context (2009: 7). As already noted, for Green a practice requires something more than ‘brute’ activity. In fact, he argues that even being a goal-directed activity is insufficient to constitute a practice. To identify what else is needed for a practice, Green turns to the other two interrelated categories: experience and context. For Green, practice is inescapably experiential. This category encompasses several dimensions. One experiential dimension is the standard aspect of practices that the practitioner is required to interpret what is happening and to assess its significance. A further experiential dimension is that the practitioner lives through, anticipates, and later recalls their practice. This dimension depends on various sorts of consciousness, such as sensory awareness, cognition, emotions and affects. Green holds that his third interrelated category, context, is widely recognised, as well as being widely misunderstood. He rejects such notions as context being a container for practice or being a backdrop against which practice is carried out. Instead, “context” needs to be thought of as part of practice, as inscribed in it, as part of its larger and more adequate conceptualisation. Yet “context” also needs to be problematised. It cannot simply be taken for granted or assumed. … it must be used with caution, and always under erasure, as it were. This is because the distinction between “context” and “text” … is blurred, indistinct, shifting. (Green 2009: 9)

According to Green, the complexities surrounding these three distinct but interrelated categories already underline the difficulties involved in adequately theorising

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practice. But, Green argues, there are yet further aspects to be considered in any comprehensive theory of professional practice. These further aspects centre upon the related concepts of knowledge, judgement and decision-making, each of which is inevitably part of any professional performance. Here, Green draws upon the ancient Greek concepts of phronesis, praxis and aporia. Phronesis captures practitioners’ capacities to employ practical (not technical) rationality to make appropriate, concrete and context-sensitive judgements. Praxis, recalling MacIntyre, points to the moral dimensions of professional practice, which are reflected in committed engagement in the practice, for instance, by practising in a manner that serves to further the goods of the practice. Aporia highlights the practical reality that practice will inevitably throw up situations of uncertainty, ones in which practitioners need to take action, even if at the time it is unclear which course of action is for the best. This means that some professional judgements are inescapably defeasible (for more on this see, e.g., Beckett and Hager 2002: 187–188). Green concludes that each of these many considerations identified in his synthesis of theorisations of practice is equally necessary and significant if we are to reach an adequate understanding of professional practice. Like Kemmis, Green has offered a very suggestive framework for appreciating the many complexities involved in theorising practice. However, it is also notable that, in common with the previous accounts of practice discussed above, Green’s synthesis places an almost exclusive emphasis on practitioners as individuals. Likewise, he identifies many aspects of practice as interrelated, but offers little guidance on how to think about this interrelatedness. Finally, though practitioner interactions with clients, patients or the like are implied in his account, the possibility that interrelations between practitioners might significantly shape the practice is not even recognised. This completes our discussion of a representative selection of accounts of practice. As well as summarising the distinctive features of each of these diverse theories, we have identified several common assumptions and limitations that will be addressed as this book unfolds. However, before completing this section there are aspects of the work of several other practice theorists that are worth mentioning here.

3.2.4 Other Theoretical Contributions Antonacopoulou (2008) has been referred to already for her insistence that it is insufficient for practice theories to merely recognise the interconnectedness of the many components of a practice. She maintains that any sound theorisation must elucidate the nature of these relations. Her own attempt at this draws upon what she regards as three important features of practices: their embodiment, the role of internal and external goods and the connections between the intensity, integrity and intentionality underpinning practice. Employing these three features, Antonacopoulou (2008) proposes a dynamic account of practices as being self-organising and emergent, with the concept of ‘tensions’ underpinning these two key features of practices. Her proposal makes reference to complexity theory and Deweyan transactional relations. We take

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up both of these ideas later in this book. Whilst our account will differ fundamentally from Antonacopoulou’s, she deserves credit for at least recognising some of the main limitations of received practice theories and for having sought to offer remedies. In the preceding discussion of various accounts of practice, a recurring theme was the almost exclusive focus on the individual practitioner as the unit of analysis. Our response, expounded later in this book, is that sound accounts of practice need to consider both individual and group factors. However, it is worth noting that some have proposed a more drastic solution here—to remove all reference to humans whether individuals or groups. Socio-materialism is a theoretical framework proposed by Orlikowski (e.g. 2010) to address perceived limitations of human-centred and system-centred models of sociotechnical interaction. The key principle of socio-materialism is that the social and the technical elements of a system are constitutively entangled and, hence, neither human nor technical elements of a system should be accorded a privileged status. Thus, for Orlikowski, there is no ontological distinction between human and nonhuman elements of systems. Fenwick (2014; see also Fenwick and Nerland 2014) has employed this principle in her work on understanding professional practice: one key contribution of sociomaterial analysis is to de-couple knowing and action from a strictly human-centred sociocultural ontology, and to liberate agency and responsibility from its conceptual confines as a human-generated force. Instead, agency is understood to be enacted in the emergence and interactions – as well as the exclusionings – occurring in the smallest encounters. (Fenwick 2014: 161)

On this view, both the social and the material are themselves mere effects of relational clusters within entangled assemblages. As Fenwick and Nerland put it, ‘all things—human and non-human, hybrids and parts, knowledge and systems—are viewed as effects. They are performed into existence in webs of relations’ (2014: 3). This socio-materialist perspective insists on the principle that ‘no anterior distinctions, such as human beings or social structures, are presupposed’ (Fenwick 2014: 161). By regarding everything, including agency and practices, as mere effects of relational interactions within micro-level assemblages, this brand of socio-materialism is uncompromisingly reductive. In seeking to understand events and happenings, it is left with just one level of explanation. Is it really plausible to suggest that relational interactions within micro-level assemblages will serve to explain everything? We think not. Indeed, even Fenwick admits to some doubts about the efficacy of this type of theorising when she states that a ‘sociomaterial approach offers a sensibility rather than a set of analytical tools’, one that does ‘not attempt to generate explanatory models of social life’. Rather, it tends to ‘cultivate an attunement to the micro-practices of everyday life’ (Fenwick 2012: 5). Since humans, along with everything else, have supposedly been reduced to mere effects, we are left wondering what sort of non-human entities are they that are claimed to be ‘cultivating an attunement’ within the micro-level assemblages? Another notable feature that makes us sceptical about the value of this kind of theorising is that webs of relations at the micro-level are claimed to be the source of

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everything. But this is just asserted as a dogma. There is no account offered of the nature of these primordial relations. Thus far we have presented various approaches to understanding practices, together with our views on what is lacking in these assorted accounts. We turn now to the work of Joseph Rouse, a prominent practice theorist whose ideas we find very helpful. According to Rouse, practices are ‘constituted by the mutual accountability of their constituent performances’ (2007: 48). He elaborates on this as follows: [A] practice is maintained by interactions among its constitutive performances that express their mutual accountability. On this normative conception of practices, a performance belongs to a practice if it is appropriate to hold it accountable as a correct or incorrect performance of that practice. Such holding to account is itself integral to the practice and can likewise be done correctly or incorrectly. If done incorrectly, then it would appropriately be held accountable in turn. That would require responding to it in ways appropriate to a mistaken holding-accountable and so forth. (Rouse 2007: 48)

Here, Rouse has proposed the crucial importance of relations between performances of a practice. As well, the notion of the accountability of performances of a practice to one another automatically serves to draw attention to the relations between individual practitioners and between groups of practitioners. This, we argued, was a significant omission of the theories discussed earlier. As well, echoing MacIntyre’s emphasis on the important relationship between practices and the organisations dedicated to supporting them, Rouse’s theory implies the likelihood of formal accountability measures for practices being instituted by organisations such as professional associations, regulatory authorities and the like. The full significance of Rouse’s work will become apparent as the rest of the book unfolds.

3.3 Claimed Advantages of Practice Theory Over Previous Approaches This short section sets out some of the main claimed advantages of practice theory that are to be found in the literature. In each case, we add our own brief suggestions on what extra is needed for these advantages to reach their full potential, thereby pointing towards Parts II and III of the book: Practices are carriers of meaning/understandings, that is, they are ‘distributed sensemaking’. Thus, meaning emerges from the sociality of practices. Our view is that not enough is made of this insight because of the focus on the individual practitioner as the unit of analysis. The mechanism for distributed sense-making is the individual interacting with the practice. We will argue that the interaction of practitioners with one another provides a more powerful source of new meaning and understanding. The relationality of practices is supposed to be a defining feature of practice theory. Certainly, most of the practice theorists refer to it.

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Our view is that, though this is asserted frequently, as discussed above, there is no real consideration of relations and their explanatory potential. Rather, relations are typically left as a black-box concept. In effect, this manoeuvre sidesteps explanation (Later in the book (Chap. 7, Sect. 7.3.1) we will offer an account of transactional relations that addresses this explanatory vacuum). Practice theory accounts better for the holistic facets of practice than did its predecessors. But our claim is that a fuller account of relations opens the way to a much more convincing treatment of the holism of practice. Practice theory accounts somewhat for the changing nature of practices over time and the indeterminacy of those changes, as Kemmis emphasises. But our claim is that a fuller understanding of relations and their explanatory potential, via complexity thinking, will lead to a richer account of the emergence of practices and the indeterminacy of this emergence.

3.4 Unresolved Issues Concerning Current Accounts of Practice and Practices One notable commonality in the work of virtually all of the practice theorists discussed in this chapter is that they are substantialists rather than relationists—Rouse is the clear exception here. By calling these theorists substantialists, we mean that their strategy for understanding a practice is to identify and describe the multiple diverse components that, suitably related, are said to comprise the practice. This does not mean that all of the components themselves are literally substances. Rather, they are a mixed bag of entities, norms, affects and values, practitioner characteristics, beliefs and intentions and so on. What is common to these theorists is that they take their main task to be the specification of the various components of a practice. Once these components have been specified, it is assumed that, appropriately interconnected or related, they constitute the practice. But the problem is that ‘appropriately interconnected or related’ becomes a black-box. The nature and kinds of relations themselves are simply taken for granted, treated as an afterthought, as secondary to the various components (relata) that, summed together, are regarded as capturing the essence of the particular practice. This trend of treating relations as innocuous follows influential philosophical traditions, collectively referred to as nominalism. These traditions variously treat relations as being ontologically inert in contrast to the particulars (or relata) that they relate, or they seek to reduce relations to qualities by subsuming them into their relata (we will call this the Lego View of relations, since it is the properties of pieces of Lego that determine whether or not they interconnect). In either case, these traditional philosophical accounts effectively downplay the roles of relations

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and their significance for theorising. In the terminology employed in Chapter 1, they represent a reductive relationality. Whether or not they are conscious of this nominalist philosophical lineage, practice theorists who go no further than assuming that together the various interrelated parts explain the practice itself are left with an impoverished understanding of practice. They are in effect assuming that the mere sum of the parts is equivalent to the practice as a whole. Genuinely furthering our understanding of practice requires us to investigate the different types of relations that constitute it and their various contributions to practice as a whole. Without such an investigation, our understanding of practices will remain in its current unsatisfactory state. Giving an adequate account of relationality seems to be easily the most important issue currently facing practice theory. In Parts II and III of this book, we will expound and employ a holistic (i.e. less reductive) relationality that will offer novel thinking about practices. A relationist theory, as we employ the term, treats the relations as being equally as significant, or even more so, as the relata. As Russell (1915/1986: 77–78) maintained, what makes (say) a symphony distinctive is its structure. Its structure, arguably, consists more so in the relations between the notes than in the notes themselves (for a fuller discussion, see Hager 1994: 107–110; Hager 1996). Consider, for instance, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. It is recognisably still his Fourth even when it is arranged for chamber orchestra or transposed to another musical key. This is so because the crucial relations between notes that characterise the symphony are largely preserved on the rearrangement or the transposition. It is only when these vital relations between the notes are significantly changed that it is no longer Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. Conceivably two very different symphonies might involve identical sets of musical notes. At the same time, they could feature very different structures, thereby demonstrating their differences. So, it is the relations between the musical notes, rather than the ‘gross tonnages’ of each particular note, that are responsible for a symphony’s distinctive character. The wide scope of our claim that understanding some phenomena requires the prioritising of relations over relata is well illustrated by considering the science of chemistry. The Periodic Table of the Elements, the cornerstone of chemistry, sets out systematically the chemical elements and their key properties. Whilst the Periodic Table highlights some relations, e.g. those that are common across the various ‘families’ of elements, its main focus is on the relata themselves, i.e. on the different kinds of atoms. However, the major part of chemistry deals with the billions of distinctly different substances (compounds) that result from the chemical combinations of various atoms. Understanding of a chemical compound depends much more on the relations between the atoms than it does on the natures of the atoms themselves. Consider for example common table salt. Its molecule consists of a sodium atom chemically combined with a chlorine atom. Sodium is a dangerous silvery metal in that it is liable to spontaneously ignite or even explode upon exposure to moist air, whilst at normal temperatures chlorine is a greenish-yellow toxic gas. Clearly, common salt does not share the properties of its related atoms. Rather, it is the chemical relations between the atoms that constitute the distinctive character of the sodium chloride molecule. Likewise, hydrogen and oxygen, themselves both invisible gases,

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combine chemically to form water, a very different kind of substance from its parent atoms. This principle applies across the multiplicity of chemical compounds. A deeper understanding of the relations that constitute chemical compounds takes us into the quantum world, one in which the stable, enduring particles of common sense disappear. The general conclusion from the preceding discussion is that whilst relata themselves, rather than the relations between them, are primary for understanding some aspects of reality, in other cases it is the relations between the relata that are of most explanatory significance. This book argues that the latter is so for a range of phenomena that thus far have been poorly understood because attention has centred on the relata rather than on the relations between them. A second major commonality of the practice theories discussed above is their unquestioning focus on the individual practitioner as the unit of analysis. This reflects long-standing traditions in both philosophy and sociology (see, e.g., Emirbayer 1997). Prior to the advent of practice theory, theorisations of human performances tended to overemphasise the role of cognition in such performances, downplaying or ignoring other crucial aspects, such as affect, know-how and the role of judgement. This formerly prevalent tendency to focus on the more overtly cognitive aspects of human performances resulted in ‘thin’ understandings that overlooked other key dimensions of these performances. As noted above, a prime motivation for the advent of practice theory was the dissolution of epistemological dualisms such as mind/body, mental/manual and theory/practice. For practice theorists, the intelligibility and meaning of human activities and performances arise from humans’ interactions and engagements with the world. Given this more holistic, integrative flavour, it is somewhat ironic that so many practice theorists limit their quest to understand better humans’ interactions and engagements with the world by thinking primarily in terms of the performances of individuals. So, the first of the two commonalities identified in this chapter—the prevalent tendency to attempt to understand practices by atomising them into their component parts—is mirrored by the second commonality—the prevalent tendency to atomise group performances into individual performances.

3.5 Conclusion In Part III of this book, we will draw on complexity thinking to propose novel understandings of agency, expertise, practice, skills, competence and associated concepts, and the concept of learning. These novel understandings will avoid the above pair of difficulties by: • insisting on holistic, relational understandings rather than the black-box or Lego approaches to relationality that have prevailed so far;

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• stressing the importance of analysis at the level of groups rather than the almost exclusive focus on individuals that has prevailed so far; and • recognising the central role of judgement (‘professional judgement’, ‘practical judgement’) in all of this, including the oft-overlooked contribution of affect to judgement. Though practice theory has continued to gain prominence in social theory and beyond, we have argued that it remains problematic in several important respects. These issues are subject to ongoing debate. Nor should it be thought that these particular issues are largely internal to practice theory. As we will demonstrate in the following two chapters, virtually all of them recur in ongoing debates about the natures of skills, of abilities, of competence, and of learning.

References Antonacopoulou, E. P. (2008). On the practise of practice: In-tensions and ex-tensions in the ongoing reconfiguration of practices. In D. Barry & H. Hansen (Eds.), The Sage handbook of new approaches in management and organization (pp. 112–131). Los Angeles: Sage. Beckett, D., & Hager, P. (2002). Life, work and learning: Practice in postmodernity. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brandom, R. (2001). Articulating reasons: An introduction to inferentialism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dreyfus, H. L., & Dreyfus, S. E. (1986). Mind over machine: The power of human intuition and expertise in the era of the computer. Oxford: Blackwell. Dreyfus, H. (2001). On the internet. London: Routledge. Emirbayer, M. (1997). Manifesto for a relational sociology. The American Journal of Sociology, 103(2), 281–317. Fenwick, T. (2012). Co-production in professional practice: A sociomaterial analysis. Professions and Professionalism, 2(2), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.7577/pp.v2i1.323. Fenwick, T. (2014). Rethinking professional responsibility: Matters of account. In T. Fenwick & M. Nerland (Eds.), Reconceptualising professional learning: Sociomaterial knowledges, practices and responsibilities (pp. 157–170). London & New York: Routledge. Fenwick, T., & Nerland, M. (2014). Introduction: Sociomaterial professional knowing, work arrangements and responsibility: New times, new concepts? In T. Fenwick & M. Nerland (Eds.), Reconceptualising professional learning: Sociomaterial knowledges, practices and responsibilities (pp. 1–18). London & New York: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Vintage. Foucault, M. (1991). Questions of method. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault effect (pp. 73–87). London, Toronto, Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Green, B. (2009). Introduction: Understanding and researching professional practice. In B. Green (Ed.), Understanding and researching professional practice (pp. 1–18). Rotterdam/Taipei: Sense Publishers. Hager, P. (1994). Continuity and change in the development of Russell’s philosophy (Nijhoff International Philosophy Series). Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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Hager, P. (1996). Relational realism and professional performance. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 28(1), 98–116. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-5812.1996.tb00234.x. Hager, P. (2011). Refurbishing MacIntyre’s account of practice. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 45(3), 545–561. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.2011.00810.x. Hager, P. (2012). Theories of practice and their connections with learning: A continuum of more and less inclusive accounts. In P. Hager, A. Lee, & A. Reich (Eds.), Practice, learning and change: Practice-theory perspectives on professional learning (Professional and practice-based learning book series) (Vol. 8, pp. 17–32). Dordrecht: Springer. Hager, P., Lee, A., & Reich, A. (Eds.). (2012). Practice, learning and change: Practice-theory perspectives on professional learning (Professional and practice-based learning book series) (Vol. 8). Dordrecht: Springer. Higgins, C. (2003). MacIntyre’s moral theory and the possibility of an aretaic ethics of teaching. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 37(2), 279–292. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.00326. Higgins, C. (2010). The good life of teaching: An ethics of professional practice. Oxford/Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Kemmis, S. (2005). Knowing practice: Searching for saliences. Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 13(3), 391–426. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681360500200235. Kemmis, S. (2010). What is professional practice? Recognising and respecting diversity in understandings of practice. In C. Kanes (Ed.), Elaborating professionalism: Studies in practice and theory (pp. 139–165). Dordrecht: Springer. Kemmis, S., Edwards-Groves, C., Wilkinson, J., & Hardy, I. (2012). Ecologies of practices. In P. Hager, A. Lee, & A. Reich (Eds.), Practice, learning and change: Practice-theory perspectives on professional learning (Professional and practice-based learning book series) (Vol. 8, pp. 33–49). Dordrecht: Springer. MacIntyre, A. (1981). After virtue. London: Duckworth. MacIntyre, A. (1990). Three rival versions of moral enquiry. London: Duckworth. MacIntyre, A. (1994). A partial response to my critics. In J. Horton & S. Mendus (Eds.), After MacIntyre: Critical perspectives on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre (pp. 283–304). Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press & Blackwell. MacIntyre, A. (1999). Dependent rational animals: Why human beings need the virtues. London: Duckworth. Orlikowski, W. J. (2010). The sociomateriality of organizational life: Considering technology in management research. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 34(1), 125–141. https://doi.org/10. 1093/cje/bep058. Polkinghorne, D. E. (2004). Practice and the human sciences: The case for a judgement-based practice of care. Albany: State University of New York. Reckwitz, A. (2002). Toward a theory of social practices: A development in culturalist theorizing. European Journal of Social Theory, 5(2), 243–263. https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310222225432. Rouse, J. (2007). Social practices and normativity. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 37(1), 46–56. https://doi.org/10.1177/0048393106296542. Russell, B. (1986). The ultimate constituents of matter. In J. Slater (Ed.), The collected papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. 8. The philosophy of logical atomism and other essays: 1914–19 (pp. 74–86). London: Allen & Unwin. (Original work published 1915). Schatzki, T. R. (1996). Social practices: A Wittgensteinian approach to human activity and the social. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schatzki, T. R. (2001). Introduction: Practice theory. In T. R. Schatzki, K. Knorr Cetina, & E. von Savigny (Eds.), The practice turn in contemporary theory (pp. 1–14). London & New York: Routledge. Schatzki, T. R. (2002). The site of the social: A philosophical account of the constitution of social life and change. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Schatzki, T. R. (2005). Peripheral vision: The sites of organizations. Organization Studies, 26(3), 465–484. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840605050876.

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Schatzki, T. R. (2006). On organizations as they happen. Organization Studies, 27(12), 1863–1873. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840606071942. Schatzki, T. R. (2012). A primer on practices. In J. Higgs, R. Barnett, S. Billett, M. Hutchings, & F. Trede (Eds.), Practice-based education: Perspectives and strategies (pp. 13–26). Rotterdam: Sense. Schatzki, T. R., Knorr Cetina, K., & von Savigny, E. (2001). The practice turn in contemporary theory. London & New York: Routledge. Searle, J. R. (1995). The construction of social reality. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Taylor, C. (1995). To follow a rule. In C. Taylor (Ed.), Philosophical arguments (pp. 165–180). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Usher, R., & Edwards, R. (2007). Lifelong learning: Signs, discourses, practices. Dordrecht: Springer. Winch, C. (2010). Dimensions of expertise: A conceptual exploration of vocational knowledge. London and New York: Continuum. Young, M., & Muller, J. (Eds.). (2014). Knowledge, expertise and the professions. London & New York: Routledge.

Chapter 4

Issues Concerning Related Topics Such as Skills, Competence, Abilities and Capabilities

In the previous chapter, we considered practice as a relatively macro-level concept for thinking about human performances. In this chapter, we focus on related, more micro-level concepts, such as skills, competence, abilities, capabilities, dispositions and capacities. Against prevailing atomistic views of skills, it is argued that a more holistic approach is required for a satisfactory understanding of skilled performance to be achieved. The same point applies to the concept of competence. Likewise, it will be maintained that concepts such as abilities and dispositions play important roles in holistic accounts of human performances.

4.1 Skills 4.1.1 Common Talk About Skills Common parlance treats skills as things or entities that can be gained or possessed by individuals. Viewed as things, skills are entities that, once gained, can be taken from place to place by their possessor and applied to diverse situations. Further, skills as things can be passed on to other individuals. However, as folk wisdom asserts, skills that are not used by their possessor for any lengthy time may well be lost. To truly possess, a skill is to be able to perform it at will. For such common sense entity talk, the possession of skills by individuals implies that they are located somewhere in the possessor’s body. This is so irrespective of whether the particular skills are regarded as being mainly physical, or mainly mental, or as some combination of the two. However, whilst skills are commonly referred to as being located within the bodies of skilled performers, everyday skill talk simultaneously presents them as things that have a measure of independent existence. This is evidenced by the common scenario of individuals passing on skills one to another, so that many individuals can all come to possess the same skill. Similarly, the notion of using them or losing them implies that skills are independent © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 P. Hager and D. Beckett, The Emergence of Complexity, Perspectives on Rethinking and Reforming Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31839-0_4

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entities. As well, since the many individuals having the same skill typically will have developed the skill in differing circumstances (e.g., from training, by trial and error or by imitating skilled performers), it seems that skills are somewhat separate from and independent of the particular context in which they were developed. Since skill acquisition centrally involves learning, it is unsurprising that most of the widely held assumptions about the nature of learning (outlined in the next chapter) are reflected in these common understandings. Just as is the case for learning, skills are viewed as being features of individuals. Again like learning, skills are thought of as being relatively stable and enduring things, as entities independent of the context in which they were developed. Likewise, the features of replicability and transparency are assumed to be straightforwardly applicable to skills. That is, different people are regarded as possessing the same skill (replicability). Likewise, possession of skill implies being able to demonstrate it readily (transparency). The literal truth of these everyday, common sense ways of thinking and talking about skills, is simply taken for granted since they seem to ‘work’. A notable feature of these common understandings of skills is that they freely employ the acquisition and transfer metaphors. The next chapter will highlight the confusion that can result from taking these metaphors too literally when thinking about learning. Unsurprisingly, the same kinds of problems arise in relation to understanding skills. The tensions and contradictions become evident when these matters are thought about critically. The notion of skills as things or substances located within their possessor, whilst at the same time being independent, already points towards interesting ontological puzzles. Items acquired and possessed by persons are not typically located inside of their owners. Why should it be different in the case of skills? Likewise, skills are not literally transferred from a master to apprentices. Rather, if the training has been successful, new instances of skills are created, since the master still retains the skill that has been supposedly ‘transferred’ to the apprentices. But what about cases where workers supposedly transfer their skills from place to place? Is this transfer in the normal sense? Not really. Stating that a worker having the skill in question deployed it in two different places is a more accurate and succinct account, than saying that the skill itself was transferred between the two places by the worker. In any case, the second statement is not employing the normal usage of ‘transfer’. As is the case for learning, the ubiquitous acquisition and transfer metaphors can easily mislead us. We need to remind ourselves that ‘acquiring’ and ‘transferring’, when used in skill thought and talk, are actually metaphors, rather than descriptions of concrete reality. Long ago, Scheffler warned educators that every metaphor has limitations, ‘points at which the analogies it indicates break down’ (1960: 48). He argued for the need to explore the limitations of dominant metaphors, thereby ‘opening up fresh possibilities of thought and action’ (Scheffler 1960: 49). A major aim of the present book is to open up fresh ways of thinking about skills and related concepts.

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4.1.2 Theoretical Understandings of Skills As could be expected, more reflective understandings challenge various of these widespread common sense views about the nature of skills. For a start, the assumption that skills are discrete independent entities is undermined by recognition of the fact that many (most?) skills are not at all readily specifiable. As well, treating skills as if they are typically mechanical and routine offers a superficially attractive simplicity, but one that is deceptive and misleading. As this section will go on to demonstrate, many skills are quite complex. Likewise, accounting soundly for the often complicated mix of human attributes and characteristics that underpin skilled performances is typically an arena of ongoing contestation. This elusive specifiability of skills also signals a crucial difference between skill learning and propositional learning; as the next chapter will demonstrate, the latter is widely viewed as the paradigm of learning. Whilst it is typical that propositions can be specified readily, the same cannot be said of skills. This significant difference tends to remain hidden because the specification of human skills (which is inevitably somewhat imprecise) is often confused with the specification of performance outcomes (which are much more amenable to precise specification) (for more on this see Hager 2004). Thus, we can appreciate quality work in (say) plumbing without having much idea of the nature of the skills that went into producing these quality outcomes. This significant difference between the relative specifiability of propositions and skills means that employing the acquisition and transfer metaphors in the case of skill learning becomes even more problematic. It is the outcome of skilled performance that can be specified minutely, not the skills, abilities, and capacities that underpin the performance. Yet it is precisely these elusive human attributes that are supposedly being acquired and transferred. By now, it should be clear that the fact that skills are mostly difficult to specify seriously challenges the assumption that they are discrete independent entities. But there is a further reason to reject this assumption in the case of skills. As will be shown in the next chapter, the term ‘learning’ is assumed to be univocal in the sense of having only one proper meaning. But this is definitely not the case for the term ‘skill’. The noun ‘skill’ belongs to a limited class of nouns that have two distinct senses—a countable one and an uncountable one (other such nouns are improvement and achievement). For example, the Oxford Advanced American Dictionary defines skill in the uncountable sense as ‘the ability to do something well’, whilst skill in the countable sense refers to ‘a particular ability or type of ability’. Instances of the uncountable sense are ‘The job requires skill and an eye for detail’ and ‘What made him remarkable as a photographer was his skill in capturing the moment’. Instances of the countable sense are ‘we need people with carpentry skills’ . and ‘she shows good management skills’. Likewise, The Cambridge Online Dictionary defines skill as ‘an ability to do an activity or job well, especially because you have practised it’. At first sight, this definition might appear to gloss over the countable/uncountable distinction. However, it actually covers both usages of ‘skill’—‘activities’ cover

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specific countable skills, whilst ‘job’ covers uncountable usages, such as being a skilled carpenter or a skilled manager. Thus, as a countable noun, ‘skill’ is a word for a specific ability that is often developed from special training or experience, such as finger typing skill or rose pruning skill. Sometimes such specific abilities may develop as part of normal human maturation, for example, face recognition skill. In the countable sense, virtually everyone has a number of different skills. But the range and nature of the countable skills that someone has varies, of course, with the individual. Countable skills, as such, are relatively specifiable, though the exact mechanisms involved in (say) face recognition, may be uncertain or contested in the sense noted above. Nevertheless, too much of a focus on countable skills encourages an atomistic understanding of skilled performance. The problems that this narrow focus creates will become apparent in the next few paragraphs. In contrast, ‘skill’ used as an uncountable noun refers to an ability to do something well or with expertise such as ‘Her skill as a cellist is astounding’ or ‘His mathematical skill is legendary’. Here, ‘skill’ is a word for a concept that encompasses something that is much more than a set of discrete specifiable skills; something that is less tangible yet still recognisable, particularly by suitably experienced observers such as fellow cellists or mathematicians, whose own levels of accomplishment are, perhaps, somewhat more modest. The uncountable sense of skill represents a wider, more holistic understanding. Nor is its use restricted to high levels of skilled performance. For example, the uncountable skills of the cellists or mathematicians exhibiting relatively modest levels of accomplishment are described in statements such as ‘Her mathematical skill is above average’ or ‘He is close to attaining the skill level of a proficient cellist’. It seems plausible to maintain that the uncountable sense of skill is clearly the primary one. Further reasons for this being so are discussed later in this section. But a familiar example will serve here to reinforce the initial plausibility of the claim that the wider, more holistic understanding of skill is indeed the primary one. The example is the case of learner-drivers of motor vehicles. Learner-drivers need to develop a wide range of fairly specific skills (or know-how) (how to start the car, how to apply the brakes, how to operate the windscreen wipers, how to reverse the car, how to make a right or left turn, and so on). They also need various kinds of propositional knowledge including the various road rules (when to give way, when it is safe to overtake, etc.) and acquaintance with the various controls of the vehicle that they are driving. Is this all that is needed for competent driving? Let us imagine a learner-driver who has mastered all of the required propositional knowledge and who, in addition, can demonstrate proficiency in each of the many specific driving skills. Would that suffice for us to conclude that they must be a competent driver? The answer is clearly ‘no’. Competent driving involves something more, namely a holistic capacity to produce an overall performance that draws upon both the range of specific driving skills and the relevant propositional knowledge; a performance that is tailored to meet particular circumstances such as prevailing road and traffic conditions and the driver’s physical and mental state (alertness, tiredness, stress level, etc.). Competent driving is more the capacity to produce appropriate holistic

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performances than the mastery of the various countable specific driving skills. It is also apparent that this more holistic notion of skill incorporates much more than just narrow technical skills. It also includes such things as perceptual discrimination, persistence, attention to detail, planning ahead, and so on. Note that this holistic, uncountable driving skill, which might be called, driving judgement, is something that develops over time. It is the kind of skill that exhibits degrees of performance— some drivers are much more skilled than others. Driving judgement can be further improved with practice and experience. In contrast, the more specific driving skills, such as operating the turning indicators or the headlights, are much more discrete— one can either do them or one cannot. Note also that, as the driving example illustrates, it is not the question, ‘Which type of skills should be developed—either the countable or the uncountable ones?’ Rather, both are necessary for competent driving. However, the countable driving skills serve to underpin the uncountable skill—holistic driving judgement. Thus, the uncountable sense of skill is the primary one because the demonstration of satisfactory driving judgement requires that the driver already has the relevant countable skills. By contrast, mere attainment of the countable skills indicates little about overall driving competence. Driving competence is holistic rather than atomistic. This holism suggests an essential relationality of skills. As this section will argue, all skills are complex to a greater or lesser degree. Skilled performance presupposes not just the right components but crucially that the components be integrated via relations appropriate to the given context. Similar support for the uncountable sense of skill being the primary one comes from cases involving a really high level of skilled performance; a level of performance that is exceptional rather than common. For instance, a professional orchestral cellist is clearly someone who is highly skilled as a cellist. This cellist’s high level of skill includes numerous countable skills relating to the techniques and mechanics of playing the cello, music sight-reading skills, and so on. But these constitute a foundation for the uncountable sense in which the cellist is highly skilled in delivering an excellent, musicianly, holistic performance, one that takes account of and caters for multiple factors such as the particular preferences of the given conductor, the playing of the cello section as a whole, the role of the cellos within the musical fabric of the particular work, the audience reaction, the acoustic vagaries of the particular concert venue, and so on. This example also serves to underline the point that whilst skilled performances often involve significant physical skills, they also commonly involve much more besides—in this case, highly developed aesthetic and musical judgements. These crucial non-physical aspects of skilled cello playing support the numerous dictionary entries that list the arts, crafts and sciences as typical sites of skilled performance. Dictionaries also put the uncountable sense of skill to the fore when they emphasise the close link between skills and arts, crafts and sciences. For instance, Webster’s New World College Dictionary defines skill as: • great ability or proficiency; expertness that comes from training, practice, etc. • an art, craft, or science, esp. one involving the use of the hands or body

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• ability in such an art, craft, or science. Here, we have the ‘ability to perform well as a result of training or practice’ which was noted above. But in addition, a skill is typically an art, craft, or science or an ability to perform well in one of these. Clearly, skilled performance in an art, craft or science usually involves significant uncountable skills as well as the countable ones underpinning them. It is also significant that various dictionary entries pointedly contrast skill, as a broader concept, with its narrower relatives such as dexterity and adroitness. The point of these contrasts is that skilled performance typically involves something more than mere dexterity or adroitness. The multiple references to art, craft or science suggest the nature of this extra dimension. As Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) aptly puts it: Skill is more intelligent, denoting familiar knowledge united to readiness of performance. Dexterity, when applied to the body, is more mechanical, and refers to habitual ease of execution. Adroitness involves the same image with dexterity and differs from it as implying a general facility of movement. (especially in avoidance of danger or in escaping from a difficulty)

It seems, then, that any satisfactory theoretical understanding of skills needs to do two things. First, it needs to take account of their complexity ranging from fairly specific countable skills through to the more holistic uncountable ones. Second, plausible skill theories need to recognise the important logical connection between countable and uncountable skills in which the former is necessary for the latter, whilst being insufficient to constitute it. Thus, the uncountable sense of skill is, logically speaking, the primary one. These basic ideas are, indeed, reflected in recent theoretical accounts of skills (e.g., Winch 2010; Beckett and Mulcahy 2006; Hager and Halliday 2006: 124–125; Hager 2014). Particularly instructive is the work of Christopher Winch which further advances our understandings of skills and related concepts. Winch firstly characterises skills as a sub-set of abilities, a sub-set in which its members are subject to normative appraisal: ‘to act skilfully is not to perform a type of act, but to act in a certain (praiseworthy) way’ (2010: 43). Thus, Winch centres his account of skills on there being degrees of just how skilled a skilled performance might be: ‘The concept of a skill seems to be the ability concept which opens up the vista of normative appraisal in terms of the degree to which an activity can be performed well or badly’ (Winch 2010: 41). This focuses on normative appraisal sits well with the previously discussed dictionary definitions of skill, such as, ‘an ability to do an activity or job well, especially because you have practised it’ (Cambridge Online Dictionary). Typically, there are degrees of how well an activity or job can be done. Likewise, it is typical that periods of suitable practice can improve the level of skilled performances. Winch’s characterisation of skills accords well with the uncountable sense of skill being the primary one. Whilst uncountable skills, such as cello playing or carpentry, align naturally with the idea of being subject to normative appraisal, this is less the case for discrete, specific countable skills, such as starting a motor vehicle’s engine, where it is a matter

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of one can either perform the skill or one cannot. Countable skills are less amenable to there being degrees of how well they can be performed. Second, Winch’s account of skills offers an analysis of the various dimensions of skills, one which serves to clarify the complexity of uncountable skills as opposed to the more specific countable ones. Winch notes that notions such as method or technique are commonly used to characterise skills, but he maintains that they involve much more than this. Winch (2010: 43–44) holds that skills are typically complex, involving most or all of these components: • • • • • •

physical capacities technique moral qualities (such as persistence and attention to detail) habits (such as taking care of one’s equipment) refined perceptual discrimination knowledge (which is often displayed enactively rather than verbally, i.e. skills can involve tacit know-how as well as propositional knowledge) • judgement. More recently, Winch (2017) has provided detailed accounts of the complex dimensions of refined perceptual discrimination and of professional know-how. At the same time, Addis and Winch have usefully characterised the tacit know-how that underpins professional expertise: ‘tacit knowledge is an aspect of know-how which is beyond articulation, although some transfer might be possible through exemplification, imitation and practice’ (2017: 561). Winch’s summation is that ‘to possess a skill is to possess something complex, with different integrated and interrelated aspects’ (2010: 44). This account helps to explain the contextual holism of the instances of uncountable skills discussed earlier in this section (driving a motor vehicle, professional cello playing). In both cases, the more overtly physical aspects of skilled performance need to be guided by and integrated with less tangible aspects such as persistence, attention to detail, habits, refined perceptual discrimination and judgement. It might be argued that judgement is like a ‘glue’ that ‘sits above’ the various other components identified by Winch, since it involves something more than mere know-how that might be included in Winch’s knowledge category. Skills can involve many kinds of know-how that are not holistic in the sense that judgement is holistic. Such holistic judgement underpins the capacity to ‘put it all together’ seamlessly to produce an efficacious skilled performance that meets the needs of the given circumstances. This is something that needs to be considered in its own right. Why is the complexity of typical skills often overlooked? Winch (2010: p. 45) dubs this error ‘conceptual deflation’ and attributes it to the mistake of equating skills with tasks to be performed (Hager 2014 provides a fuller discussion of Winch’s account of skills and its advantages over more traditional accounts). Overall, this sub-section has presented strong arguments against making the narrow, uncountable sense of skills the primary one. The fact is that familiar examples of skilled performances clearly involve wider holistic understandings and dispositions that encompass as well their narrower countable cousins.

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4.1.3 Unresolved Issues Regarding Skills The Challenge of Accounting for Their Holism and Relationality The two senses of skill—the countable and uncountable—have significantly shaped this section. A tendency for ‘common sense’ discourse about skills to favour the countable sense has been noted. This kind of thinking views skilled performances as a matter of ‘adding the appropriate bits together’. Thus, the ontology of skills becomes substantialist (or substance-centred). The various limitations of this ‘adding bits together’ approach have already been outlined. Uncritical acceptance of its implied ontology only ensures further major problems for the project of attaining a nuanced understanding of skills. In contrast, the uncountable sense of skill, which this section has argued to be the primary one, is marked by holism, reflected in such phrases as ‘an essential relationality of skills’, ‘something complex, with different integrated and interrelated aspects’ and ‘putting it all together seamlessly’ (all from Sect. 4.1.2 above). Likewise, concepts crucial to explicating the holistic dimension of skills, such as contextuality (or situatedness) and professional judgement, are all inherently relational rather than substantialist. Unfortunately, substantialist ontologies, though sometimes incorporating relations, tend to downplay their significance in favour of the related entities or substances. But, as we saw in Chap. 3, Bertrand Russell long ago stressed that in such cases, the relations are often more central to an understanding of the situation than are the entities that they relate. Russell illustrated his point using the symphony as an example. He insisted that the distinctive character of a symphony lies not in the set of its musical notes, but in its structure, that is, in the many relations between its notes; in the nature of the relations and the patterns between these relations, that is, in the relations between relations. Thus, the elucidation of the nature of a symphony requires a sophisticated relational ontology rather than a limiting substantialist one. Moving from a substance ontology to a more relational one also challenges the view that skills are essentially stable and enduring entities. Perhaps it will be more useful to view the development and maintenance of skills, in most cases, as more of an ongoing process than the achievement of a destination. External factors, such as technological advances and social changes, mean that current skills requirements for many occupations gradually evolve such that there is now a significant mismatch with the skill requirements of even a few years ago. Thus, it would seem to be much more fruitful to view a practitioner’s skill set as an evolving work-in-progress rather than as a stable, enduring ‘tool kit’. Likewise, any satisfactory understanding of the holism of skills will require a developed relational understanding of this holism and its interconnections with the crucial set of related concepts, such as contextuality and professional judgement. This will involve some kind of relational realism, one that takes proper account of relations by recognising that they are distinctively different kinds of entities to substances or particulars. This will result in very different skills ontology. In the hope of furthering our understanding of these various matters, an account centred on

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transactional relations and their interconnections, drawing upon complexity thinking, will be developed in this book. Challenges to the Exclusive Focus on Individuals as the Locus of Skills We have argued that Winch’s account of skills has much to recommend it. However, one significant limitation is its exclusive focus on individuals as the locus of skills. The possibility that a group might be capable of a skilled performance, one that is more than the mere skill sum of its individual members, is not one that is considered. However, other theorists have strongly argued the case for group- or team-based skills. Marine Navigation Hutchins (1995) provides a detailed investigation of the practice of marine navigation aboard large vessels. This important work is performed, typically, by specially designated, highly skilled navigation teams. Hutchins concluded that the social organisation of these teams is such that it frequently produces ‘group properties that differ considerably from the properties of individuals’ (Hutchins 1995: 175). Hutchins maintained further that the ‘social distribution’ of navigation is such that the knowledge required to carry out the coordinating actions is not discretely contained within the various individuals. Rather, much of the knowledge is intersubjectively shared among the members of the navigation team. (Hutchins 1995: 219)

The crucial role of this socially distributed navigational know-how is evident from the fact that, whilst each navigation team member had a very detailed job description, taken together these job descriptions were not sufficient to enable a newly formed team to carry out navigation successfully. Rather the novice team, as a team, needed to develop the inter-subjective knowledge required for proficient completion of the task. Inter-subjective knowledge is also affected when a new member replaces someone in an existing experienced team. On top of understanding and meeting the requirements of their job description, optimum performance of the team will require that the new team member becomes a participant in the team’s inter-subjective knowledge. As part of this process occurring, there may well be some alteration or expansion of the inter-subjective knowledge itself. Whether it is a case of a novice navigation team or of an existing team taking in some novice members, attaining the requisite inter-subjective knowledge will be via a process of practising performance of navigational tasks. Hutchins attributes this to the implicit nature of much of this inter-subjective knowledge, much of it consisting of tacit know-how. Hutchins concludes that this sets ‘limits on the team’s abilities to explicitly plan the coordination of their actions’ (1995: 228). Hence there is a yawning gap between job descriptions and the actual performance of navigation. Reflecting the essential relationality of skills (emphasised above), Hutchins (1995: 219) describes the navigational team ‘as a malleable and adaptable coordinating tissue’ that ensures the proper coordinating activities are carried out. Reflecting the contextuality of performance and the concomitant role of situated professional

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judgement (also emphasised above), Hutchins notes how navigation team members ‘dynamically reconfigure their activities in response to changes in the task demands’ (1995: 219). Orchestral Performance Group learning and group performance is also a central feature of the work of orchestral musicians (For a detailed account of this, see Johnsson and Hager 2008; Hager and Johnsson 2009). Although professional orchestral musicians must have exceptionally high levels of skill, the most virtuoso performers on a given musical instrument may not be suited to the role of orchestral musician. The nature of orchestral playing demands that the individual player’s preferences, about many aspects of music making, must be subordinated in order to achieve group cohesion. Though every player has their own ‘natural’ musical expression, sections of an orchestra and the orchestra as a whole need to produce a sound that blends. It is in refining the performance of sections of the orchestra, and then of various combinations of sections playing together, including sometimes the orchestra as a whole, that notions of group or team skills become prominent. For instance, when multiple players and instruments are needed to play a particular chord, it requires adjustments by various of the participants to attain a satisfactory harmonious blend of sound. An orchestral musician’s role is much more varied than is suggested by viewing it as a strict adherence to playing the music exactly as written by the composer in the score. In fact, there are numerous aspects of performance that are not specified in the score. As well, there are wider contextual factors, such as the particular conductor (often a visiting guest), the concert venue itself and the size of the orchestra for the performance of a particular work. In all of this, on top of individual player skills, there is a further category of skills: section or group skills. Both types of skills (individual and group) are developed and maintained by practice. Groups of players, qua group, must adapt the way they play the same repertoire to different contextual situations. In Hutchins’s terms, these groups and sub-groups are developing inter-subjective knowledge. Here, the whole is more than the sum of the parts. The salient point in these two examples of skilled group performance is that ‘knowledge and skills reside in shared practices as much as in individuals’ (Beckett and Mulcahy 2006: 243). There is a growing literature centred on the concept of practice, as was discussed in the previous chapter. In this literature, ‘the focus has shifted from knowledge and skills as something people possess to something they do as part of practice’ (Beckett and Mulcahy 2006: 243). These two examples have presented what appear to be clear cases of group or team skills. Meanwhile in diverse fields such as health, education, housing and human services more generally, the notions of co-production and inter-professional practice have become increasingly prominent. The purported aim is to ‘shift the balance of power, capacity and responsibility from a provider-consumer relationship to one of co-production’ (Lee et al. 2012: 267) (see also Dunston et al. 2009; Brodie et al. 2009; Fenwick and Nerland 2014).

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Note also that the holism of the preceding examples challenges the traditional assumptions about learning that are often taken to apply to skill learning, such as this learning being context-free, replicable and transparent. In the case of group or team skills, a critical factor is how well the members of the group/team charged with addressing a given problem ‘gel’ to produce a combined skilled performance, one that meets the needs of the particular situation. A satisfactory group performance is something beyond the scope of any one member’s contribution. Clearly, the group or team skills are not context-free, since the given team members and what they bring to the overall group performance are themselves part of the context of the particular situation. As well, group or team skills are hardly likely to be replicable across groups or teams. Overall group performance will almost certainly vary with changes in the membership. Likewise, crucial group or team skills will not be transparent because they reside more in the relations between group or team members than in the individual members that comprise the group or team. This makes them less than amenable to being readily identified and demonstrated to others. Hardly surprising, then, the wide gulf that Hutchins found between individual job description sheets and actual navigation team performance. Are there possible accounts of skills and skill learning in which group or team skills are mainstream—rather than being an odd exception? This possibility will be explored in Part III in an account of skills centred on relations and their interconnections. This account, drawing upon the co-present group concept and complexity thinking, will be presented in Chap. 10.

4.2 Competence 4.2.1 Common Understandings of Competence As is to be expected, common understandings of competence closely mimic common sense views of skills. Indeed, the most naïve understanding of competence is that it consists simply in the possession of a bundle of skills. So to be (say) a competent carpenter is to have the set of appropriate skills. Likewise, it is predictable that many of the widely held assumptions about the nature of learning (which will be discussed in detail in the next chapter) are reflected in the common sense understanding of competence. Thus, it is part of common wisdom that it is individuals who are competent or not. Likewise, it is taken for granted that the particular discrete skills that make up the bundle of skills that constitutes competence are each relatively stable and enduring independent things. Again, various competent individuals are thought of as possessing the same skill sets, inferring that competence is replicable. Likewise, competence is assumed to be transparent in the sense that each of the skills that comprise it can be readily identified and demonstrated to others. The pervasive influence of these common understandings of competence was evident when, during the last twenty-five years or so, most nations introduced a

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competency-based reform of their vocational education and training systems (For a comprehensive account, see Mulder 2017.). A common principle of these reform agendas was that each industry should be responsible for developing its own particular competency standards. This seemingly made irrefutable sense. Who else was better qualified for this undertaking? Yet far too often, echoing the assumptions outlined in the previous paragraph, enthusiastic volunteers identified long lists of discrete skills and minute tasks (the two were often confused with one another) that were taken to comprehensively represent competence in the given vocational occupation. Any holistic considerations, of the kind suggested in the previous section on skills, were simply overlooked as competence was viewed as being satisfactorily demonstrated by being ticked off against the standard list of discrete skills or tasks. Nor, at first sight, do dictionary definitions of competence rule out this fragmentation into minute discrete tasks. Competence is variously defined as ‘properly qualified to do a task’ or as the ‘ability or capability that will enable satisfactory completion of some task’. These definitions leave open the size of the particular task(s) in which satisfactory performance constitutes competence. So why not break a large complex task into a myriad of sub-tasks, whilst taking it as obvious that competent performance of each of the sub-tasks equates to competence performance of the large complex task? The motor vehicle driving example, discussed in the earlier skills section of this chapter, highlighted the limitation of this atomistic approach. Clearly, the tasks that are part of dictionary definitions of competence are tacitly understood to be relatively complex ones. Whilst it is interesting and informative to learn that someone is (say) a competent motor mechanic or a competent guitarist, it is much more banal and less informative to learn that someone can change engine oil competently or is able to hold a plectrum correctly.

4.2.2 Theoretical Understandings of Competence a. The Tasks/Skills Approach Although the main themes of the present chapter already point to obvious flaws in the tasks/skills approach to competence, at first glance it appeared to have some solid grounding in certain parts of the literature. As well, the tasks/skills approach to competence gains some credence from much traditional educational thought that has cast training as the poor relation of its more illustrious, higher status relative: education. Whilst education was celebrated for its focus on development of desirable mental capacities, such as rational thought, critical judgement and other cognitive powers, training was regarded as an inferior type of learning, one which was focused on the development of motor skills with minimal cognitive demands (see, e.g., Winch 1998, 2010). This view, deriving from such false dichotomies as mind versus body and mental versus manual, is now largely discredited (as Winch’s and other contemporary accounts of skills testify). However, it takes more than theoretical developments to

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weaken the social impact of widely held traditional, simplistic views such as this one. The most influential theoretical support for the tasks/skills approach to competence comes from behaviourism. This theory of learning focuses exclusively on behaviour and the conditions for shaping it, whilst systematically avoiding any appeal to supposedly ‘inner’ entities, such as mental states (see, e.g., Kalantzis and Cope 2009; Phillips and Soltis 1998). This stance stems from the mistaken idea that a theory attains ‘scientific’ status if its understandings and explanations refer only to items that are directly observable. In the spirit of behaviourism, the central assumption of competency-based training (CBT) has been that competence involves satisfactory completion of a series of discrete, observable tasks or, more specifically, that competence is the set of observable behaviours involved in the completion of these tasks (see, e.g., Arguelles and Gonczi 2000). This assumption has only served to feed the widespread, condescending image of trade training as being the province of mechanistic manual skills requiring little deeper understanding. For this tasks/skills approach, it then seems obvious that assessment of competence simply involves candidates being ‘ticked off’ for satisfactory performance of each of the series of discrete, observable tasks that are taken to comprise the competency standards that represent the particular occupation. However, as the case of competent motor vehicle driving (discussed earlier in this chapter) testifies, this atomistic approach to competence is significantly flawed. Being ‘ticked off’ against a myriad of more and more minutely specified tasks does not necessarily equate to competence—far from it. What this ‘sum of observable tasks/behaviours’ approach overlooks is that competent performance also involves less tangible holistic capacities, such as planning, contingency management, and organising. These broader, more generic capacities are crucial to competence since they underpin performance in ways that are appropriate to often changing particular circumstances. Crucially, competent performances are context-sensitive—a dimension absent from lists of discrete tasks/behaviours. Thus, even work that is relatively routine involves more than mechanistic repetitions of sets of discrete behaviours—a situation well-recognised by researchers and educators. For instance, it is more than a quarter of a century since Griffiths was pointing out the ‘worrying number of people trying to reduce complex practical activities to a checklist of relatively simple and mindless ones’ (1987: 208). Nevertheless, this seemingly common sense ‘sum of the tasks/behaviours’ approach to competence has been widely influential in the implementation of CBT internationally, whilst also being the main target of prominent critics, such as Hyland (e.g., 1994, 2014). In the heat of the crossfire, the possibility that there might be available more fruitful understandings of competence is one that has been largely overlooked. Perhaps there is a deeper reason for the apparent persistence of the ‘sum of the tasks/behaviours’ approach to competence, despite the cogent arguments against it. The fact is that tasks and observable behaviours can be readily and clearly described. These descriptions can be made as detailed and specific as the purpose at hand requires. On the other hand, specifying in detail the exact nature of the human attributes that underpin performance of the tasks or behaviours is, at best, a much less

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precise, contested activity. This is well-illustrated by considering Winch’s list of the multiple components that jointly make up the complexity of typical skills (discussed earlier in this chapter). The fairly general nature of each of the items on Winch’s list demonstrates the difficulty of attempting to definitively specify the exact combinations of human attributes and capacities that ground skilled performances in any particular instance (for more on this, see Hager 2004). Thus, many might conclude, it is much easier and safer to focus on items that seem to be directly observable and objective (tasks, behaviours), and to shun less tangible, not directly observable items (the human attributes that underpin a competent performance). b. Generic Skills/Attributes Approach There has been a long-standing debate over the extent to which management skills are generic. Whilst it has been recognised that the details of essential management skills might vary somewhat with factors such as the size of the organisation, its goals and purpose, there has been a strong consensus that major management skills are indeed generic. Thus, a view that competence largely consists in proficient and effective deployment of a series of generic attributes or skills has been influential both in management and in business-related occupations more generally. This represents a very different way of conceptualising competence as a set of generic skills or attributes, such as organising, planning, gathering and analysing data, communicating, problem-solving, pattern recognition and so on. With this approach, the notion of generic skills or attributes may be stretched somewhat to include relevant knowledge and favoured attitudes and values. A very influential example of this approach has been Job Competence Analysis (see, e.g., Boyatzis 1982). Broadly, this approach seeks to identify the types and levels of generic skills and attributes that distinguish superior performers from their more run-of-the-mill counterparts. This, in turn, provides data for designing courses aimed at swelling the ranks of superior performers. One clear plus for this generic approach to competence is that it addresses, as a matter of course, the less predictable aspects of work roles. But a major limitation is that it overlooks the often crucial significance of contextual factors. It seems that so-called generic skills or attributes, such as problem-solving, analysis and pattern recognition, are often significantly context-sensitive. Rather than being generic across contexts, it seems that communicating effectively, for instance, requires somewhat different skills in very different contexts. Assessing a candidate’s performance of these generic skills or attributes in a context that is somewhat different from those in which they will be carrying out in their actual job practice is likely to be a poor predictor of their future job performance (Hager and Smith 2004). So, efforts to teach and assess generic attributes in pre-employment courses may well fail significantly to prepare novices for competent performance within their future work contexts. But this generic approach also exhibits another very significant limitation. In most cases, it turns out that a list of generic skills or attributes is actually a very thin representation of what is involved in the competent performance of an occupation. After all, so-called generic skills, such as organising, planning, gathering and analysing

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data, communicating, problem-solving and pattern recognition, are typically significant for many and diverse occupations. Thus, employing a list of generic skills to represent occupational competence results in diverse occupations looking very much alike. The result is that this approach to conceptualising competence ends up overlooking the very skills and activities that constitute the distinctive or unique features of an occupation. c. The Integrated Approach Given that there are diverse understandings of competence abroad, it should not be expected that dictionary definitions would be of much help in evaluating competing views. Earlier in this section, it was suggested that, at first sight, the atomistic task approach seemed to accord with typical dictionary definitions of competence. However, a closer examination of this matter raises significant doubts about this conclusion. As we saw, competence is variously defined as ‘properly qualified to do a task’ or as the ‘ability or capability that will enable satisfactory completion of some task’. What should be evident from these two dictionary definitions is that competence is essentially a relational concept, one that relates peoples’ abilities and capabilities to the satisfactory carrying out of particular tasks. This immediately suggests deficiencies in both the tasks/skills approach and the generic skills/attributes approach. Each of the various versions of these two approaches focuses on just one leg of the relational whole that comprises competence. It is precisely a commitment to preserving the integrity of this relational whole that is the starting point of the integrated approach. From this perspective, competencies are never abilities or capabilities in the abstract—they exist only in relation to particular ends or goals. On this view, competence is inherently relational, that is, it necessarily links two very disparate kinds of things—abilities or capabilities of practitioners and the accomplishment of particular task(s). The integrated approach takes seriously the relatedness of the two key components of competence that characterise the dictionary definitions: the abilities (or capabilities) that enable the satisfactory completion of certain task(s). When abilities or capabilities are elucidated further, the descriptions usually employ categories such as ‘knowledge’, ‘skills’ and ‘attitudes’, that is, personal attributes or characteristics of the competent practitioner. The integrated approach to competence typically requires somewhere between 20 and 30 key tasks to represent suitably the scope of an occupation or profession. In short, integrated competency standards relate the major activities that take place in an occupation with descriptions of the main practitioner attributes needed to successfully carry out these activities (Gonczi et al. 1990; Hager 1994). In a nutshell, competence can be summarised as knowledge, abilities, skills, attitudes and other attributes integrated seamlessly to accomplish a carefully chosen set of realistic professional tasks, which are of an appropriate level of generality (Gonczi et al. 1990; Hager 1994; Hager and Beckett 1995; Hager 2017). It is true that in describing an occupation in terms of a series of key tasks, the integrated approach does employ a limited form of atomism. This would seem to be unavoidable if analysis of competence is to be viable and useful. However, it differs from the more simplistic task or generic skills approaches to competence because it

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opposes its limited atomism with a thoroughgoing holism. This holism, which is of several different kinds, more than counterbalances the limited atomism by making synthesis a central feature of the integrated approach. A major motivation for the focus on holism in the initial formulation of the integrated approach to competence was a determination to try to capture the evident seamless know-how that is the most striking hallmark of typical highly skilled performances. This holistic phenomenological feature of sound professional practice in its broadest sense has not, however, received due attention in the relevant literature on skilled performance and expertise (For fuller discussion of this point, see Hager 2013, 2017). The integrated understanding of competence is holistic in several crucial senses. The first important type of holism that characterises the integrated approach stems from the fact that the 20–30 key tasks that represent the occupation or profession are not themselves discrete and independent. This means that it is highly likely that any segment of actual workplace practice will involve simultaneously several of the key occupational tasks. Thus, in practice, the key tasks are ‘molecular’ rather than ‘atomic’. This has major implications for assessing someone’s competence. The integrated approach insists that for assessment of competence to be valid, it must centre on the performance of strategically selected slices of actual workplace practice, rather than on the performance of key occupational tasks taken one by one in isolation. A second major sense in which the integrated understanding of competence is holistic is that significant aspects of the key tasks are shaped by the particularities of the context in which they are performed. This requires that the practitioner employs ‘situational understanding’ in order to adapt their practice to the varying needs of the assorted contexts in which they operate. So, performance of the integrated key tasks is far from being routine or mechanical. Rather, in each case, the practitioner is required to deploy a more general cognitive perspective in order to fashion a skilled response that is appropriate to the particular contextual circumstances. There is yet a third major sense in which the integrated approach to competence is holistic. The nub of the matter here is that competence itself is a construct that is not directly observable. This is a stance not taken by all understandings of competence, but it is fundamental to the integrated approach. The point stressed by the integrated approach is that it is performance that is directly observable, not competence. Competence or otherwise can only be inferred on the basis of suitable observations of performance. This means that assessment of competence is a judgement based on sufficient observational evidence of performance of significant slices of actual practice. Thus, assessment is holistic in the sense that, rather than assessing key tasks serially in isolated assessment events, data is drawn from a range of assessment events and is consolidated into an overall judgement of competence or otherwise. These crucial holistic features ensure that integrated or relational competency standards are the opposite of essentially atomistic approaches, whether the atoms be tasks or attributes. Thus, the integrated approach avoids the undesirable alternatives of either fragmenting occupations to such a degree that their holistic character is overlooked or adhering to a dogmatic, monistic holism that rules out all analysis.

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The above three senses in which the integrated understanding of competence is holistic also serve to underline the very close links between holism and professional judgement. The first kind of holism, centred on the fact that actual work practice typically involves several key tasks simultaneously, highlights the practitioner’s required capacity to enact a holistic performance that seamlessly integrates the relevant key tasks into an efficacious whole. The capacity to accomplish this reliably is aptly viewed as an important part of professional judgement. The second kind of holism concerned the need for the practitioner to employ ‘situational understanding’, that is, to adapt their practice and its guiding protocols, rules and norms to align with the varying contextual factors and exigencies of the current case or situation. This adapting and interpreting is based also on the exercise of sound professional judgement. This type of judgement is normally developed and refined by ongoing experience of successful practice, as, for example, the revised Dreyfus’ (2001) seven-stage model of expertise development illustrates (In this model, competence is the third stage). Third, the integrated understanding of competence is holistic in the sense that competence is a construct that is not directly observable. What is observable is performance, so sound judgements of competence require a sufficiency of performance evidence. Here, professional judgements underpin decisions about the types and quantity of performance evidence needed. Many and varied instances of professional judgement in action are easily found within a wide spectrum of occupations, not just in the traditional professions (For a diversity of such examples, see Hager and Halliday 2006). As well, these examples serve to illustrate the close links between holism and professional judgement. A range of other features of integrated competency standards also serves to highlight the crucial role of professional judgement. For instance, the integrated approach accepts that competency standards can never be a complete or comprehensive description of an occupation. Nor do they capture crucial tacit aspects of practice. Thus, professional judgement is the most reliable arbiter for those aspects of practice that lie outside of the scope of integrated competency standards protocols. However, what these standards do achieve quite well is a rich description of the holism of key parts of actual practice. Typically, when occupations make considered use of integrated competency standards, they find them to be a valuable and useful advance on the previous resources that they had deployed in this area (For detailed accounts of the employment of integrated competency standards in Australia see, e.g., Ash et al. 1992; Gonczi 1994; Hager and Gonczi 1998; Hager 2000; Stone et al. 2011; Gonczi 2013. For details of applications elsewhere, e.g., see Mulder 2014; Mulder et al. 2007). In the previous Sect. (4.1), we found that a nuanced understanding of skills departs strongly from widely accepted common sense features that are supposedly characteristic. These common sense features are also widely attributed to learning. It will be no surprise to find that these same features are commonly attributed to competence. Thus, competence is assumed to be a feature of individuals. Instead, we have found that it can be attributed plausibly to both individuals and groups in some instances. Again, like learning and skills, competence is thought of as a relatively stable and

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enduring thing that is independent of the context in which it was developed. Instead, the discussion of the integrated approach to competence suggests that it is changing and relational, with contextual features of particular circumstances being significant contributors to its relational nature. Likewise, as was the case with skills, the replicability and transparency assumptions are also widely assumed to be straightforwardly applicable to competence. Replicability suggests that different people can all possess exactly the same competence, just as, supposedly, they can possess the same skill. Instead, the integrated approach suggests that competence will, as a process of development, inevitably include some marks of the particular contexts in which it has been developed. Though there may be many competent practitioners in a given field, the different histories of how they developed this competence will ensure that their competence is not identical in all respects. As well, it is only to be expected that different practitioners will likely exhibit different degrees or levels of competence. The transparency assumption holds that to possess a skill or competence is to be able to demonstrate and articulate it. However, matters are more complex than this according to the integrated understanding of competence. It is well known that highly effective practitioners can, very often, do more than they can say. Unlike its more simplistic rivals, the integrated understanding of competence accepts the often tacit dimensions of competent performance. Overall, then, the integrated view of competence can be summarised as contextualised capability involving an integration of assorted practitioner attributes. These attributes include such things as broadly cognitive skills (e.g., knowledge, critical thinking and problem-solving strategies), interpersonal skills, affective attributes and technical/psychomotor skills. This section has provided a summary of key features of the integrated approach to competence, as well as two rival views. For fuller accounts, see Gonczi et al. (1990), Hager and Beckett (1995), and Hager (2017).

4.2.3 Unresolved Issues Regarding Competence Whilst competence is a much broader, more inclusive term than skill, the main unresolved issues concerning skills (outlined in the previous section) are also at the heart of what needs to be done to further our understanding of competence: The challenge of accounting better for the holism and relationality of competence and the central role of professional judgement The integrated approach to competence emphasises its essentially relational character. This contrasts with its more substance-oriented rivals—the tasks/skills and generic skills/attributes views. Unsurprisingly, the inherently relational concepts such as contextuality (or situatedness) and professional judgement, that were crucial to the explication of skills, are also vital for elucidating the holistic relationality that characterises the integrated approach to competence. Drawing upon the co-present

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group concept and complexity thinking, Chap. 10 will offer a detailed exploration of these matters. Challenges to an exclusive focus on individuals as the locus of competence The previous section of skills argued strongly for the importance of group or team skills. The same two cases that were outlined then testify equally persuasively for the significance of group or team competence. For the integrated approach, the competence of a particular practitioner can be usefully viewed as a complex, holistic relational nexus of skills, professional judgement, normativity, affective dimensions and so on. So, group or team competence becomes an even more complex, holistic, relational nexus of skills, professional judgement, normativity, affective dimensions and so on. The account offered above of the integrated approach to competence has made professional judgement the central explanatory concept. If, in the tradition of most educational thought, we think only of the competence of individuals, then professional judgement might be viewed as largely a matter for each individual practitioner. However, there are important social dimensions and norms that are very influential in shaping and refining a practitioner’s professional judgement. In an important sense, each practitioner’s professional judgement is accountable to that of other competent practitioners in the same field. This becomes evident in cases of group or team competence but applies equally to the work outputs of sole practitioners. Again, drawing upon the co-present group concept and complexity thinking, Chap. 10 will provide a close consideration of professional judgement and its fundamental links to other important concepts, such as relationality, holism and competence. Thus far in this chapter, it has been argued that the holistic senses of skill and competence are crucial for adequately capturing many of the dimensions of human performances of all kinds. As well, we saw that besides its holistic uncountable sense, skill also has a countable sense, one that covers more specific aspects of performances. The next section considers a series of concepts, including abilities, capabilities and dispositions, that are closely related to skill and competence.

4.3 Abilities, Capabilities, Dispositions, Capacities 4.3.1 Abilities Earlier in this chapter, Winch’s important claim that skills are but a sub-class of abilities (Winch 2010) was discussed. Thus, for Winch, ability is a much wider notion than skill. This concurs with typical dictionary definitions according to which having an ability is having sufficient power or capacity to do something (capacity seems to be a near synonym for ability). Many abilities occur or develop naturally, such as moving, breathing or walking. But instances of skilled movement, breathing or walking are much less common. The developmental process that extends a mere

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ability into a serious skill would normally require some learning and practice. As well, the level of skill attained at any time can be normatively appraised, as Winch stressed. The very wording of the definition of ability (having an ability is having sufficient power or capacity to do something) suggests that not all abilities are necessarily exercised, or even recognised, by those who have them or by their teachers, employers, peers and so on. For instance, someone might have the ability for sports, but seldom if ever exercises that ability. It is part of the genetic lottery that some individuals have many more abilities than they need for a fulfilling life, whilst others are less well endowed. Abilities, as normal features of humans, can remain dormant or undiscovered. But where their exercise is encouraged and developed by practice or training, typically they become skills. Also, as with skills, there would seem to be countable and uncountable senses of ability (for instance, compare ‘At eighty years of age she is still able to touch her toes’ with ‘She seems to have unlimited artistic ability’). As was noted early on in this chapter, attempts to characterise accurately human attributes, skills, capacities, and the like, seemingly inevitably, provoke contestation. Unsurprisingly, abilities are no different in this respect. For instance, research on human abilities has tended to focus mainly on cognitive abilities. Only recently has there been a growing recognition of the hitherto largely overlooked importance of noncognitive abilities (Kyllonen 2014: 2). Other areas of ongoing contestation around abilities include: the extent of their malleability and the extent to which they are generic as against being task-specific (for more on this, see Kyllonen 2014: 1–2).

4.3.2 Capability Closely related to ability, and sometimes used interchangeably with it, is the notion of capability. Perhaps dictionary definitions of capability (e.g., power of action, etc., of acting, etc.) suggest that capability may sometimes be a broader, more generic term than ability. Others have suggested that capability is what an individual can achieve with their abilities in a ‘best-case situation’ (one in which they are alert, well rested, motivated, etc.) (Kyllonen 2014: 1). However, there does not seem to be much value to be gained from pursuing this line of discussion any further here. After all, whether, say, a plumber is recommended as being ‘able’, ‘capable’ or ‘competent’ seems to make little difference. What is clear is that a competent practitioner or professional will have a range of abilities and capabilities that underpin their competence. Equally, it seems clear that various skills plus other personal attributes will underpin each of these abilities and capabilities.

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4.3.3 Dispositions and Capacities Dispositions and capacities are two closely related concepts that are sometimes employed interchangeably. According to Honderich, a disposition is a ‘capacity, tendency, potentiality or “power” to act or be acted on in a certain way’ (1995: 203). Dispositions are exhibited in both the realms of the animate and the inanimate. Examples include: some humans are irascible, others are impulsive; metals conduct electricity, glass is fragile. Honderich defines the closely related concept ‘capacity’ as follows: ‘A capacity is a power or ability (either natural or acquired) of a thing or person, and as such one of its real (because causally effective) properties’ (1995: 119). Thus, an irascible person has a capacity to lose their temper easily when provoked; metals have the capacity to conduct electricity. However, there appear to be some important differences between human capacities and those of inanimate items. The capacities of metals to conduct electricity or of glass to be fragile are natural properties. As such, the attribution of these properties to these items entails the truth of corresponding subjunctive conditional propositions, such as ‘if a potential difference were to be applied to the two ends of this copper wire, then an electric current would flow’ or ‘if this sheet of glass were to be struck forcefully, then it would shatter’. Human capacities and dispositions are subject to voluntary control. Hence they do not entail the truth of corresponding subjunctive conditional propositions. On at least some occasions, impulsive persons can restrain their impulsivity. For this reason, it has been suggested that human capacities are not, strictly speaking, dispositions (Honderich 1995: 119). As well, it is less than accurate to describe human capacities as ‘natural’ since this is a more complex matter. Whilst some human capacities are, arguably, innate, others may be learnt from experience (as the above Honderich definition implies). Still others might arise from a suitable mix of nature and nurture, that is, as a part of normal growth and development within favourable circumstances. A further notable feature of Honderich’s definition of capacity is that it specifically refers to individual persons. Reflecting a major ongoing theme of this book, Part III will discuss the importance of human groups or teams having distinctive capacities. But not all writers are as precise as Honderich in their uses of the terms ‘disposition’ and ‘capacity’. The term ‘disposition’ is often employed simply as a catchall for natural abilities, capacities, capabilities, propensities and the like. As well, human dispositions and capacities generally have received less attention in the literature than have skills or competence. However, in recent decades, they have begun to assume an important role in the work of some learning theorists. As we will see in the next chapter, there has been a strong historical tendency within the learning literature to view the learning of propositions as the most desirable and valued form of learning. However, some theorists now maintain that it is highly significant, though not widely appreciated, that all propositional learning in fact already presupposes dispositional learning. The main reason for this important fact being overlooked is it seems that dispositions (abilities, capabilities, capacities, etc.), unlike propositions, are not transparently specifiable. Whilst propositions can be stated fully and

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shared completely with others, much about human dispositions remains tacit either in practice or in principle. But, as it turns out, humble, non-transparent dispositional learning appears to be a prerequisite for the occurrence of more highly valued forms of learning. Passmore (1980) was among the first to stress the importance of non-transparent dispositional types of learning. He carried out a detailed investigation of the abilities or capacities that are presupposed by propositional learning and other forms of learning. Passmore was interested in the capacities and dispositions presupposed by what he called ‘capacities for action’. He argued that in normal cases of development ‘every human being acquires a number of capacities for action … whether as a result of experience, of imitation or of deliberate teaching’ (1980: 37). In the early years such acquired capacities include: learning to walk, to run, to speak, to feed and clothe oneself. These are followed, for example, by capacities to read, to write and to add. Later still, according to Passmore, come more diverse capacities—such as the capacity to drive a car, to play the piano, to repair diesel engines, to titrate, to dissect and so on. Note that, particularly as humans move from the early years to later ones, Passmore’s ‘capacities for action’ belong very much within the domains of skills and competence. Passmore maintains that these capacities for action—walking, reading, writing and so on—in turn presuppose a further range of capacities and dispositions whose specification is elusive and contested. He thus concurs with the point made earlier in this chapter that attempts to describe in detail human skills, abilities and capacities seem to be, inevitably, matters of contestation. The capacity to read, for example, presupposes a capacity to understand the language. In addition, Passmore stresses that there are other important kinds of human learning that are not capacities for action. The examples he offers are development of tastes (e.g., for poetry), formation of habits (e.g., of quoting accurately) and development of interests (e.g., in mathematics) (Passmore 1980: 37). But again, Passmore maintains, these other instances of learning also depend on a further range of capacities: a capacity to understand the language, a capacity to copy a sentence and a capacity to solve mathematical problems. Hence his conclusion that, not only are capacities fundamental for learning, but they a major, perhaps the major, class of human learning (Passmore 1980: 37). This view contradicts the widely influential assumption, discussed in detail in the next chapter, that propositional learning is the quintessential kind of learning, the one against which the value of all other kinds is to be judged. That the scope of capacities extends well beyond the cognitive domain is very evident from the Honderich definition already quoted above: ‘A capacity is a power or ability (either natural or acquired) of a thing or person, and as such one of its real (because causally effective) properties’ (1995: 119). Cognitive learning is itself dependent upon the exercise of a myriad of broader capacities. For reasons similar to Passmore’s, Winch (1998: 19) argues that knowledge itself is largely dispositional, thereby shifting the central focus of this topic firmly away from supposedly transparent propositions located in minds. An important, but oft-overlooked, species of non-propositional conceptual know-how is the

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ability to make appropriate conceptual inferences within a given professional field (see, e.g., Brandom 1994, 2001; Derry 2013). All of this provides powerful reasons for questioning the value of the acquisition and transfer metaphors, which, as the next chapter will demonstrate, have dominated much thought and talk about learning. It is also worth noting that Passmore (1980: 40) further divides capacities into two different types: open capacities and closed capacities. They are distinguished as follows: • ‘A “closed” capacity is distinguished from an “open” capacity in virtue of the fact that it allows of total mastery’. Examples include playing draughts, starting a car and so on. • ‘In contrast, however, good we are at exercising an “open” capacity, somebody else—or ourselves at some other time—could do it better’, for example, playing the piano. Clearly, Passmore’s distinction is a near cousin of the countable skills/uncountable skills distinction (discussed earlier in this chapter), but it is not the same distinction. In earlier sections of this chapter, we found that understandings of the concepts of skills and competence had been skewed by uncritical application to them of five key assumptions that characterise traditional theories of learning. Given that many abilities, capabilities, dispositions and capacities are, at least in part, able to be learnt, it will hardly be surprising that these same traditional assumptions about learning have been applied to this cluster of concepts. The need to move beyond this kind of thinking will now be addressed.

4.4 Unresolved Issues Regarding Abilities, Capabilities, Dispositions and Capacities Given that abilities, capabilities, dispositions and capacities are close relatives of skills and competence, the main unresolved issues that need to be addressed in order to advance our understanding will by now be familiar. First, we need better conceptual resources to adequately understand the characteristic relationality and holism of abilities, capabilities, dispositions and capacities. Chapter 10 will offer such an account as it addresses the same matters for skills and competence drawing upon complexity thinking. Second, since the importance of group or team skills and competence has been argued, we will also need to consider the implications of this for a more developed understanding of abilities, capabilities, dispositions and capacities. This discussion will gain significance because of the growing significance of coproduction and inter-professional teamwork. Again these matters will be addressed in Chap. 10. However, though there are very close connections between the range of concepts discussed in this chapter, it is nevertheless important to distinguish between them in some instances. For example, Winch argues that there are important higher order abilities, such as planning, communicating, coordinating, controlling and evaluating,

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that are central to many kinds of work. He calls these higher order abilities ‘second order traversal abilities’ (Winch 2013). Winch maintains that for a satisfactory understanding of their nature we need to clearly distinguish them from skills: It is a characteristic of the exercise of such second order transversal abilities that, although they presuppose the exercise of skill, they are not to be identified with skills. Thus, for example, the ability to plan, although it may involve, (but need not) the ability to draw diagrams or to write a sequence of instructions, it is not to be identified with such skills, since it is evident that an individual can do these things without actually planning. This is an important point since there is a prevalent reductive discourse of referring to planning as “planning skills”, communicating as “communicating skills” and so on. What makes, for example, planning, something more than the mere exercise of planning skills is the seriousness of intent and attention that is brought to bear on the activity, not just the exercise of skills but in orientation to what it is intended should be achieved. (Winch 2013: 1210)

Further, Winch observes that these second order transversal abilities ‘are very often social activities, involving the active participation of others’ (2013: 1210). Thus, more generally, Winch is identifying orders or levels within abilities. At first sight, this fits well with the complexity and holism that this chapter has argued are crucial features that need to figure in any satisfactory account of skills, competence, ability and related terms. Perhaps uncountable skills can be regarded usefully as a higher level or order than countable skills? This matter of levels is one that will be explored further in Chap. 10 using the co-present group concept and complexity thinking as suggestive conceptual resources.

4.5 Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated the importance of holistic understandings of the skills and competence concepts. As well, the roles in accounts of human performances of a family of closely related concepts, such as abilities and dispositions, have been elucidated. Various deficiencies of current views on these matters have been highlighted. Parts II and III of this book will employ the co-present group concept and complexity thinking to address these deficiencies and to further expand our understanding of holistic human performances. However, this chapter and the previous one have both come up against the vital role of learning in the explication of quality human performances. We will end Part I with a closer examination of learning and its role in the major topics of this book. It will turn out that, in Part III, the co-present group concept and complexity thinking will stimulate new understandings of learning.

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Hager, P. (2017). The integrated view on competence. In M. Mulder (Ed.), Competence-based vocational and professional education: bridging the worlds of work and education (pp. 203–228). Dordrecht: Springer. Hager, P., & Beckett, D. (1995). Philosophical underpinnings of the integrated conception of competence. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 27(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-5812. 1995.tb00209.x. Hager, P., & Gonczi, A. (1998). Development of professional competencies—A case study in the complexities of corporatist policy implementation. In A. Yeatman (Ed.), Activism and the Policy Process (pp. 56–80). Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Hager, P., & Smith, E. (2004). The inescapability of significant contextual learning in work performance. London Review of Education, 2(1), 33–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 1474846042000177465. Hager, P. & Halliday, J. (2006). Recovering informal learning: Wisdom, judgement and community (Lifelong Learning Book Series) (Vol. 7). Dordrecht: Springer. Hager, P., & Johnsson, M. C. (2009). Learning to become a professional orchestral musician: Going beyond skill and technique. Journal of Vocational Education & Training, 61(2), 103–118. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13636820902933221. Honderich, T. (Ed.). (1995). The Oxford companion to philosophy. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Hyland, T. (1994). Competence, education and NVQs: Dissenting perspectives. London: Cassell. Hyland, T. (2014). Competence: Conceptions and perspectives. In D. C. Phillips (Ed.), Encyclopedia of educational theory and philosophy (Vol. 1, pp. 166–167). Los Angeles/London: Sage. Johnsson, M. C., & Hager, P. (2008). Navigating the wilderness of becoming professional. Journal of Workplace Learning, 20(7/8), 526–536. https://doi.org/10.1108/13665620810900346. Kalantzis, M., & Cope, B. (2009). New learning: Elements of a science of education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kyllonen, P. C. (2014). Abilities, measurement of. In D. C. Phillips (Ed.), Encyclopedia of educational theory and philosophy (Vol. 1, pp. 1–2). Los Angeles/London: Sage. Lee, A., Dunston, R., & Fowler, C. (2012). Seeing is believing: An embodied pedagogy of ‘doing partnership’ in child and family health. In P. Hager, A. Lee, & A. Reich (Eds.), Practice, learning and change: Practice-theory perspectives on professional learning (Professional and PracticeBased Learning Book Series) (Vol. 8, pp. 267–276). Dordrecht: Springer. Mulder, M. (2014). Conceptions of professional competence. In S. Billett, C. Harteis, & H. Gruber (Eds.), International handbook of research in professional and practice-based learning (pp. 107–137). Dordrecht: Springer. Mulder, M. (Ed.). (2017). Competence-based vocational and professional education: Bridging the worlds of work and education. Dordrecht: Springer. Mulder, M., Weigel, T., & Collins, K. (2007). The concept of competence in the development of vocational education and training in selected EU member states: A critical analysis. Journal of Vocational Education and Training, 59(1), 67–88. https://doi.org/10.1080/13636820601145630. Passmore, J. (1980). The philosophy of teaching. London: Duckworth. Phillips, D. C., & Soltis, J. (1998). Perspectives on learning (3rd ed.). New York: Teachers College Press. Scheffler, I. (1960). The language of education. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas. Stone, C., Boud, D., & Hager, P. (2011). Assessment of osteopaths—Developing a capability-based approach to judging readiness to practice. International Journal of Osteopathic Medicine, 14(4), 129–140. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijosm.2011.09.001. Winch, C. (1998). The philosophy of human learning. London & New York: Routledge. Winch, C. (2010). Dimensions of expertise: A conceptual exploration of vocational knowledge. London & New York: Continuum.

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Chapter 5

Understandings of Learning

This book is focused on achieving new understandings of the development of professional practice, skills and expertise. This in itself is a journey in which learning is implicated. But, more importantly, the concept of learning has very close connections to the topics already discussed in Part I. Hence, a detailed examination of the nature of learning is an apt way to conclude it. However, as this chapter will demonstrate, our understandings of learning are far from settled. Indeed, as it happens, how we think about learning has been unduly shaped, even distorted, by too much focus on formal classroom learning as the purported paradigm of all learning. This chapter begins by outlining some traditional understandings of learning and the key assumptions that underpin these understandings. More recent theorisations of learning that emphasise its previously underplayed social aspects are then outlined and discussed, presenting various challenges to the traditional understandings of learning and their underpinning assumptions. This critique of traditional ideas suggests various principles that point the way towards richer understandings of the nature of learning, as well as highlighting various as-yet-unresolved issues.

5.1 Common Understandings and Assumptions About the Nature of Learning Learning has been a prominent human activity from time immemorial. Indeed, it could be said to be a prime survival tool, whether as a procedure or as a capacity, both for individuals and for groups. But other than indubitably being something that people do, what exactly is the ontological status of learning? It has just been characterised as a tool, a procedure or a capacity. A tool suggests that it is a thing, an entity; a procedure suggests that it is a process, a way of acting or transacting; a capacity suggests that it is an attribute of the learner, a power to act. A main theme of this chapter is that it does matter vitally how learning is understood, whether as a thing, a process or an attribute, or as some combination of these. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 P. Hager and D. Beckett, The Emergence of Complexity, Perspectives on Rethinking and Reforming Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31839-0_5

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Of course, learning is a topic about which much has been written. However, before turning to the literature on this topic, it will be useful to discuss the ‘common sense’ view of learning. Since learning is a fairly ubiquitous human activity, it is only to be expected that common sense will have fairly definite views on it. Also, given that it is now many generations since the advent of universal compulsory schooling, it is unsurprising that the common sense view of learning typically employs language associated with learning by individual learners in classroom situations. For example, learning typically is viewed as a ‘thing’ that individual learners acquire; this acquired thing being stored in the individual’s head. Thus, the common sense view is that learning involves individuals acquiring and storing (possessing) ‘things’ (items of knowledge) that can be accessed and used as required. Since English dictionaries strongly reflect common usage, it is unsurprising that typically they define learning as a product to be acquired. Thus, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, learning means: ‘To acquire knowledge (of a subject) or skill (an art, etc.), as a result of study, experience or teaching’. In the case of skills, common sense would likely distinguish mental skills (regarded as stored in the head) from physical skills (regarded as stored in the wider body). However, like knowledge, skills are viewed typically as a product to be acquired and used. This is reflected in common sense talk about skills, such as ‘pass them on to the next generation’ or ‘use them or lose them’. The above ideas reinforce the widespread, unreflective common sense perception that performance in a quiz show provides a measure of a person’s level of learning, and even of their ‘intelligence’, expressed as a measure known as ‘IQ’. Bereiter helpfully summarises the common sense view of learning as follows: Under the influence of the mind-as-container metaphor, knowledge is treated as consisting of objects contained in individual minds, something like the contents of mental filing cabinets. (Bereiter 2002: 179)

Reflecting this common sense view is the popular perception that a quiz show champion, with their mind seemingly crammed with information, represents the ideal of a learned person. Here, common sense is misguided, as the actual situation of educated people is that they know their way around their special field(s) of knowledge and have the know-how to readily access information as needed without having their minds crammed to capacity with innumerable facts.

5.2 Traditional Understandings and Assumptions About the Nature of Learning that Have Shaped Educational Practice Over centuries, the rise to prominence of formal educational arrangements has been accompanied by practices that share key assumptions with the common sense understanding of learning. Of course, this fact can be viewed as significant evidence in favour of the common sense understanding. However, it might also be the case that

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traditional approaches have important limitations. We turn now to a consideration of key assumptions that have long characterised formal teaching and learning practices.

5.2.1 Learning as a Unitary Concept A prominent feature of much educational practice is that learning is treated as a unitary concept. There are several aspects of the notion of learning as a unitary concept: • The term ‘learning’ is assumed to be univocal (i.e. having only one proper meaning). Hence, its diverse applications are assumed to refer to a single common phenomenon. • If indeed all learning is of the same kind, then a single general theory of learning should be attainable. Hence, the claim by certain psychologists, for example, that learning exhibits law-like regularities that are best studied scientifically so as to identify the laws of learning. • However, since the wide diversity of learning situations has made it very difficult to find a general theory that plausibly applies to all of these diverse situations, proponents of the unitary concept have resorted to the fall-back position that there is a single best kind of learning. Other kinds of learning are thereby judged to be inferior according to the extent to which they differ from the single best kind. Compulsory schooling means that everyone is personally familiar with learning situations no matter how successful or otherwise their own experiences of them might have been. Hence, the common sense, unreflective view is that everyone knows what learning is. This encourages the perception that learning is a concept with a clear, obvious meaning. The result of this univocal public perception of ‘learning’ is that people are often unaware of clear-cut instances of learning in which they have been involved. For instance, research by Boud et al. (2009) found that workers in diverse occupations were firmly opposed to the suggestion that learning occurred through their work practice. The reason for this stance was that the workers regarded ‘learning’ as something that happened in formal courses undertaken previously to qualify for the job. Any suggestion that learning occurred on-the-job was tantamount to admitting that they were not properly qualified to be in the job in the first place (Boud et al. 2009). This is a clear example of the widespread, unreflective assumption that ‘learning’ has a single common meaning. This point has important implications for researchers investigating learning in the workplace. As Boud and colleagues found, direct questioning about learning in the workplace is liable to find very little. More indirect methods are required in order to uncover the phenomenon. For example, if the same workers are asked to recount details of their most satisfying or challenging work experiences, they provide rich instances in which valuable and crucial professional learning was achieved, whilst not describing or recognising it as ‘learning’.

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In contrast, the quest for a single general theory of learning does not arise from unreflective, common sense presuppositions. Rather, it reflects a conviction that adopting a scientific approach to the study of learning is the best way to discover and elucidate what is its common basis. On the face of it, treating the study of learning as a science, thereby aiming for simple and parsimonious laws and explanations, is a laudable idea. However, rigorous application of the scientific method to the study of learning, for example, by psychologists, has not thus far resulted in any widely accepted general theory of learning. In fact, as we will show, current research acknowledges its inter-disciplinary nature. This is welcome, since there has been substantial criticism of the ‘scientific’ study of learning and the resultant ‘psychologising’ of education (e.g. Usher et al. 1997: 73–82; Winch 1998). Despite these wider perspectives, the idea that, at bottom, all learning is of a kind remains widespread. If the search for a single general theory of learning has foundered, the subsidiary idea has taken hold that there is one, or a few, best kinds of learning against which the worth of all other kinds should be judged. This move also suggests that the more modest project of developing a single theory of learning to cover the best kinds of learning may be viable. Perhaps it might even be the case that the lesser kinds of learning might somehow be reducible to the best kinds of learning? This approach has been very influential in shaping educational thought, as will become clear later on in this chapter. As argued in detail by Hager and Halliday (2006: 132–134; see also Hager 2005), the prominence in educational thought of the assumption that there is one best kind of learning can be traced to the abiding influence of Greek ideas, particularly those of Plato and Aristotle, reinforced later by Cartesian rationalism. In a nutshell, the claim is that since humans are essentially minds that incidentally inhabit bodies, then development of mind remains the prime focus of education. The best kind of learning is that which enriches the mind and enhances rationality. Likewise, if the essential characteristics of minds are thinking and rationality, they can be treated in isolation from non-essential characteristics like emotion and conation. Hence Aristotle, for example, held theoretical knowledge to be superior to both practical (ethical) and productive knowledge. This hierarchy of theory/practice/production was not only epistemological, but also social in that the kind of knowledge that was a person’s daily concern correlated closely with their role and standing in the Greek city-state. In this way, the assumption that there is one best kind of learning served to foreground in educational thinking a series of perennially influential dualisms such as mind/body, thought/emotion, theory/practice. The mind/body dualism, for instance, underpins the notion that all mental events and activities are essentially interior to the mind. Likewise, the theory/practice dualism underpins the view that practice is mere application of theory. The combination of this essentialism and the privileging of theorising as prior to experience in the socio-material world leads to the traditional assumption that learning is what resides (and is ‘filed’) in an individual’s head, available as answers to be ‘applied’ to quiz questions, for example. We turn to the implications of this now.

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5.2.2 Learning as Something Done by Individuals In common with standard educational practices, the vast majority of learning theories incorporate a rarely questioned assumption that learning is centred exclusively on individual learners. An unreflective acceptance of this assumption is encouraged by the ubiquitous presence of formal education arrangements in contemporary societies. Overwhelmingly, formal education institutions focus on assessing and certifying the learning achieved by individual students. Reflecting this hegemonic sway of formal educational arrangements, the broad literatures on teaching students and on assessing their learning almost without exception assume that the individual is the correct unit of analysis. No wonder the common sense understanding of learning follows suit. But what if the domain of learning is wider than just learning by individuals? As we have already emphasised so far in this book, what if learning by small groups or teams is a real phenomenon, one that is not reducible to mere learning by the individuals that are the members of the groups or teams? This matter will be pursued later in this chapter. The assumption that individuals are the locus of learning serves to foster several other common notions about learning. One of these is that learning (what is learnt) is located in the learner’s head (e.g. for propositional knowledge) or body (e.g. for physical skills). This suggests that the focus of learning, viewed as a process, is on circumstances that promote the acquisition by individual minds and bodies of items that are to be learnt. The focus of learning viewed as a product is on the stock of accumulated knowledge and skills that will create a well-furnished individual mind and a capable body, hence the common sense view of learning for which the mind becomes a ‘mental filing cabinet’. The plausibility of these common understandings about the location of learning is reinforced by three widely used metaphors that permeate thought and talk about learning. These three common metaphors are ‘acquisition’, ‘possession’ and ‘transfer’. Learners are said to acquire the items that they have learnt. They thereby possess these items of learning, which they can then transfer to appropriate situations as required. These metaphors provide strong support for the notions that learning is located in the learner’s head or body. Since learning can be acquired, possessed and transferred, it is a commodity of some kind. But also, this thing (learning) that is acquired, possessed and transferred is not directly observable. So, it makes apparent sense to regard it as somehow located inside the learner in the mind or brain, for propositional knowledge; in the body, for physical skills. These common metaphors also imply that learning is closely involved with movement of things (or substances) from place to place. An instance of this is when new learning comes to be located in the learner’s head, or when, later on, this learning is transferred to some new situation. Can we avoid metaphors in our thought and talk about learning? It appears that deployment of metaphors is inescapable in this context. The reasons for this are beyond the scope of this chapter (see Hager and Halliday 2006: 112–131, and Hager 2008, for detailed discussion). But it is well worth noting here that metaphors can lead our thinking astray just as often as they

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can illuminate it (see, e.g., Scheffler 1960; Hacking 1999). So, an important question is: are there other fruitful ways of thinking about learning that deploy metaphors other than these traditional ones? This question will also be considered later in this chapter.

5.2.3 Learning as a Relatively Stable and Enduring Product As the preceding discussion has shown, the assumption that individuals are the focus of learning is closely aligned with the notion that what is learnt is a product or commodity that can be acquired, possessed and transferred by individual learners. Linked to this is a further influential assumption that this product, that is, the learning, is a thing that is relatively stable and enduring. That learning should exhibit relative stability and endurance is a vital practical matter for formal education arrangements. These require that learning (what is to be learnt) has the kind of stability that enables it to be encapsulated in curriculum, libraries and textbooks. It is important that what teachers are expected to pass on to their students can be clearly specified. This sets boundaries around what kinds of student attainment are reasonable for testing in examinations and other assessments. At a meta-level, student attainment levels for different teachers and different institutions need to be amenable to comparison. Thinking and talking about learning as if it is a product helps to promote dubious thinking about education in general. Neo-liberal policy makers like to regard education as a mere commodity to be bought and sold in a free market. Unfortunately, education systems generally have unwittingly encouraged this widespread mistake. For decades they have uncritically deployed and promoted nomenclature and terminology that portrays education as a product like any other. Thus, educational institutions routinely talk about delivery of courses, course providers, course offerings, course load, student load, and so on. If education is akin to a marketplace, students become consumers of products that are sold to them by salespersons (teachers). Further, this encourages the notion that what is learnt is in the form of products that are able to be packaged and quantified readily; not something that is partial, intangible and in a state of flux. If educational institutions themselves exhibit sloppy thinking about the nature of education and learning, what hope do students have? So, as we have seen, formal education systems are largely predicated on the assumption that learning (what is to be learnt) is stable, familiar and widely understood. Little wonder then that theories of learning have broadly taken this feature of learning to be essential. Engeström succinctly summarises this assumption of ‘standard theories of learning’ as ‘a self-evident presupposition that the knowledge or skill to be acquired is itself stable and reasonably well-defined’ (2001: 137). All of this underpins a common sense understanding of learning as essentially individuals accumulating appropriate products. According to Bereiter (2002), this ‘adding more substance’ to the mind, preferably as ‘bite-sized’ chunks, constitutes the ‘folk theory’ of learning. It also adds a further widely employed metaphor to thought and talk about learning, namely ‘the mind as a container’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980).

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These ideas about learning ensure that the focus is firmly on the products of learning as items to be stored in the mind. They thereby deflect attention away from the processes of learning, and from the fluidity of those processes.

5.2.4 Learning as Independent of Context What is learnt is not only widely understood as being a stable and enduring thing, but it is also importantly regarded as being context-free. This supposed independence of learning from its context has several dimensions. First, learning should be independent of the setting in which it occurred. If a given item of knowledge has been truly learnt, then it is irrelevant whether the learning occurred in a formal classroom setting, in a library, or somewhere else. Whilst differences in context, for instance through the work of different teachers, might serve to facilitate or to hinder various processes of learning, the product of successful learning is independent of how it was achieved. This supposed context-independence of learning reinforces the power of the ‘transfer’ metaphor discussed above. Learning appears as a self-contained abstract thing or entity, that can be transferred readily and intact to new locations at will, as much as posting a package moves it intact to a new location. But context has a further dimension. Learners themselves are part of the context in which learning takes place. Thus, what is learnt (the product of learning) is thought of as being separate from, and independent of, the learner. This accords with the metaphors of ‘acquisition’ and ‘possession’—what has been acquired can just as readily be given away. This propensity to view learning as independent of context resonates strongly with key strands of Western thought. Many philosophers have been attracted to the image of a spectator individual human mind, aloof from the world, but able to represent the world to itself. As it becomes steadily stocked with knowledge, this solitary human mind could, in theory, recapitulate, or retrieve at will, the course of human learning.

5.2.5 The Replicability and Transparency of Learning Following on from the naïve characterisation of learning as ‘context-free’ is the idea that the learning of different learners can be literally the same or identical. For instance, if, in a particular classroom, each student has acquired the same item of knowledge, then each of them has achieved identical learning in this particular situation, learning that is independent of learners’ individual differences. So this can be repeated, endlessly. This replicability assumption is at the heart of formal educational arrangements. For instance, the sorting and grading functions of education systems require the persistence of this kind of foundational, predictive significance for marks and grades as measures of learning achievement.

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But replicability of learning implies more than just identical learning across learners. An individual who has truly learnt something will be able to demonstrate (replicate) the learning at a later date. Just as learning can be stored in various receptacles other than minds, such as books, libraries and e-repositories, likewise it can be stored in the learner’s mind and recalled as required. This feature of learning is its transparency—to have successfully learnt is, in the best sense, to know what ‘it’ is that you have learnt. Learning that is non-transparent is inferior. Winch clarifies this point as follows: ‘It is natural for us to talk about learning as if we recognise that we have both a capacity to learn and a capacity to bring to mind what has been learned’ (1998: 19).

5.2.6 Learning as Quintessentially Propositional As discussed earlier, the search for a single general theory of learning has not enjoyed notable success. Hence, the fall-back position has been to identify and theorise one, or a few, best kinds of learning against which the worth of all other kinds might be assessed. In the event, the most favoured kind of learning has been propositional learning. Various theoretical and intellectual trends have coalesced to bring about this situation. Common sense views the mind as both a source and a storehouse of ‘ideas’. More sophisticated understandings replace the vague term ‘ideas’ by concepts and propositions as the primary objects of thought. The meanings of concepts are established through the activity of minds. Concepts are combined in propositions so as to represent things and states of affairs in the world (see, e.g., Winch 1998: 63ff). According to this line of thinking, which reflects much traditional Western philosophy, the individual mind is a kind of spectator that is not itself in the world, but is able to represent the world to itself via propositions. This places the mind in effect in a different world; the same location applies to the propositions that the mind contains. It is then a short step to assuming that propositions are themselves timeless universal entities. On this view, true propositions are the basis of knowledge. Knowledge growth rests on the accumulation of true propositions. Learning is paradigmatically the mind being furnished with the ‘right kinds’ of propositions. So, learning is seen as a series of changes in the contents of individual minds. Since propositions have been widely thought of as universals, that is, the same in each instance, knowledge is, in principle, attainable by all able motivated minds. Likewise, knowledge as universal, true propositions becomes the prime focus of education. Given these kinds of understandings of propositions, it is easily seen that the five previously considered assumptions about learning (5.2.1–5.2.5) coalesce and reinforce one another to make this ‘master’ assumption (namely, that the ‘one best kind of learning’ is propositional learning), seem inevitable. They come together in this way: the individual learner’s head is the obvious location for acquired propositions. They are thereby possessed and are available for later

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transfer. Thus, the three common metaphors are tailor-made for propositions. Likewise, consider the remaining assumed features of learning—that it is a stable and enduring product, one that is independent of context, and is replicable, explicit and transparent. All of these characteristics fit propositions perfectly, as their timeless universal character attests. Hence, the widespread appeal of the notion that propositional learning is the best kind of learning. Thus, the original view that learning is a unitary concept has morphed into the idea that there is a single best kind of learning. As was noted earlier in this chapter, this position accords well with influential views of Plato, Aristotle and Descartes that have massively shaped educational thought. This dominant idea still held sway two millennia later, as typified by the Hirst and Peters position that the focus of education is ‘developing desirable states of mind involving knowledge and understanding’ (1970: 85). The achievement of knowledge and understanding is demonstrated by being able to ‘bring the relevant propositions before the mind’. Traditionally, an inability to represent the world in this way supposedly indicates a failure of learning. This also implies that less-than-transparent kinds of learning (such as tacit knowledge, informal and incidental learning), and their messy distributional quality located ‘out there’ in human experiences, are either aberrations or second-rate types of learning. By the early 1980s, Donald Schön’s refreshing account of the ‘reflective practitioner’ (1983) and his later (1987) account of the educational implications of reflective professionals’ formation and development exposed what he lamented as ‘junk categories’ of knowledge. These are ubiquitously apparent in expert practitioners through their supposed ‘wisdom’, ‘talent’, ‘intuition’ or ‘artistry’. But, Schön states, ‘[u]nfortunately such terms as these serve not to open up inquiry but to close it off … attaching names to phenomena that elude conventional categories of explanation’ (1987: 13). Not surprisingly, ‘conventional categories’ and verbal usage, which reflect key common views about learning, resonate with traditional ideas. For example, as dictionaries attest, the verb ‘to learn’ covers acquisition of both knowledge and skill, thereby having broad scope. However, the noun ‘learning’ and the adjective ‘learned’ are usually restricted to verbal knowledge. A ‘person of learning’ is invariably regarded as being accomplished in propositional knowledge. Thus, whilst, say, learned judges or learned mathematicians are common, a learned concreter, or even a learned sculptor, are much less likely. A ‘learned’ practitioner (of anything) is redescribed through ‘junk categories’ of knowledge, of lower status than conventional or common sense propositional knowledge. Schön’s ‘artistry of practice’ (1987) was a forthright way to redress this oversight, or epistemological blind spot, by bringing to prominence ‘expressive’, rather than merely ‘representational’, knowledge. For representational accounts to be accurate in these cases of concreting or sculpting, practitioners would likely need to have detailed ‘propositional’ understanding of some field other than laying concrete or making sculptures. A ‘learned society’ of scientists has no parallel in concreting or sculpting. Hence, it seems that whilst ‘learning’ as a verb encompasses more than propositional knowledge, the corresponding noun and adjective reflect the primacy of propositional knowledge over other types of learning, such as learning through practice.

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A further influential implication of this assumption about the one best kind of learning is that it has served to entrench mind/body dualism into educational thought. This dualism underpins the notion that all mental events and activities are essentially interior to the mind. As Toulmin (1999: 56) puts it, common understandings of learning assume that ‘the supposed interiority of mental life is an inescapable feature of the natural processes in our brain and central nervous system’. According to this view, human sense organs are instruments that can add content to mental life, but are themselves part of the ‘outer’ world of the body, not of the ‘inner’ mental world. Thus, mind/body dualism implies its companion: inner/outer dualism. In turn, these have fostered a series of abiding dualisms that have dominated educational thought, such as, thought/emotion, theory/practice and thinking/acting, where the first of each pair has high status. As noted above, though major thinkers such as Dewey have vigorously highlighted the toxic effects of these dualisms, they have remained influential in educational policy and practice, since they seem to reflect common sense understandings about education. Overall, the assumption that the most valuable form of learning is focused on thinking (what minds do), rather than on action in the world (what bodies do, or, more exactly, what embodied minds do) has continued to reinforce the ‘ivory tower’ perception of much formal education. This rationalist bias favouring propositional learning still dominated educational philosophy in the late twentieth century. For example, though the very influential work of Hirst and Peters (1970) recognised that there is a wide variety of kinds of learning, they arranged the types of learning into a hierarchy of value, with propositional learning at the top. The value hierarchy was then employed to decide what kinds of learning should count as being educational: ‘The value criterion for education clearly implies that much which can be learnt must be excluded from education either as undesirable … or as trivial’ (Hirst and Peters 1970: 76). On this basis, they valued learning physics, for example, above learning physical skills, or learning interpersonal skills. So their work gives pre-eminence to propositional learning whilst allowing that education should include some other kinds of learning located in the upper levels of their hierarchy of value. At the same time, others were attempting to reduce all worthwhile learning to propositional learning. For instance, Hamlyn set out to assimilate less rational forms of learning to the more rational ones. Hamlyn proposed ‘that learning must at least involve the acquisition of knowledge through experience and that changes of behaviour due to learning must be the result of the new knowledge’ (1973: 180). The obvious objection to this definition is that there are many kinds of learning that at first sight appear not to involve the acquisition of knowledge. Hamlyn addressed this objection by considering the case of learning to love someone. He argued that even here, ‘my love follows upon and exists in virtue of what I have come to know’, though he did admit that how this actually happens was too ‘complex’ to ‘enter upon here’ (1973: 180). So, whilst accepting that the analysis would be complex, Hamlyn tried to establish that all instances of learning ‘are parasitical upon those cases of learning which do involve the acquisition of knowledge simpliciter’ (180). The difficulty for Hamlyn’s reductive strategy is that in making knowledge acquisition a necessary condition for learning whilst also

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encompassing the very many diverse kinds of learning, he is forced to broaden the notion of knowledge to cover the full range of know-how, much of which is tacit or implicit. This clashes with the principle that the best kind of learning is explicit and transparent. Later in this chapter, we will find that Hamlyn came to realise that he needed to revise his 1973 definition of learning. This section has outlined some main persistent and entrenched assumptions about learning. Sections 5.4 and 5.5 will demonstrate that in more recent work, each of these assumptions has attracted cogent criticisms. In the meantime, the next section will consider the relationships between these understandings and assumptions and some prominent learning theories.

5.3 Learning Theories and Traditional Understandings and Assumptions About the Nature of Learning It might be expected that serious, significant theories of learning would very likely challenge the traditional understandings and assumptions presented in the previous section. However, until at least the 1990s, far from directly challenging these understandings and assumptions, it was common for learning theories to actually support many of them, and imply only minor reinterpretations of still others of them. A detailed survey of learning theories is outside of the scope of this chapter (for significant critical surveys, see, e.g., Kalantzis and Cope 2009; Phillips 2003; Phillips and Soltis 1998). However, we can summarise the situation up until the 1990s as one in which virtually all theories of learning supported the following principles: • learning as a unitary concept; • individual learners as the appropriate unit of analysis for understanding learning; • learning as the acquisition of stable, enduring products. As well, with some minor reinterpretations in order to fit better with particular theories, versions of the remaining traditional assumptions continued to be influential. Thus, though the significant effects that context can have on learning processes were often acknowledged, learning outcomes (products) themselves were viewed as largely context-independent. These trends reflected the hegemonic dominance of formal education systems over educational thinking. The major focus of formal educational structures on the learning of propositional knowledge, that is, knowledge that can be codified in syllabi, transmitted in classrooms, and assessed in examinations so as to ‘objectively’ grade students, only served to reinforce the seeming self-evidence of the context-free, replicability and transparency assumptions. The ongoing power of these assumptions is illustrated by the current enthusiasm for generic skills. As nations have sought to respond to globalisation by enriching, expanding and better recognising the skills profiles of their labour force, policies to promote and reward so-called ‘generic skills’, such as employability skills, key skills and learning to learn skills, have become common at all levels of education systems. Once acquired, it is assumed that learners can transfer these skills unproblematically

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to diverse situations. Yet, as contemporary research-based investigations of actual workplace situations suggest, these so-called generic skills are anything but contextfree, replicable and transparent (Hager and Holland 2006). As noted, particular learning theories sometimes required minor reinterpretations of their traditional understandings and assumptions, whilst still maintaining their overall thrust. For instance, reflecting the unitary assumption, behaviourism sought to establish the scientific laws governing all learning. The individual learner was taken to be the self-evident unit of analysis. However, behaviourism also eschews all reference to inner mental events, relying instead on overt behaviour to account for learning. Thus, there is no temptation for it to locate learning in the head, or even inside of the body, since publicly observable behaviour suffices. Similarly, cognitivist theories of learning, whilst insisting that the most valuable form of learning is focused on thinking (what minds do) and also viewing learning as a product of this cognition, nevertheless came to recognise that learning (the product) is not literally contained in the mind (or head) (see, e.g., Winch 1998). From the 1990s onwards, a new wave of learning theories has even more emphatically questioned traditional understandings and assumptions about learning. Lave and Wenger (1991) marked the advent of these sociocultural theories, which characteristically elevate the various social aspects of learning to a new prominence, thereby rejecting the idea that the individual learner should be the exclusive focus of analysis. In general, sociocultural theories maintain that whilst all learning is social in some significant sense, this is compatible with some instances of learning being individual learning, and other instances being group or community learning. Sociocultural theories also reject the idea that learning is primarily a product. They view learning as an ongoing process of participation in suitable activities. Whereas learning as product dovetailed neatly with the acquisition and transfer metaphors, learning as process invokes the metaphor of participation. Further, sociocultural theories reject the supposed independence of learning from context. They insist that learning is significantly shaped by social, organisational, cultural and other contextual factors. They also emphasise that learning is an embodied phenomenon that integrates a range of human attributes, much wider than just the cognitive, since all human experience is taken to be (eventually) educable. In short, sociocultural theories of learning pose a major challenge to traditional understandings and assumptions about learning. In so doing they can be seen as not only problematising the concept of learning, but as seeking to re-theorise it. We can provide a more detailed substantiation of these challenges to traditional understandings and assumptions about learning by asking the following questions: What exactly is meant by ‘all learning is social’? and What is distinctive about sociocultural theories of learning?

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5.4 Sociocultural Theories and Fresh Insights About Learning Major contributors to the sociocultural theorisation of learning include Lave and Wenger (1991), Wenger (1998), Engeström (1999, 2001, 2008), Wertsch (1991, 1998) and Bereiter (2002). Again, it is outside of the scope of this chapter to present a detailed account of the main sociocultural theories of learning. Instead, we will concentrate on addressing the two questions: What exactly is meant by ‘all learning is social’? (in this section) and What is distinctive about sociocultural theories of learning? (in Sect. 5.5). These questions will be answered largely by presenting a critical analysis built around an influential framework, developed by Salomon and Perkins (1998), for considering the various categories of learning proposed by sociocultural and related theories. Though ultimately we reject some aspects of their framework, it does provide a useful starting point for our own analysis of the situation. They identified four distinctively different meanings of the term ‘social learning’ as it applies to the dynamics or processes of learning: • • • •

active social mediation of individual learning; social mediation as participatory knowledge construction; social mediation by cultural artefacts; the social entity as a learner.

These four supposedly different processes of ‘social learning’ proposed by Salomon and Perkins will now be outlined and discussed in turn.

5.4.1 Active Social Mediation of Individual Learning According to Salomon and Perkins, this kind of social learning process involves two distinct roles: a learner (or learners) and an ‘other’ (or ‘others’), whose task it is to enhance the learning of the individual learner(s). Sometimes the roles are asymmetrical (e.g. an experienced tutor and a novice); but they can also be symmetrical (e.g. student peers forming a cooperative study group so that the group activities serve to enhance the learning of each individual participant). The crucial notion here is social ‘mediation’. Vygotsky’s (1978) zone of proximal development, involving internalisation and active construction of knowledge, provides an early example. Likewise, Rogoff’s work emphasises active participation by which learners ‘transform their understanding and skill in solving the problem’ (Rogoff 1991: 362; see also Rogoff 1999). The crucial point is that this kind of learning process involves something more than mere instruction or information transfer. Thus, a traditional lecture clearly comprises a social situation, but as far as social mediation is concerned, it is a limited, ‘not very interesting’ case (Salomon and Perkins 1998: 4). This is so because

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learning from lectures, for example, arises more from students’ own ‘autoregulation skills’, rather than from interactions with the lecturer or with one another. So this first particular kind of social learning not only requires active participation by the learner, that enhances their understanding and skill in dealing with the situation, but also requires that it is shaped in part by the actions of the ‘other’ or ‘others’ (tutor, peer learners, etc.). This means that each participant in a peer study group actually plays a dual role. As learner, each participant has their own learning shaped in part by the contributions of the other participants. As participant, each group member influences the learning of each of the other group members. Because this kind of learning centres on individuals, it is commonly assumed that the learning is located inside of the learner. However, as argued above, the validity of this assumption is very questionable. Common activities that accompany this kind of social learning include interaction, feedback, encouragement, challenge, guidance, the elicitation of rich responses from the learner such as explanations, suggestions, reflections and so on. By now it should be clear why their term ‘social mediation’ encompasses more than mere instruction or information transfer. Salomon and Perkins maintain that this kind of socially mediated learning by individuals is far more effective for enhancing conceptual development and change than is its solo alternative. This is because social mediation enables the “objectivization” of one’s thoughts, still-to-be-formulated ideas, and considerations, which, when communicated and shared, can be discussed, examined, and elaborated upon as if they were external objects. Objectivization of this sort is quite impossible outside the social context. (Salomon and Perkins 1998: 8)

5.4.2 Social Mediation as Participatory Knowledge Construction The first kind of social learning assumed that a learner’s understanding and problemsolving capacities are best shaped by suitable interventions by a learned other (or others). Also, it assumed that this process is ‘one-way’ from the learned other(s) to the learner, that is, that the process does not reshape the tutor, teacher and so on. Both of these assumptions view knowledge as independent of the learning context, that is, that the learned other guides, encourages and inspires the learner to acquire readymade knowledge. It also surmises that the learned other already has this pre-specified knowledge and that their own learning is not increased. Rejection of both of these assumptions leads to a different notion of ‘social mediation’. According to this second approach, knowledge arises gradually from participation in a context of practice. This approach views learning, both as a process and as a product, as being inseparable from the sociocultural setting in which it occurs. Salomon and Perkins dub this the ‘sociocultural’ approach. It reflects a ‘more qualitative, holistic way of anthropological thinking’ (Salomon and Perkins 1998: 8). Lave

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and Wenger (1991) and Wertsch (1991) are invoked as seminal figures behind this distinctive approach. However, it is notable that the Lave and Wenger work centred on the process of novices becoming full members of a community of practitioners, whereas the sociocultural approach itself has more general applicability, for example, it encompasses the ongoing learning of practitioners as their practice changes and evolves. This latter point is important as it reminds us that the sociocultural approach is something much more wide-ranging than a proposal to help us to reconceptualise formal courses that prepare novices for entry into professions and other occupations. Salomon and Perkins warned the reader that a satisfactory specification of the key principles of the sociocultural approach may be difficult: ‘Given the relative novelty of the sociocultural approach, much of its vocabulary and many of its basic constructs are still somewhat vague …’ (Salomon and Perkins 1998: 8). Nevertheless, certain main ideas are clear enough. First, the sociocultural approach involves a holism that challenges traditional approaches to understanding learning: It becomes unreasonable to separate cognition or motivation from the socially mediating context or, for that matter, to separate individuals from their activities and the contexts in which they take place. (Salomon and Perkins 1998: 8–9)

Such holism requires a very different unit of analysis for describing and understanding learning. Second, the learning is jointly produced and thereby distributed across the holistic system: ‘[T]he learning products of this system, jointly constructed as they are, are distributed over the entire social system rather than possessed by the participating individual’ (Salomon and Perkins 1998: 4). Joint production of knowledge and its distribution across the holistic system should not be interpreted as meaning that each individual in the system personally produces and/or possesses this knowledge. In fact, according to this approach, traditional notions of acquisition, internalisation and transfer are misleading: Knowledge, rather than being transmitted or internalized, becomes jointly constructed (‘appropriated’) in the sense that it is neither handed down ready-made nor constructed by individuals on their own. Rather, knowledge, understandings, and meanings gradually emerge through interaction and become distributed among those interacting rather than individually constructed or possessed. (Salomon and Perkins 1998: 9)

Some questions can be raised here. If learning emerges through group interaction and becomes distributed amongst those interacting without being possessed individually, is this not a plausible case of group learning? Salomon and Perkins do not think so, reserving the term ‘group learning’ for their fourth kind of sociocultural learning. In Part III of this book, we develop an account of group learning that shows why their second and fourth categories are not really distinct from one another at all. Also, the previous quotation appears to suggest that knowledge creation and distribution occurs simultaneously for those participating in the group. However, the seminal work of Lave and Wenger (1991) focuses on the initiation of novices into a practice. Apparently, as new members gradually move towards full participation in a pre-existing group of practitioners, we are to imagine the distribution of knowledge adjusting to include the newcomers. Simultaneously, as novices move to being fully fledged practitioners, their sense of identity changes accordingly. This sociocultural

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approach, rather than specifying practitioners in terms of their acquisition of knowledge and skills, talks of identity change brought about by increasing participation. Third, this approach obviously renders useless the usual learning metaphors, particularly acquisition and transfer, which are traditionally invoked for understanding learning by individuals. Rather, for this approach, the metaphors of participation and construction seem to capture both the process and the goal of learning. The socially based, participatory construction of knowledge, which is the crux of this account, ensures that by its nature, such knowledge is highly situated in its context of production. Clearly in all this there are various conceptual issues that deserve close consideration. We will here consider three such issues. One conceptual issue is whether we should accept the injunction of the sociocultural approach to take all the focus off the individual in favour of the group. In general, we maintain that theorising about learning should not be confined starkly to either the individual or to the group—rather, learning by both is important (Hager 2011). This second sociocultural approach can be charged with embedding the learning so completely within the given context that it remains a mystery exactly how it is that individuals are reshaped by their learning. So, a limitation of this approach is that it says too little about the individual’s learning as their personal identity changes from that of a novice to a full participant. This particular deficiency in the Lave and Wenger account has been discussed by several critics—see, for example, Elkjaer (2003) and Guile and Young (1999). Nevertheless, despite defending the position that it always makes sense to ask about the learning by an individual, even in a sociocultural holistic situation, we also wish to defend the idea of learning being distributed across a learning system. This is the second conceptual issue. The main point here is to reject the common sense assumption, seemingly accepted by many writers on education, that learning is a thing located inside of the heads (or the bodies) of learners. As argued elsewhere (Hager and Halliday 2006: 129–130; Beckett 2012), and in the final section of this chapter (5.6), learning is a complex relational web that is in a process of change, where learners have a sense of their (individual) self-directedness, typically embedded in socio-material practices. This relational web connects the whole that is the learner and the surrounding world in an evolving way. So, learning is located outside of the learner’s head—it is external. To possess a car or a block of land is not to have them inside of us—in fact, their possession is ‘out there’. Why should possessing learning (as a product of knowledge) be any different? Though not widely recognised, John Dewey agreed with this claim about the location of learning (see, e.g., Burke 1994: 164). A third conceptual issue concerning the sociocultural approach relates to its claimed distribution of knowledge across the holistic system of the group of participants. In the literature, this is presented as a distributed network of sociological relations. However, more weight needs to be given to the fact that these complex relational webs are causally efficacious. Learners expect to make differences in their shared situations, arising from those very situations. So, the ‘external’ feature of learning is typically embedded in practices, over time:

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[P]eople learn best at work when they see time as malleable, when they see they are free in groups to make something of their shared problems and challenges and that this requires letting the collective imagination to run free. (Beckett 2012: 126)

Participatory constructions of knowledge are inevitably relational: they invite consideration of particular kinds of relations. However, that is a very different enquiry from the traditional nominalistic approach, which has been to seek to reduce relations to particulars. In this book, we argue against this traditional approach, since we advocate less-reductive, holistic and, yet, quite particular accounts of agency. As we observed in Chap. 3 and as Bertrand Russell recognised, the kinds of relations that are causally efficacious must be real in some significant sense (Russell 1915/1986; see also Hager 1994). This is an issue that will receive further consideration in Parts II and III of this book. So, participatory constructions of knowledge raise crucial relational considerations, with which our ‘complexity’ analysis throughout this book will fully engage.

5.4.3 Social Mediation by Cultural Artefacts This third kind of social mediation, distinguished by Salomon and Perkins, centres on the way humans are shaped by the tools that they use. The term ‘tool’ is employed in a very broad sense, to include physical implements, technical procedures (such as mathematical algorithms) and symbolic resources (such as languages or musical notation). When humans use tools of these kinds, they are typically focused on achieving something other than learning. Although learning is normally a secondary consideration, Salomon and Perkins suggest that there are several aspects to the learning that results from humans’ use of tools. First, both the practitioners and the practice are developed. Second, tools ‘play a double role’ (Salomon and Perkins 1998: 11). There are ‘learning effects with the tool’ that expand human capability to act upon the world. But there are also learning ‘effects of the tool’. These go further in transforming the ways in which humans relate to the world. This leads us on to issues such as discourse and identity, the discursive construction of reality, and gender and language. Writers who have taken up these issues include Vygotsky (1978), Leont’ev (1981) and Foucault (1977, 1980). Most significantly, ‘social mediation’, where the ‘learning effects’ of the tool and of the relations held between tools and other entities (including humans), has been re-cast through actor-network theory—itself a powerful driver of the new sociomaterialism. Relationality is central to these contemporary analyses of what used to be mere ‘mediation’ and is now a full-blown ontological claim: embodiment matters (the pun is usually intended). One prominent contributor to this emergence, Dianne Mulcahy, sets out relationality this way: The concept of the assemblage forwarded by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) is akin to the notion of actor-network in actor-network theory, and directs attention to the many, diverse and contesting actors, agencies and practices through which human subjects and material objects

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take form … Deploying a sociomaterial assemblage approach affords consideration of the “complex, messy and contextualized” [Larsen 2010: 209], specifically affective processes and relations, and challenges the idea of the teacher as inevitably centre-stage, inviting attention to other actors and agencies … Embodiment is inescapably material. (Mulcahy 2015: 106)

Furthermore, in promising research very relevant to this book, exploration of what can be called ‘affective arrangements’ within the socio-material has been currently framed in this way: In cultural theory, affect is often not understood in terms of individual mental states, but rather in terms of interactive dynamics between multiple actors and actants in sociomaterial settings … for instance, in infant-caregiver interaction, in situations of engaged dialogue, in crowd behaviour such as protests and riots, or in the immersive practices of interactive media. … Is it individual affective states that get embedded or even ‘extended’ in addition to their being experienced by individual subjects? Or is a stronger claim warranted, for example, that individual affective states and relational affect are co-constitutive and thus ontologically on the same footing? Might one even hold that affective relations are prior to and constitutive of the entities or “agencies” related, as some posthumanist approaches seem to suggest (see Barad 2007; Bennett 2010). (Slaby et al. 2017: 1)

So, contemporary work in socio-materialist analyses takes the embodied nature of holistic experiences (especially the underrecognised role of the affective) very seriously and constitutes this socio-materialism relationally, that is, amongst individuals in groups, not within a single individual. Thus, there is much congruence with the emergence of complexity thinking in this book. The implications for learning are also very congruent with the emphasis we place on small groups and the ownership within them of shared learning purposes and outcomes, including the significance of the affective in their reflexive activities and functions.

5.4.4 The Social Entity as a Learner The key idea for this fourth category of socially mediated learning is that ‘collective entities can learn’ (Salomon and Perkins 1998: 10). Salomon and Perkins suggest that this kind of learning has been relatively neglected because it is not prominent in formal education settings. However, they maintain, not only does ‘a great deal of individual learning and education’ occur outside of formal education arrangements, but that a lot of it embodies group learning of this fourth kind. According to Salomon and Perkins, this kind of sociocultural learning provides a ‘decisive step away’ from the literature of the earlier three kinds. They assert that proponents of this approach form ‘by and large, a camp of their own’ (Salomon and Perkins 1998: 13). They cite well-known writers on learning within organisations (e.g. Argyris and Schön 1996; Levitt and March 1988) as progenitors of this category of sociocultural learning. Whether this fourth category is really so different from the second one is challenged by our account of collective learning espoused in Part III of this book. But given the congruence we have just seen in the third category (‘social mediation’ and its

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continuing evolution to socio-materialism), the similarity between the second and fourth categories should not be a surprise. After all, it was Senge’s ‘Learning Organisation’ (The Fifth Discipline 1990) that really provoked ‘systems thinking’ across the Western corporate world. He advocated the potential for entire organisations to explicitly learn from their operations, such that all staff would align with the collective purposes and thus all move forward as one. By the mid-1990s, a main criticism of this was that it assumed an organisation was a singular entity. For example, Field concluded his critique of the ‘massified’ Learning Organisation marked by ‘systems thinking’ with this: [I]t is time to adopt a more holistic and robust view of ‘organisational learning’: one that gives equal weighting to all three levels of learning outlined here: technical-economic, political, and ontological. It is also time to recognise the conflictual nature of organisations … and the crucial roles of interests and interest differences. Finally, it is time to examine much more carefully, the circumstances, if any, in which learning is actually ‘organisational’. (Field 2004: 218)

Field’s ‘levels’ of learning are important ontological and epistemological phenomena to which we return in the last section of this chapter (5.6). But next, we explore how particular instances of ‘knowledge embedded in practice’ may sit within organisations, which moves us beyond the Sengian ‘massified’ organisation. Besides the organisational learning theorists already mentioned, other prominent educational thinkers have also regarded learning by collective entities to be a distinctive category of learning. Bereiter and Scardamalia (1996) call this kind of learning ‘knowledge embedded in practice’ and provide an interesting example of such learning, which is worth quoting here: In Rome, to cross a wide thoroughfare where automobile traffic flows endlessly, pedestrians will step out boldly and proceed at a steady pace while the automobile traffic parts like the Red Sea around them. Trying that in a North American city would create a horrendous traffic jam, if not much worse. To attribute the difference to the superior skills and versatility of individual Roman motorists is hardly adequate. What we see in Rome is an evolved motoring practice that adapts to pedestrian cross-traffic. No amount of individual training of motorists would produce it. There is, indeed, probably no way to get such a motoring practice established in places where it does not already exist. It would have to have started long ago, when cars were few and not very fast, and become progressively refined as traffic grew denser and faster. Thus we are looking at a learning trajectory that extends over several generations and for which the necessary initial conditions no longer exist. Today’s Roman motorists are collectively executing a skilled performance that is more than a combination of their individual driving skills. They are participants in a social practice with a learning history of its own, growing out of the activities of drivers now gone, who probably had no idea what they were contributing to. (Bereiter and Scardamalia 1996: 490)

Boreham has written extensively on group learning in work situations, calling it ‘work process knowledge’ (e.g. Boreham et al. 2002). Within organisational learning theory, recent work has brought increased rigour to discussions around group learning (e.g. Stacey 2003; Zhichang 2007). Meanwhile, the notion of group learning has received hardly any attention from philosophers, the stand-out exception being Toulmin (1999). Interestingly, it is certain that Dewey viewed learning as a holistic

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relational complex of the kind proposed by some categories of social learning. Presumably the individual versus the group is one of the dualisms he sought to reconcile. However, we are not aware of him writing about group learning as such. Having identified these four meanings of social learning, we are in a position to answer our two key questions: What exactly is meant by ‘all learning is social’? and What is distinctive about sociocultural theories of learning? In doing so, we are also well-placed to challenge the influential traditional understandings and assumptions about learning that were presented in Sect. 5.2. Clarifying the import of ‘social’ is the key to answering the first question. As Salomon and Perkins point out, a single-minded socioculturalist could well maintain the universal truth of ‘all learning is social’. This is so because even a learning situation involving a lone individual ‘comes deeply embedded in a cultural context, involves culturally informed and laden tools, and figures as part of a range of highly social activity systems’ (1998: 16). However, this would be an empty victory since, as Salomon and Perkins insist, ‘all learning is social’ misses important distinctions in the same way that ‘all learning is individual’ did. In order to capture these important distinctions, Salomon and Perkins envisage a continuum with individual learning at one end and social learning at the other. At the individual end, some social factors are relevant. At the social end, where group learning occurs, individuals within the group may also gain personal learning. For Salomon and Perkins, locations on the more social part of the continuum are where cases of learning involving their four distinct meanings of social learning are situated; the individual part of the continuum is for cases where social mediation is much less significant. So, whilst ‘all learning is social’ is true in terms of the continuum, it is of little practical value without taking account of the various crucial distinctions represented by positions along the continuum. The conclusion is that the social aspect is very important for understanding some types of learning, but of less significance for understanding other types. Our answer to the other question, What is distinctive about sociocultural theories of learning? is best approached by considering what these theories imply for the traditional understandings and assumptions about learning discussed earlier in this chapter.

5.5 Sociocultural Challenges to the Traditional Understandings and Assumptions About the Nature of Learning The Salomon and Perkins four-fold analysis of the social mediation of learning, together with their social learning-individual learning continuum, provides strong grounds for disputing each of the traditional understandings and assumptions about the nature of learning. As well, other writers—many from within psychology and neuroscience who take a broader sociocultural context seriously—have offered cogent

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criticisms of various of these understandings and assumptions. This section highlights some major examples of these challenges to the traditional understandings and assumptions.

5.5.1 Challenges to Learning Being Understood as a Unitary Concept Salomon and Perkins’s four distinctive ways in which learning can be socially mediated point to the conclusion that there are distinctly different kinds of learning. Their continuum from social learning through to individual learning reinforces this view. They are not alone in rejecting the idea that learning is a unitary concept. Although common usage still treats learning as an unproblematic concept with an agreed clear meaning, the advent of the sociocultural approach has seen serious learning theorists increasingly recognise the great diversity of ways in which the concept of learning is employed. For instance, Brown and Palincsar observed that ‘[l]earning is a term with more meanings than there are theorists’ (1989: 394). A decade later, Schoenfeld pointed out ‘that the very definition of learning is contested, and that assumptions that people make regarding its nature and where it takes place also vary widely’ (1999: 6). The result has been that amongst learning theorists the aim of achieving a unitary account of learning has been undermined. Even amongst psychologists themselves, there has been a growing trend to accept that the diversity of types of learning means that a ‘one theory fits all’ approach is unlikely to be successful (e.g. Bruner 1996; Bereiter 2002). Thus, the common sense assumption, that the term ‘learning’ is univocal (i.e. has only one proper meaning), is overly simplistic. This situation is in fact typical of terms that refer to broad generic activities. For instance, think of ‘travelling’. We can probably accurately characterise all instances of travelling as ‘movement from place A to place B’. But this formulation is too abstract and vague to be of any real use. To understand particular cases of travelling, we need to know such things as the purpose, the mode of travel, the kind of distances involved, what borders (if any) are crossed, and so on. The diversity of types of travelling means that any generic characterisation is necessarily uninformative. No wonder that nobody seriously suggests that we need a rigorous scientific account of travelling! But if ‘movement from place A to place B’ is a basic human capacity, so also is ‘adjusting to accommodate changes to one’s environment’ (i.e. learning). Besides both learning and travelling being basic capacities of human beings, they are also alike in their diversity of purposes, modes and contexts. Hence, generic formulations of learning, such as ‘learning is a change of behaviour’, are likewise too abstract and vague to be very useful or informative. Of course, the polyvocal nature of learning does not of itself rule out the possibility that scientific approaches might be the best way to understand each of its many diverse types. But Winch questions even this position: ‘the possibility of giving a scientific or

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even a systematic account of human learning is … mistaken’ (1998: 2). This is because there are many and diverse cases of learning, each subject to ‘constraints in a variety of contexts and cultures’ which precludes them from being treated in a general way (1998: 85). Winch dismisses as futile attempts to achieve generalisability by studying learning situations in supposedly context-free experimental conditions. For Winch, there are two problems here. First, the experimental setting is itself ‘highly culture specific’ and, therefore, not ‘context-free’ (1998: 85). Second, the settings in which learning actually occurs are nearly always different from the context that pertains in the experimental setting. Thus, concludes Winch, ‘grand theories of learning … are underpinned … invariably … by faulty epistemological premises’ (1998: 183). Winch’s recommended alternative is that we concentrate on describing and understanding instances of learning viewed as distinctive cases: ‘we have been obsessed with theory building at the expense of attention to particular cases’ (Winch 1998: ix). This neo-Wittgensteinian approach might suggest that Winch wants to treat ‘learning’ as a family resemblance concept. Actually, he does not make this move, though his book does discuss family resemblance concepts (1998: 110–111). However, treating learning as a family resemblance concept would indeed capture the diversity of cases of learning, whilst accepting that there may be no single feature that is common to all cases. This approach arguably merits serious consideration. With his focus firmly on description of particular cases, Winch stresses that his book should not be read as advancing an alternative theory of learning. Rather, he sees the book as providing ‘a philosophical treatment of the concept of learning’, a project necessitated by ‘the distorted way in which learning has been treated by many psychologists and those educationists who have been influenced by them’ (Winch 1998: 1). The nature and diversity of cases of learning will be explored further both in later sections of this chapter and later in this book.

5.5.2 Challenges to the Assumption that Individuals Are the Exclusive Locus of Learning Salomon and Perkins’s four distinctive ways in which learning can be socially mediated decisively rebut the claim that individuals are the exclusive locus of learning. Their continuum from individual learning to group learning illustrates that there is a diversity of loci of learning that extends well beyond individual learners. Many other recent writers concur. A prominent example is the very significant critique of the distorted way in which learning has been treated by many psychologists. This critique has come in the 1980s from within psychology itself. Gilligan’s (1982) critique of developmentist moral psychology (the work of Kohlberg) has resonated over the decades since its publication, partly because it connects human development to a broader environment. The Wikipedia entry summarises thus: Kohlberg’s data showed that girls on average reached a lower level of moral development than boys did. Kohlberg’s theory (based on his 1958 dissertation) had been developed on

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a sample of boys (as he had been advised to do). Gilligan stated that the scoring method Kohlberg used tended to favor a principled way of reasoning (one more common to boys) over a moral argumentation concentrating on relations, which would be more amenable to girls. (‘In a Different Voice’, n.d.)

Building on Gilligan, Belenky et al. (1986) asked if there were distinctively women’s ways of knowing. Fieldwork showed that women were cognitivist in a more relational way than shown in the linear and individualistic developmental psychology of Piaget, Bruner and Kohlberg—who made research assumptions of a developmental trajectory where the peak of maturity was the fully realised self-aware adult. On the way up these developmental pyramids, relationships with others were indeed affirmed, but eventually, these, based in care and empathy, were subsumed into the trajectory towards autonomy. In their survey of philosophical foundations of adult education, Elias and Merriam (2005) described Belenky’s project as a ‘connected’ approach to education, although still with an individualistic purpose: This approach affirms women’s experience, voices and ways of knowing. According to Belenky et al., the nature of truth and reality and the origins of knowledge shape the way we see the world and ourselves as participants in it: “If a woman is to consider herself a real knower, she must find acceptance for her ideas in the public world” [Belenky et al. 220]. (Elias and Merriam 2005: 180)

These feminist critiques of developmental psychology argue that the building of relationships is not just a mere pause on the way up the staircase to self-aware autonomy (the supposed peak of ‘maturity’). Rather, connecting with a wider environment enhances, at every step, what ‘maturity’ means wherever relations are richly developed. To valorise individual learning as the paradigm of learning and, then, to attempt to understand all other kinds of learning in terms of it, is a serious conceptual and psycho-sociological error. Yet this is precisely what traditional learning theories have attempted to do. It is akin to physicists choosing red as the paradigm colour and seeking to reduce the properties of all other colours on the visible spectrum to those of red. So, various recent researchers reject the near universal assumption that the individual is the correct unit of analysis for understanding learning. Their work puts forward an irresistible case that learning by teams or groups warrants serious scholarly attention, as we, too, have set out from the beginning of this book. Such communal learning is significant in its own right because teams or groups are capable of accomplishments that are beyond the capacity of individual members, that is, such communal learning is greater than the mere sum of the individual learnings by the various team or group members. Maturity is not well-defined as merely an individualistic accomplishment. Hence, communal learning is not helpfully reducible to individual learning. As Toulmin argued, understandings of learning that centre on the individuality assumption offer no ‘convincing account of the relationship between “knowledge” as the possession of individuals and “knowledge” as the collective property of communities of “knowers”’ (Toulmin 1999: 54). This parallels the problem created by

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the assumption that meaning is established via individual minds, that is, it overlooks collective knowledge (Toulmin 1999: 55). Winch goes even further. He argues that there is more at stake here than a failure to account for collective knowledge. We need to recognise ‘the necessarily social nature of learning’ (Winch 1998: 183). Winch maintains that normative learning of all kinds, including the important case of learning rule following, presupposes the prior existence of social institutions: ‘No normative activity could exist ab initio in the life of a solitary’ (1998: 7). The implication is that when considering learning within practices and other group situations, and, as we argue, as part of the journey towards normal psycho-sociological maturity, making the individual learner the unit of analysis is seriously flawed. This crucial point is central to Parts II and III of this book. Frequently accompanying the assumption that individuals are the locus of learning is the sub-assumption that learning is located in the individual’s head or body. As we have seen, three widely employed learning metaphors (acquisition, possession and transfer) serve to strongly reinforce these assumptions. They are further reinforced by the fact that learning in its noun sense seems to refer to an abstract thing, one that cannot be observed directly. Inside of the learner becomes an obvious choice for the location of this ‘hidden’ abstract thing. So, the widespread acceptance of abstract rationality’s developmental bed-fellow, cognitive mastery, and their attendant metaphysics, inevitably supports the sub-assumption that learning is located in the individual’s head or body. Then, since the learner can accomplish a multitude of things with the learning (recall it, analyse it, apply it cleverly or inappropriately, etc.), it becomes almost irresistible to propose that the mind or brain possesses a range of specific ‘mental powers’ that the individual learner can deploy. Thus arises the assumption, endemic to most research and theorising around learning, that various mental powers exist. The main task becomes one of investigating and elucidating them. Yet, as Davis (2005) and others have argued persuasively, the existence or otherwise of mental powers is a conceptual matter, not an empirical one. Davis concludes that increasingly, on conceptual grounds, ‘the very existence of some supposed mental powers is open to challenge, at least if these powers are conceived of in an individualist fashion’ (2005: 637). More broadly, this approach suggests that the way we think about learning itself is in important respects a conceptual matter rather than an empirical one. Individualistic learning is also under attack from contextually sensitive neuroscience, which has raised crucial doubts about learning being somehow recorded in minds or brains. For instance, discussing various conceptual confusions that arise from blending the findings of neuroscience with common sense understandings of minds and learning, Bennett and Hacker point out that ‘brains cannot be said to be knowledgeable, ignorant, learned, untutored, experts or charlatans—only human beings can be such things’ (2003: 152). They maintain that it is simply a mistake to think of knowledge and information being recorded in the brain in the same kinds of ways that they are recorded in books, card-indexes and computers:

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We may say of a book that it contains all the knowledge of a lifetime’s work of a scholar, or of a filing cabinet that it contains all the available knowledge, duly card-indexed, about Julius Caesar. This means that the pages of the book or the cards in the filing cabinet have written on them expressions of a large number of known truths. In this sense, the brain contains no knowledge whatsoever. There are no symbols in the brain that by their array express a single proposition, let alone a proposition that is known to be true. Of course, in this sense a human being contains no knowledge either. To possess knowledge is not to contain knowledge. (Bennett and Hacker 2003: 152–153).

Thus, even if we favour the use of the common learning metaphors (acquisition, possession and transfer), it is going too far to assume that they imply also that learners contain their learning. And indeed, this situation typifies the normal relations between humans and their possessions. As we stated earlier, an individual can commonly possess a house, a motor vehicle or a musical instrument. But in none of these typical cases are the possessions located inside of the individual. Why should possession of knowledge be different? As will be discussed later in this chapter, more recent accounts of learning view it as a complex, evolving relational web that includes learners and their surroundings. But might it not be the case that knowledge and information are recorded in the brain in somewhat different ways than they are recorded in books, card-indexes and computers, and the like? Bennett and Hacker emphatically reject this: A great deal of information is contained in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In that sense, there is none in the brain. Much information can be derived from a slice through a tree trunk or from a geological specimen – and so too from PET and fMRI scans of the brain’s activities. But this is not information that the brain has. Nor is it written in the brain, let alone in the ‘language of the brain’, any more than dendrochronological information about the severity of winters in the 1930s is written in the tree trunk in arboreal patois. (2003: 153).

Thus, the common view that when individuals learn propositions they are transferred to and contained in the mind or brain is highly suspect. Whilst there are still some who hope that neuroscience might yet accommodate the common sense view (e.g. Clark 2005, 2015), contemporary research suggests otherwise. In a wideranging exploration of contexts in which learning occurs, Jacobson et al. argue that through ‘feedback interactions’ between elements or agents at various levels (the neuronal, cognitive, intrapersonal, interpersonal and cultural) ‘collective properties arise [i.e. emerge] from the behaviours of the parts, often with properties that are not individually exhibited by those parts’ (2016: 1). This ‘complex systems’ approach sits well with broader, less-reductive accounts of learning, and aligns with more detailed research in psychology and neuroscience specifically focused on learning in education: as universities explore Massive Open Online Courses and other online modalities, Lodge et al. (2017) set out a research agenda which explores what big data sets can tell us about learning. They are sceptical: ‘[d]ata-driven inference … does not appear to be sufficient to provide a clear picture of psychological and social phenomena such as learning’ (2017: 387). There is much else to be sought, and patterns in big data (key strokes, eye movements across screens) can contribute to designing university learning which is ‘multi-dimensional, complex and requires the preparation of graduates for an unknowable future’ (2017:

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389). They locate these ‘learning analytics’ as ‘sense-making and actionable science in practice’ (2017: 391). This contemporary research suggests that less-reductive relationality has much to contribute to better learning, provided what counts (literally) as ‘what counts’ (educationally) feeds into the judgements made by course and programme designers about what is found to be most powerful by groups of learners (i.e. university students), not by individual brains (of university students). Accordingly, we are confident that it is increasingly fruitful to view learning as an evolving, complex relational web. In Parts II and III of this book, we will introduce concepts that greatly extend our understanding of the many and various other kinds of human learning. By then it will appear even more dubious to regard these as located within the human cranium or body.

5.5.3 Challenges to the Idea that Learning Is a Relatively Stable and Enduring Product The common sense understanding of learning regards it as consisting of relatively stable and enduring products that learners need to acquire. Yet the new e-world, with its various blended, online and Internet-based data and portals, and the onslaught from social media, shows us that the opposite is the way the world is going. Volatility, fluidity and micro-qualifications mark the future of learning. Many refer to ‘digital disruptions’ to traditional models of conducting commerce; for example, the traditional shopping mall—hitherto a stable and enduring sociocultural phenomenon—is facing the challenge of online retailing. This disruption confronts the sandstone and ivy-league business of education as well, and the assumptions of learning that come with that. Traditional stability, by contrast, requires a sharp separation between what is learnt (a product) and the processes by which the learning occurs. This distinction seems particularly plausible for relatively passive learning processes where learning is separated from action (e.g. memorising propositions). However, as the Salomon and Perkins analysis of the different kinds of social mediation of learning demonstrates, the ‘relatively stable and enduring’ assumption crumbles when, for instance, we are dealing with knowledge arising from practices, especially where the e-world is involved. Quite simply, some vital, and immediate, kinds of knowledge or knowhow are always in the making. When learning is closely linked with action and desires, learning processes and products are not sharply distinguishable at all. The process facilitates the product, which in turn enhances further processes, and so on. Downloading e-applications and upgrading them is itself motivating: the latest has arrived on my hand-held device—what can it do? These are experiences which can be spontaneously enjoyed. Is this experiential vitality integral to learning? Consider the following fairly standard definition of learning as ‘the acquisition of a form of knowledge or ability through the use of experience’ (Hamlyn 1995: 476) (note that

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in contrast to his 1973 account of learning, discussed earlier in this chapter, Hamlyn has widened the scope of ‘learning’ to include not just knowledge but also ability). This definition clearly presents learning as a kind of active process, as the ‘use of experience’ implies. However, even the traditional understanding of the learner as an individual spectator mind, aloof from the world whilst acquiring propositions about it, can be said to involve action of a kind. That is, experiencing the world in order to furnish the mind is itself a kind of action. So, it seems that Hamlyn’s updated definition of learning may require activity no more strenuous than mental activity. However, it is clear that those who regard the process and product of learning as being closely interconnected are employing stronger notions of activity, as do we, throughout this book. One such theorist is Jarvis. He maintains that ‘learning is intimately bound up with action’ (1992: 85). For him, the norm is for learning to involve an action component. It is a ‘process of thinking and acting and drawing a conclusion’ (1992: 84). Jarvis argues that learning that lacks this kind of action component, such as contemplative learning, is abnormal learning. Thus, Jarvis subverts the common sense view of learning which privileges propositional learning at the expense of all other types of learning. He blames the common sense view for the ‘denial of learning’ syndrome, that is, the phenomenon of people rejecting as learning everyday experiences that do not fit its narrow assumptions (Jarvis 1992: 5). For Jarvis, the process and product of learning are intertwined. Wittgenstein’s later philosophy provides further critique of the notion that the process and product of learning can be rigidly separated. Williams (1994) argues that the major insight about learning, from Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, is that the basic case of teaching (training) is not about mentalistic concepts being connected to objects (as in ostensive definition and rule following). Rather, it is about being trained into pattern-governed behaviours, that is, learning to behave in ways that mimic activities licensed by practice or custom. In short, we learn to act on a stage set by others. This is highly contextual in that the process of learning is constitutive of what is learned, that is, the normativity of practice. Thus, for Wittgenstein, the process and product of learning are both intimately entwined in the learning activity. Wittgenstein’s later philosophy also rejects the notion of the solitary spectator mind observing the world and recapitulating the accumulation of human knowledge. Rather than meanings being established internally by individual minds, they emerge from collective ‘forms of life’. Winch (1998) further develops the implications of these Wittgensteinian themes for understanding learning. He stresses the ineluctable normativity of human learning/life and the crucial role of training within this. So, for Winch, training plays an essential role within teaching. Training has sometimes been dismissed as a lowly form of educational activity, usually because it is regarded as predominantly physical with a minimal mental component. However, Winch maintains that training of humans always involves language use and rule following. He sees an important educational role for training because training in normative practices opens up options and flexibility in human behaviour. Winch suggests that critics who claim that the notion of being trained in ways that promote independence and autonomy is paradoxical

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have erred by confusing training with conditioning. According to him, the crucial difference is that training results in capacities for conscious, overt rule following, whereas mere conditioning produces mechanical behaviour that accords with a rule. In later work, Winch (2010) has further bolstered his 1998 case for the educational importance of training. He attacks the ‘conceptual deflation’ involved in accounts of skills that focus on technique and habit (Winch 2010: 45). Winch maintains that any sound understanding of skills must take into account the important roles of judgement and normativity. He insists that the development of these dimensions of skills requires proper training (Winch 2010: 158). So, for Winch, judgement and normativity imply an essential role for teaching. He thinks that the rules can even be implicit so long as they have the characteristics of normative activity. For Winch, part of the flexibility of ‘trained’ behaviour lies in the fact that, not only do rules need to be interpreted, but that changing contexts require that interpretation and reinterpretation are continuous. So far this section’s discussion has centred on the strong association of much learning with action, with the implication that the supposed distinction between the process and the product of learning starts to blur significantly. This means that the idea of the product of learning being stable and enduring also comes under challenge. As long as the focus is on the learning of propositions, the ‘relatively stable and enduring’ assumption looks plausible. However, once the wide diversity of kinds of learning is recognised, together with the significant contextuality of most kinds of learning, change rather than stability becomes the norm. Dewey, for one, recognised that in order for learners to live successfully in more or less changing environments, their learning never ends. The required learning is never stable since contexts continually change and evolve. There are now many occupations for which practitioners having just the expertise of a decade ago are no longer employable. Much work requires practitioners to continually develop their capacities. This does not mean that everything they had learned a decade ago is now out of date. It is just that this previous learning needs to have been supplemented, and perhaps transformed by, current or recent successful practice. In contemporary workplaces, a common type of learning that has come to the fore involves developing increased capacity to participate effectively in socially situated, collaborative practices. This includes being able to make holistic, context-sensitive judgements about how to act in situations that may be more or less novel. Many of these judgements are developed at the level of the work team or the organisation. In such circumstances as these, the propositions acquired by individual minds may well be of limited interest. The preceding discussion posits an essential social dimension of learning. But there is no denying that individual learning is also occurring. The point is that there is more to learning than just learning by isolated individuals. Thus, learning begins with interaction in the public domain, that is, some form of action is basic to learning. Internalisation of the learning by individuals comes later (Toulmin 1999: 58ff).

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5.5.4 Challenges to the Idea that Learning Is Independent of Context The Salomon and Perkins analysis of socially mediated learning highlights the significant learning that can emerge from participating in activities whose major purpose is something other than learning. Such cases encompass all kinds of informal learning, including learning from experience and learning from practice. In such cases, the socially mediating context shapes the learning—both its processes and its content. The learning is constructed from participation in the particular activities. It can also be distributed across the various participants. Thus, the idea that learning is independent of context only seems plausible if there is an exclusive focus on certain kinds of propositional learning. Once we attend to the diversity of kinds of learning, the claim about context-independence collapses. Dewey’s work links the contextuality of learning with rejection of the claim that the product of learning is located in the learner’s mind or brain. According to Dewey, thought and learning extend beyond the learner. Burke expresses this Deweyan insight as follows: Thought, in the most general sense of the term, does not even take place solely within the agent but rather is a kind of agent/world interaction. Thought takes place in the interactive interface between agent and world. (Burke 1994: 164)

Thus, for Dewey, learning is thoroughly implicated and located in its context and needs to be viewed as a complex web of relations that transact over time. Even Howard Gardner has retreated significantly from his well-known approach to learning as a mental power: It makes sense to think of human cognitive competence as an emerging capacity, one likely to be manifest at the intersection of three different constituents: the ‘individual’, with his or her skills, knowledge and aims; the structure of a ‘domain of knowledge’ within which these skills can be aroused; and a set of institutions and roles – a surrounding ‘field’ – which judges when a particular performance is acceptable and when it fails to meet specifications … a new assessment initiative should acknowledge the effects of context on performance and provide the most appropriate contexts in which to assess competences, including ones which extend outside the skin of the individual being assessed. (1999: 99–100).

Clearly, as we develop more satisfactory conceptual understandings of learning, we need to reconsider the locations in which common parlance and traditional theorising have placed it. Note that there is nothing in the above discussion that would prevent us from focusing, when appropriate, on the learning by an individual. It is just that learning in general has a somewhat broader scope. Thus, Bereiter (2002) differentiates between ‘learning for individuals’ and ‘knowledge-building’ for groups or organisations. Both ideas can be useful for understanding learning so long as we realise that minds and organisations have somewhat different roles in the complex web of relations that constitutes learning.

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5.5.5 Challenges to the Ideas that Learning Is Replicable and Transparent The replicability assumption looks plausible if the focus is on certain simple types of propositional learning. For instance, if each student in a class can supply the correct answers to a given set of factual questions, it seems reasonable to say that each student is equally knowledgeable about the content addressed by these questions. However, when we consider the diversity of the types of learning encompassed by the Salomon and Perkins analysis of socially mediated learning, together with the significant contextuality of some of them, then the replicability assumption starts to look very suspect as a purported general feature of learning. As discussed earlier in this chapter, formal education systems have their own motivations for accepting the replicability assumption. But in the wider world of learning beyond formal classrooms, the replicability assumption has very little relevance. For instance, the learning journeys of workers, even within the one organisation, will very rarely coincide because of both the contextuality and the particularities of their different work experiences. Hence, it makes little sense to even expect, let alone look for, replicability of learning across individual workers. The twin assumption of replicability is transparency, that is, the assumption that to have truly learnt X is to be able to state or perform X. This transparency assumption is challenged by the Salomon and Perkins analysis of socially mediated learning. Their analysis recognises the significant roles of non-transparent types of learning, such as tacit, unconscious know-how—which Bereiter and Scardamalia call ‘knowledge embedded in practice’ (1996). This significance is supported by Schön (1983, 1987), whose analysis we introduced earlier in this chapter (5.2.6). His memorable critique of the low status of ‘junk categories’ of such knowledge paved the way for his retrieval of one of these: ‘reflection’. Somewhat ironically, reflection and other versions of knowledge embedded in practice, shed light on the messiness of practice—so they offer translucence rather than transparence. Dispositional learning is another non-transparent type of learning, one that is presupposed by other forms of learning (Recall Passmore’s 1980 account of abilities or capacities, some of them learnt, that are presupposed by other forms of learning, discussed earlier at Sect. 4.3.3 in Chap. 4). Winch (1998: 19) argues that knowledge itself is largely dispositional in Rylean terms, thereby taking the central focus firmly away from transparent propositions in minds.

5.5.6 Challenges to the Idea that the Best Learning Is Propositional The Salomon and Perkins analysis of socially mediated learning demonstrates that the domain of learning is much wider than propositional learning. In fact, their analysis offers no support for the notion that propositional learning is the best kind

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of learning. Indeed, the claim to pre-eminence of propositional learning has little or no theoretical support from any quarters. Its ongoing influence seems to derive from nothing more than the historical fact that propositional learning has dominated formal education systems. Not surprisingly, given its controversial nature, the pre-eminence of propositional learning has been challenged on several fronts. In Chap. 4 (Sect. 4.3.3), Passmore’s finding that the possibility of propositional learning itself presupposes that the learner already has various capacities (many of which have to be learnt) was presented. These capacities can be described propositionally, but they are not themselves propositional. At the very least, Passmore’s work challenges the notion that propositional learning is the paradigm of human learning. A further problem with the assumption that propositional learning is the best kind of learning is that it promotes various perennially influential dualisms such as mind/body, thought/emotion, and theory/practice. However, it has become more and more apparent in recent decades that these dualisms serve to create intractable problems. A well-known problem area is the theory/practice account of workplace performance. If it is accepted that the most valuable learning (knowledge) is located in minds that are essentially divorced from the world, then this must be the basis for understanding all workplace performances that are significantly cognitive. Hence, the usual strategy is to attempt to understand such performances as somehow consisting in the application of the knowledge that resides in the worker’s mind. But Ryle (1949) long since demonstrated the futility of this approach, which, in effect, aims to reduce practice to theory. Nevertheless, such is the power of traditional theories of learning, that theory/practice accounts of performance are still common, though they are increasingly seen to be implausible. These growing doubts have been amplified by research on expertise (as our chapter on this shows), and the rise of the knowledge society, both of which emphasise the creation of valuable knowledge during the performance of work. This recognition of creativity—the ‘artistry of practice’—as valuable knowledge enriches what is stored in minds prior to entry to the workplace. As we claimed in the previous section of this chapter, ‘knowledge embedded in practice’ is powerful—not because it is transparent, but because it is translucent. It sheds light on the messiness of daily experience. It holds up these experiences before us as bundles of relationships to scrutinise. Knowledge embedded in practice (such as reflection) does not shore up the purported transparency of propositions (in the mind). The emergence, recognition and common utility of this kind of knowledge represent a major challenge to propositional learning being regarded as the one best kind of learning. Yet another major challenge to propositional learning being regarded as the one best kind of learning concerns its narrow rationalism. The folly of quarantining thinking from other important human characteristics like emotion and conation has become increasingly apparent. The influence of Plato, Aristotle, and later, Descartes, in partitioning knowledge from emotion and will has been noted already (see 5.2.1). The development of mind becomes the major focus of education because humans are viewed as essentially minds that only incidentally inhabit bodies. According to

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the traditional view, thinking, since it is the essential characteristic of minds, can be treated in isolation from non-essential characteristics like emotion and conation. Hirst aptly summarised this rationalist view of learning as follows: [It] … is based on seeing the exercise of reason as necessarily the use of our cognitive powers, independent of all other capacities, to achieve propositional knowledge and understanding to which all other aspects of human life must then conform. (Hirst 1998: 18)

Recognising that recent philosophical work had severely undermined this account of ‘the operation of reason in the living of a rational life’, Hirst came to reject his previous influential account of ‘education as centrally the acquisition of propositional, or abstracted, detached theoretical knowledge and understanding’ (Hirst 1998: 18). Hirst’s revised position became: ‘The central tenet … is that social practices and practical reason are the fundamental concerns of education, not propositional knowledge and theoretical reason’ (Hirst 1998: 19, emphasis added). Amongst major philosophers of education, Dewey famously rejected both the dualisms and the narrow rationalism inherent in the assumption that propositional learning constitutes the one best kind of learning. Pivotal throughout his work was a fierce attack on all dualisms and a rejection of spectator theories of knowledge. Instead Dewey (e.g. 1916, 1938) viewed learning and knowledge as being inextricably linked to successful action in the world. In doing so, Dewey was not denying the importance of concepts and propositions. Rather, he subsumed them into a wider capacity called judgement. Deweyan judgement encompasses not only the cognitive, but also the ethical, the aesthetic and the conative, factors that are absent from narrow rationalism. For Dewey, judgement is not to be understood as changing the mental states or attitudes of the judging subject, a view he regarded as too subjectivist. Rather, Dewey insisted that the point of a judgement is to make a difference in the existential conditions, which initially gave rise to the inquiry of which the final judgement is the termination. Of course, alterations of mental states and attitudes may well be some of the changes in wider existential situations, since mental states and attitudes are themselves existential. But the key point is Dewey’s focus on the wider existential situation. As was argued earlier in this chapter (5.2.6), the idea that propositional learning is the paradigm of human learning has supported the widespread employment of the common learning metaphors. Whilst sophisticated educational thought would no doubt avoid the mind as mental filing cabinet metaphor, versions of the inner/outer metaphor have featured in respectable educational theorising. For example, starting from the idea that the prime purpose of liberal education is to expand an individual’s mind (e.g. Berlin 1969), proponents of liberal education have deployed arguments that revolve around an inner/outer distinction. This distinction is used to locate valued learning within the learner, whilst merely instrumental learning, already tainted with outside connections, remains outer (see, e.g., Bagnall 1990). There are two implications in this valuing of the inner as against the outer—both undesirable, from our perspective. First, the individual learner’s motivation to learn should come preferably from within, rather than from outer considerations. Thus, the goals of liberal education are to be viewed in terms of their non-instrumental value to

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the individual learner, since they are the priority. There should be no direct connection to external rewards. Second, the content of liberal education has uniquely intrinsic value. This learning of something for its own sake is associated with the inner, as against the outer connotations of learning it for some extrinsic reason. Privileging the ‘inner’ in these two ways is but a short step towards enshrining the ideal of the self-sufficient autonomous individual as the model of the mature person. We saw earlier in this chapter how genderised and developmentally stunted this ‘mature’ person may be. Some time back, Bailey (1984) published influential proposals for reanimating liberal education. The above inner/outer metaphors, employed in accounts of liberal education, were amongst his targets. Bailey was unhappy that liberal education had too often been presented as narrowly focused on theoretical knowledge regarded as ‘bodies of true propositions’. Bailey wanted it to include ‘areas of human “goingson” which are the actions, makings, doings, dispositions, expressions and interactions which give meaning, point and significance’ to the true propositions (1984: 80ff). Bailey’s account of liberal education importantly included components of ‘knowing how’, which, he maintained, is something richer than mere performance. The effect of Bailey’s account is that the tendency to identify liberal education with the inner has been largely eliminated; it was too redolent of that famous mentalism, named the ‘Ghost in the Machine’, by Ryle (1949). The above discussion has argued that there are various ineliminably different kinds of learning, several of which are central to formal education and its associated learning. In the light of this, the notion that propositional learning by individual minds constitutes the one best kind of learning is clearly ill-founded. This mistaken view would matter little were it not for the untold damage that it and its associated assumptions have wreaked on the theory and practice of formal education over centuries. This is not to deny that propositional learning is an important type of learning in various contexts. But it is not a plausible standard for judging all other types of learning. We are now in a position to answer the second overarching question posed at the beginning of this section: What is distinctive about sociocultural theories of learning? Our overview has shown that the social mediation of learning can occur in several very different ways. So, the first major contribution of sociocultural theories of learning is that they demonstrate that there are distinctively different kinds of learning. No one theory of learning fits all instances. The second major contribution of sociocultural theories of learning follows from the first. Given the diversity of types of learning, it becomes apparent that each of the various traditional theories is more applicable to some types of learning situations than it is to others. Certainly, if as has been commonly the case, they are taken to be generally applicable to all learning, each theory is demonstrably false. A further corollary of this overview of sociocultural theories of learning and their principles is the conclusion that each of the traditional understandings and assumptions about learning (outlined earlier in 5.2), are mistaken. They derive from common features of formal education arrangements, features not shared by other important types of learning. Thus, at best, these traditional understandings and assumptions are relevant to limited learning situations.

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In fact, as much of the content of this Sect. (5.5) has suggested, these traditional understandings and assumptions are often misleading even when applied to formal learning situations. Finally, a further distinctive contribution of sociocultural theories of learning is that they point the way towards the goal of developing more nuanced understandings of learning in its many and diverse forms.

5.6 Some Emerging Conceptualisations of Learning One reading of this chapter thus far might interpret it as a story of inevitable progress in which traditional misunderstandings about learning have been displaced by more convincing recent accounts. This is far from being the case. For example, it might reasonably be expected that the discipline of philosophy of education would be the obvious forum for those seeking to gain new insights about the nature of learning. However, seemingly because the employment of the vast majority of philosophers of education hinges on the preparation of school teachers, the discipline remains firmly wedded to traditional understandings and assumptions about learning based on formal education practices and arrangements. This depressing situation was made manifest by two major ‘state of the art’ overview volumes devised to take philosophy of education into the twenty-first century (Blake et al. 2003; Curran 2003). In the Blake et al. volume, learning as such was regarded as a topic not requiring attention. It is discussed briefly and incidentally in but two of the twenty chapters. In contrast, Curran (2003) at least provides a significant treatment of learning. In a book of 45 chapters, there is a section consisting of 13 chapters titled ‘Teaching and Learning’, which includes chapters that deal with the capacity to learn, autonomous learning, the epistemology of learning, and the assessment of learning. But it is very evident that underpinning all of these discussions of learning are a number of pervasive, and limiting, assumptions. There is a clear emphasis on learning as something that individuals do, brought about by teachers in formal settings. As well, there is a strong bias towards cognitive, especially propositional, learning. This reflects the almost exclusive focus of philosophers of education on learning in formal settings. The honourable exception to this trend is a chapter by Phillips (‘Theories of Teaching and Learning’) in which he notes a ‘distressing tendency’ of philosophers of education to ignore recent ‘fruitful empirical and theoretical work in the field of learning theory’ (Phillips 2003: 241). Phillips is referring to the expanding literature on sociocultural approaches to learning that has received very limited attention from philosophers of education. Unfortunately, little seems to have changed since 2003. Though novel accounts of learning that reject the traditional understandings and assumptions are available, the influence of sociocultural theories of learning seems to be restricted to the small minority of philosophers of education whose work centres more on informal learning. So, the theorising of learning remains a field of ongoing contestation. However, from the preceding sections of this chapter, we can now identify some pointers to how new understandings are emerging of some types of learning. In Part III of this book,

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these pointers will be bolstered by the co-present group concept and complexity thinking to offer some novel understandings of learning.

5.6.1 Learning as a Process Rather Than a Product The traditional assumption (that learning is a ‘thing’ located in the learner’s head or body) is replaced in more recent literature by learning being understood as a complex relational web, one that is in a process of development. The portrayal of learning as an evolving relational web makes it into something that is more intangible, elusive and immaterial. The attribution of relationality to learning means, for example, that it can no longer be thought of as the acquisition of discrete items located in specific places at specific times. Rather, many of the cases of learning considered in this book are more fruitfully thought of in terms of a complex relational web. More precisely, these instances of learning are an ongoing process that encompasses the whole that is both the learner and several various aspects of the surrounding world in a relational web that changes over time. Of course, these webs might well include other learners, for example a team working to alleviate a challenging problem and devising a solution that no one individual acting alone would have achieved. So, viewing learning as an evolving relational web allows for the possibility of group learning as well as learning by individuals. Most generally, learning is a change in the whole that is both the learner(s) and the environment; it is brought about by action to correct an experienced imbalance. Understanding learning as a complex relational web, one that is in process of development seems sound, even obvious, for some kinds of learning, such as learning from practice in a workplace or learning from challenging life experiences. Here, being faced with novel situations and challenges is a familiar occurrence. Dealing successfully with these novel situations and challenges requires learning. But one’s learning trajectory is continuous as fresh problems arise. However, viewing learning as a complex relational web is perhaps less obviously applicable to classroom learning, since we are used to thinking of this in the traditional way. But consideration of some pertinent examples will show that viewing learning as a complex relational web also offers us fresh insights into formal learning situations. For instance, consider the case of learners taking an examination in a literature class, where they are required to write short essays in response to questions about the texts they have studied. Ideally, this examination situation is testing candidates’ abilities to understand the questions, to relate them creatively to the particular texts so as to fashion suitable answers to the examination questions. These answers may well refer to other relevant texts or experiences of the student concerned. The traditional view is that all of these inputs are located in the student’s head or mind. Certainly, there may well be memories located in the student’s head that are associated with each of these inputs. But surely, on reflection, a more accurate description of the learning that is being assessed is that it consists of a complex interaction between the candidate, the text being assessed, other relevant texts, and the candidate’s experiences that are

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relevant to the text. Overall, the assessment is centred on the candidate’s capacity to synthesise this complex interaction into a convincing whole. Although the examination occurs at a particular point in time, the complex interaction between these components is an ongoing process, for example a candidate might well realise afterwards something that they wish they had included in their answer to a particular question. Even the answers of poorly prepared students reflect this kind of complex relational interaction, rather than mere regurgitation of ‘things’ lodged in their brains or minds. For instance, take a candidate who has guessed the likely questions and has memorised various suitable essay responses, perhaps from the Internet. Their essay answers might include some brilliant material, whilst conspicuously failing to answer the set questions. Here, their answers are strongly linked to memories in their head. But that is not the full story. Their assessed learning, such as it is, consists of complex interactional relations between the candidate, the text being assessed, and other texts, some of them hardly relevant (such as prepared answers to questions that were not in the examination paper). The problem here is that the relational complex that reflects their learning (or lack of it) features too many of the wrong entities and relations, and too few of the right ones.

5.6.2 Some Alternative Metaphors for Conceptualising Learning The seeming inescapability of metaphors for understanding learning has already been noted. As well, the worth of the most common metaphors used in thought and talk about learning (acquisition, possession and transfer) has been strongly challenged. For one thing, these common metaphors assume that learning is essentially a product. However if, as already argued, many instances of learning are more fruitfully thought of as a process, these common metaphors are even less helpful as the ways that they are deployed do not connect with processes. Are there other informative ways of conceptualising learning that reject these traditional metaphors? As a way into approaching this question, let us return to our earlier discussion of the concept of travelling (5.5.1) as a possible parallel concept to learning. After all, various philosophers have commended the idea that the process of becoming educated (learning) is best viewed as an ongoing journey (e.g. Peters 1965). Likewise, learning and travelling are both ubiquitous generic human activities, ones that had clear survival value right back to the days of our earliest ancestors. The verb ‘to travel’ is like the verb ‘to learn’, in that its derivative ‘travelling’ functions both as a noun and a verb. However, unlike the case of learning, common English usage of the noun ‘travelling’ does not involve the kinds of features that we have seen are commonly associated with learning. First, travelling as a noun simply is not plausibly thought of as a commodity or thing (whether abstract or otherwise) that can be acquired, possessed and transferred. Rather it appears to be an activity in which one can participate. Second, travelling is not something that is independent of the

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traveller. Nor is it separate from and independent of the context in which it occurs. Third, we are not tempted to view travelling as something that is somehow located ‘inside’ of the traveller. Whilst travelling may plausibly be thought to leave its traces inside of the traveller, for example memories, it seems clear that travelling itself is some kind of complex relational web with both spatial and temporal dimensions, one that connects the traveller and various parts of the wider world. So, it would be perverse to locate the travelling inside of someone’s head or mind (In fact, this kind of scenario is perhaps best reserved for dreamers whose material circumstances restrict them to vicarious travel as a substitute for the real thing.). Fourth, whilst travelling, like learning, involves movement, it is clearly not primarily movement of entities into and out of people’s heads or minds. Rather, travel involves movement of people to and between various and diverse locations. So, rather than involving movement of a thing or substance into or out of the learner’s head, any movement associated with learning will likely involve the learner moving with respect to the environment, as part of the ongoing changing relational web. So, the noun ‘travelling’ has quite different conceptual features from those that, influenced by the common metaphors of learning, we attribute to the noun ‘learning’. Likewise, whereas we saw that a learned person, supposedly, is always someone whose head or mind is well-stocked with propositional knowledge, a travelled person is someone who has more than a well-stocked mind. Whilst such a person no doubt has various propositional knowledge and concepts, the origins of which could be traced to their travels, they also stand in complex relations of various kinds to the various places to which they have travelled. We might say that travelling develops the traveller, perhaps even transforms them so that they become a somewhat different person. So perhaps learning and travelling are sufficiently analogous that developing, transforming and becoming may be more useful metaphors for thinking about learning as a process (for more on this, see Hager and Halliday 2006: 129–131; Hager and Hodkinson 2009).

5.6.3 Understanding Learning as a Complex Phenomenon Requires Various Levels of Explanation The concept of travelling has another important feature that, by extension, might assist us towards a better understanding of learning. This is that travelling is an activity whose explication requires various and multiple levels of explanation. To appreciate this, consider, for example, one particular instance of travelling: a guided sightseeing tour via a coach. To gain anything approaching a detailed understanding of what happens on such a tour, we would need to invoke many and diverse levels of explanation. For a start, one can offer a physical description of the workings of the various mechanical and electrical components of the coach during the tour. This

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description will explain some aspects of the trip, such as the difficulty or otherwise of the terrain and the accompanying weather conditions. But other aspects of the tour will require explanation at other levels. The local traffic code and road rules will shed light on some other limited aspects of the tour. Then there is the advertised programme and itinerary for the sightseeing tour. These will explain still other aspects, though the particular guide’s interests and motivations, as well as the special requests and desires of various members of the tour party, will also likely be relevant here. A description of traffic density and road conditions on the day of the tour (i.e. the environment generally) will offer further explanation and so on. The important point is that there is no one level of description that will explain everything about the sightseeing tour. Any particular example of travelling, such as the tour, is highly situated and contextual. But, in principle, we can explain/describe aspects of it, to the extent that we need to for a given purpose, by appealing to the kinds of information already outlined. However, this will require various levels and types of explanation, as the example of the sightseeing tour illustrates. The tentative suggestion now is that maybe learning is significantly like travelling (and perhaps also like other basic human activities such as eating, talking, etc.). There is no one level or type of explanation that is the explanation of an instance of travelling. The same point applies to learning. This completely undermines the notion of a unitary concept of learning or of a general theory of learning. As has been stressed in this chapter, different theories are needed to account for different kinds of learning situations. The diversity of learning situations is well represented by the Salomon and Perkins continuum. Learning turns out to be a complex phenomenon. Dewey appears to have had something like this complexity and diversity in mind in his argument about experience: Experience, in short, is not a combination of mind and world, subject and object, method and subject matter, but is a single continuous interaction of a great diversity (literally countless in number) of energies (Dewey 1916: 167, emphasis added).

5.7 Conclusion This chapter has outlined what it takes to be the dominant understanding of learning, together with the basic assumptions that underpin this understanding. These basic assumptions were challenged in various ways leading to the emergence of a somewhat different philosophical understanding of learning, centred on the notion of a ‘complex relational web’. In Part III of this book, this emerging conceptualisation of learning will be consolidated further with the help of the co-present group concept and complexity thinking.

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Part II

Infusing Complexity Through Co-Present Groups

Chapter 6

The Concept of the Co-Present Group

Part I of this book identified several major difficulties that are common to received accounts of agency, expertise, practice, skills and related concepts. Prominent amongst these were the following considerations: • A near universal assumption which was prominent in Chaps. 2–5, was that the individual agent is the appropriate unit of analysis for understanding human performances. This assumption fails to take account of crucial social aspects of human performances. • There was also a prevalent tendency, particularly in Chaps. 3–5, to understand human performances by atomising them into their component parts. The sum of the parts is then assumed to be equivalent to the original whole. Part I showed repeatedly that this strategy is not notably successful. Summation of the parts does not capture holism because it black-boxes relations. It seems that accounting for holism requires an informative understanding of relations. • An equally prevalent tendency, noted in Chaps. 3 and 4 and especially prominent in Chap. 5, was to focus on the more overtly cognitive aspects of human performances. The result is a set of ‘thin’ understandings that overlook many other crucial aspects of performances, such as affect, know-how, the role of judgement and the various influences of context. Later sections of this book will draw on complexity thinking to propose novel understandings of agency, expertise, practice, skills, competence and associated concepts, as well as the vital concept of learning. These complexity-inspired understandings will evade the above trio of prominent difficulties, as well as other assorted problems that beset received, that is, traditional, accounts. However, before turning to a detailed consideration of complexity thinking, it will be helpful to first introduce and elaborate the concept of a co-present group. This concept will take us some way towards evading the above trio of major difficulties by, respectively, • taking groups as the focus of analyses, as against the almost exclusive focus on individuals that has characterised educative and professional practices thus far; © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 P. Hager and D. Beckett, The Emergence of Complexity, Perspectives on Rethinking and Reforming Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31839-0_6

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• insisting upon holistically relational understandings of the interactions within human performances of all kinds rather than the unknowable black-box or atomistic Lego alternatives that Part I showed to have prevailed so far; • recognising the central, but often overlooked, roles of the affect and other noncognitive attributes in the judgements involved in human performances. Every day of our lives, humans move through several small groups, by which we mean groups of between two and 12 participants. Whether the groups comprise parents with children, partners with plans, or various communities that ripple out from families in households, these small groups sustain our main daily life commitments and evolve as years pass by. The pairing of mother and baby is an example. So are the various groups that families and householders leave the house to join: playgroups at schools, table-sized groups in classrooms, groups in school staff rooms—indeed, in any other adult workplace, where tasks and activities are shared between two and 12 colleagues. As the day unfolds, we encounter more formal small groups (e.g. committees, boards, task forces) that are authorised to work on tasks for an organisation or institution. Society as a whole has established small groups with essential roles for us all—juries, governmental cabinets and industrial tribunals are examples of these. As the day heads to evening, our leisure pursuits are often shaped by small groups: we may participate in hobby groups such as book clubs or model railway societies, sports teams or pairs, or opera, music or drama groups—these all involve members, casts and players in various ‘performative’ small configurations. Note that teams transcend their sporting origins: across all human life we increasingly encounter projects run by teams, comprising focused expertise to get outcomes we need. Finally, as the night falls, we return to our homes and households, to the pairs and partnerships we find most intimate. And a day like that is increasingly atypical. Our work and our leisure times are sliced and diced into both intensive and extensive versions. Shifts and contracts demand twelve-hour group activities, and open-ended responsibilities for children and grandchildren, and support for partners with these less traditional versions of groups. Furthermore, small groups have been ubiquitous throughout history. Indigenous Australians have for tens of thousands of years developed fire management of the land. One version of this is the highly selective deliberate use of ‘patch’ burning that scorches vegetation in sections to encourage regrowth, that then attracts wildlife (such as kangaroos) to grazing. Hunting is then easier when the wildlife is concentrated in a localised patch. Small groups of men and women are involved throughout this seasonal process, in that setting the ‘patches’ ablaze depends on shared perceptions of the seasons and the weather, and then, later, hunting, killing and collecting game, and cooking and feeding, depends on sustained cooperation in small groups.

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This chapter conceptualises our ready participation in small groups as a significant human phenomenon, one that is central to complexity thinking (set out in Chap. 7), when the two are combined (in Chap. 8). First, four examples of groups that are familiar are presented and their commonalities examined. These groups were identified in Chap. 1 and we build on their significance here. Second, these commonalities lead us into the significance of particular underpinning features of what we go on to call ‘co-present groups’—their holism, their focus on affect, and their locus in ‘place-in-time’. Third, we define the concept of the ‘co-present group’ by examining holistically relational understandings of • • • • • •

their affective functioning a sense of place-in-time particularity and accountability participation and non-linearity distributed participation deliberation.

Fourth, and final, this chapter sets out three personal accounts of immersion in workplace groups that meet these criteria for ‘co-presence’. These narratives are, we believe, authentic as ‘holistically relational’ accounts of vivid human experiences in small groups, from which learning has avowedly occurred. In the following chapters, the significance of the concept of co-present groups for complexity-informed analyses of agency, expertise, practice, learning and associated concepts will be set out. As Part I showed in detail, for these concepts, the received scholarly and research literature focuses unduly on the individual as the unit of analysis, together with an emphasis on the cognitive aspects of individual performances. It will be unsurprising then to find that the literature on small groups, in workplaces, likewise centres largely on what individuals contribute to such groups, particularly their more cognitive contributions. At their most superficial, training programs can adopt reductive rhetoric like ‘There’s no “Me” in “Team”’—as if taking the ego out of the common purpose was a cognitive exercise. More sophisticated training programs start with and develop the identification of a common purpose towards which a group strives, thus ideally instantiating team-work. But a better approach to these activities (and the huge organisational development and personal growth industries that underpin them) is needed to address the three major difficulties posed about small groups, above. A brief consideration of some familiar examples of small work groups (respectively historical, educational, bio-psychological, and performative), will demonstrate both the limits of this traditional thinking and point the way to our proposed concept of the co-present group. We identified these groups in Chap. 1.

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6.1 Four Examples of Familiar and Ubiquitous Groups 6.1.1 Example 1: The Jury System and Common Law The origins of the jury system and common law are found in the rule of the first Plantagenet king, Henry II, who, in the twelfth century, in place of trial by ordeal, by compurgation, or by battle … provided the assise (soon followed by the jury) as a means of eliciting truth. Trial by jury in the King’s Court, by favor or by right, became so satisfactory as to cultivate in the people of England a respect for law and a willingness to abide by its decisions that have been characteristic of the race for centuries. (Glanville, ca. 1190/trans. 1900)

The jury comprised twelve knights, sitting to ‘hear’ cases which were presented in the new Royal Courts—or ‘circuits’—in which the King’s Justices travelled around the UK as a distributed ‘central court’. These Justices established a ‘Common Law’ through meeting with each other regularly and agreeing to follow each other’s decisions—thus developing precedence as a fundamental judicial principle (Simpson 2014). In the origins of both the jury and the central circuit, we see two examples of how small and authoritative groups have subsequently, over several centuries, shaped our understandings in the Western world, of law and justice and the fair exercise of power. A jury is now the will-of-the-people—the common, reason-able judgement; the Common Law is exactly that—the politically agreed continuous and contiguous regulated life we share. In these ways, we can see how a single, socially significant point of reference has been agreed upon over centuries as pivotal to wider and deeper settlements of socio-political concerns—of justice, in this example.

6.1.2 Example 2: Staff of Part of a School Most schools are structured on the age-grade levels of their students. Between those levels (such as Years 1–12), and the overall student and staff populations, there are usually medium-level structures, for subjects (departments such as Music, Maths) and for pastoral care (‘houses’, ‘home groups’, sub-schools). The staff of these medium-level structures work together more intensively, with closer appreciation of the nuances of a particular pedagogy, such as teaching mathematics, or with closer relationships with families as siblings move up age-grade levels. Parents know who the ‘go-to’ people are when there’s a wider or urgent need to communicate. Furthermore, there are opportunities over years and various other parts of the school to link recurring issues and responses, to ensure consistency is applied as children, especially siblings, move through the school. Small groups of staff ‘own’ the progress of the students and contribute to the management of learning and behavioural challenges various students may have. For example, a ‘sub-school’

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of one hundred students with about 12 staff (within a secondary school of eight hundred students) is an ideal environment for progressing diverse learners, amongst diverse teachers, and was a prominent part of the early career of co-author Beckett. Taking a holistic approach to the learner is fundamental to sound education and to the running of a school, so it comes as no surprise that the entire reason for such medium-level groups in school directly addresses both the relationality of the staff with the students and the shape of the small group in itself. Those closest to the situation of the students work most closely to achieve locally meaningful and holistic outcomes for them.

6.1.3 Example 3: Mother/Baby Relations Human affective functioning, a crucial though often neglected characteristic of a well-rounded person, will be described in some detail later in this chapter. Here, it is sufficient to note that it has a bio-psychological basis. Mother/baby relations are vital for the development of affect because the psychological functioning of neonates is relatively primitive. For its affective development to proceed, the newborn baby ‘needs an extended period of engagement with specific adults, commonly, primarily the mother’ (Lancaster 2012: 127). This process involves shared affective exchanges between mother and infant, that are mediated non-verbally through touch, gesture, facial expression, vocal tone and prosody, the mother processes the infant’s experiences with him, so that internal, bodily and emotional experiences and external social experiences are integrated, becoming coherent and meaningful. (Lancaster 2012: 127)

Here, the mother’s psychological functioning, her processing of affect, is unconsciously shared and internalised by the baby. The baby’s brain is predisposed for this kind of neurological development via the affective input from another human. This bio-psychological process draws developing neural structures in the infant’s brain into alignment with the same structures in the maternal brain, a mutual accommodation between the two neurological systems known as ‘structural coupling’. This integration of social experience and biology allows the storage of early experiences in the form of implicit memory and provides the infant with tacit, somaticand affect-based working models of himself, his body, and his relations with the external world. (Lancaster 2012: 128)

This bio-psychological process would not have eventuated if things were left to biology alone. This process of two or more minds sharing affective functioning, thereby acting as if they are temporarily and partially one mind, becomes a persistent capacity in all manner of interpersonal relating by mature humans—for instance, in empathising with others or in grieving for the loss of a loved one. Lancaster (2012: 128) suggests that this bio-psychological process is ‘the earliest form of human learning’ and that ‘all later learning … is underpinned by this meaning-processing affective functioning’.

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Thus, this familiar process, which mothers and other close family members commonly view as facilitating and enhancing affective and communicative bonds with the newest member of their family, also has a vital bio-psychological function that may be less familiar. This overall process involves small groups, often having but two members, but sometimes three or four. Whilst it is the mature adult(s) that are the initial goal-setters of these groups, as the shared process towards the goal becomes established, the infant, however unconsciously, normally becomes a willing participant in the process. As the affective and communicative bonds increase and develop, all group members typically experience sufficient positive reinforcement to ensure the continuation of the process. Clearly, this type of small group • is focused more on the relationships within the group rather than on its members as individuals—the singularity is of the group itself (as it is for the jury); • is centred on holistic aspects of human functioning, not merely on its cognitive manifestations (as it is for the sub-school); and, • involves relationships and experiences that are constitutively social.

6.1.4 Example 4: Performing as a String Quartet The string quartet is to chamber music what the symphony is to orchestral music. Performing string quartets is an inherently complex, intense activity. At the professional level, all four players (first violin, second violin, viola, cello) are soloists in their own rights, but overriding that is the need for them to interact and interrelate as a well-disciplined team. A successful string quartet requires four players each with high levels of passion for the music and with genuine respect for one another. There is no room for dominant egos—individual differences can serve to energise and sustain the group cohesion. Overall, a well-functioning string quartet or jazz quartet consists of four special and unique individuals who, collectively, can be thought of as a single, finely tuned instrument, and this is apparent in how they play together, that is, in their emergent performativity.

6.2 What Do These Four Examples of Groups Have in Common? Across each of our four examples, the first common feature is that the relationships between the group members are constitutive of the group’s output—in the sense that the output is a singularity (one achievement, not an amalgam or aggregate). Examples of this kind of relationality abound within string quartet performances. For instance, collectively, the quartet members need to achieve unity of sound. As one musician put it: ‘“Everyone’s heightened [their] thinking … we’ve got to get it right … do it

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up on the C-string on this part of the bow … so the sound is more unified”’ (Hager and Johnsson 2012: 256). Another important factor in achieving that unity of sound involves each quartet member frequently ‘watching out of the corner of their eye’ the playing movements of the other quartet members. Likewise, a string quartet’s performances are appreciated and sensed as a whole. Hence, even though the interdependent parts can be differentiated, the relations between the parts need to be such that the performance comes across as a seamless whole. Similarly, with each of the jury, the sub-school and the mother–baby dyad, the output of the group is singularly relational. A second common feature of many small groups, and apparent in our four examples, is that they exhibit holistic aspects of human functioning, not merely cognitive ones. These various holistic aspects contribute to the singularity of outputs already mentioned. For a string quartet, though the published scores specify the basics of the performance, the interpretation that constitutes a given performance is adapted to various factors, including composer style, the overall theme of the concert program, the particular audience, the nature of the venue and other local conditions. An awareness of these various holistic effects and their significance is vital for string quartet players. For example, this awareness may require players to adjust dynamically their sound volume relative to that of the other players to take account of the size and acoustics of the playing venue. Thus, professional engagement in the practice of string quartet performance crucially goes beyond participation to include judgement; it requires an embodied, committed form of relational responsivity that implicates others who must be similarly committed. (Hager and Johnsson 2012: 262)

Out of these multi-factors, a unified interpretation of each particular piece needs to emerge. Here, we use the term ‘emerge’ to capture the idea that each string quartet or jazz quartet performance will be marked by novel features, however, small they may be. This suggests that each particular performance can include an element of indeterminacy. The third common feature of such groups, and apparent in each of our four examples, is that they are constitutively social. The relations and the relationships that characterise a string quartet portray the group as being engaged in a shared ongoing process of discovery to create quality string quartet performances. Far from being four isolated individuals playing a series of stringed instruments in time and space, the string quartet is a team producing dynamic patterns of relations in co-dependence with one another. So is the jury, the sub-school, and the mother–baby dyad. Each is, socially, work-in-progress. To summarise, these four groups focus on a shared process towards a shared goal. They each demonstrate the three characteristics of groups which we listed earlier: an orientation to the relationships of the group, not to the individuals who are members of it; a holistic appreciation of the group experience, not merely of the cognitive; and, arising from those two characteristics, an assumption that these relationships and experiences are constitutively social.

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However, these commonalities vary across the four groups. We make two caveats here: First, although in each case all members of the four groups are important (indeed, are instrumental) to the eventual group outcome, these co-present groups are not fully egalitarian. The mother-baby group (actually a pair) is necessarily hierarchical based on inevitable experiential and age differences. We could readily regard a workplace pairing of mentor-mentee similarly, since the whole point of pairing them is to contrast the experiential depth of the mentor with the novice mentee. Likewise, in the string quartet, although overall harmony between the four players is vital, some parts may well be more prominent and influential, depending on the piece of music being performed. In the jury example, all members are equal in the sense of having the one vote, but inevitably, as the deliberations unfold, a hierarchy will form as some members make more influential contributions to the deliberations than do others. And in the sub-school, staff who have leadership positions within, say, the Maths Department, are expected to facilitate the overall direction of change such that the educational purposes of the school are enhanced. So ‘equality’ plays out more as ‘equity’ of group participation in each of the four different groups, and this is fluid—there is ebb-and-flow or variation, as activities unfold. Second, variation across the four groups is apparent in the overall role of affect in the group outcomes. Though affective relations are crucial in each case, there are also some differences. The interactions in the mother-baby co-present group are overwhelmingly affective and tacit, as they integrate the infant’s internal bodily and emotional experiences with external social interactive experiences to produce a coherent, meaningful whole. Affect is also very prominent in the many tacit and non-verbal aspects of a quality musical performance. In the case of the jury, the process of deliberating and reaching a verdict is again significantly affective, but this is coupled with the cognitive demands to reach the ‘right’ verdict – to make a sober culminating judgement. How the Maths Department staff feel about each other inevitably influences how well they get on in their wider professional relationships, but ideally, this affect is subordinate to the sub-school commitment they also share, to student (Maths) learning – evidenced in sound pedagogies and intertwined with dynamic curricula.

6.3 Underpinning Concepts of Groups that Are ‘Co-Present’ Before we set out the criteria of a ‘co-present’ group in the next section, here, we lay the conceptual groundwork for those criteria. Building on the commonalities apparent in our four examples, we now explore and formalise the main concepts that underpin the subsequent criteria. Our four examples of familiar and ubiquitous groups have provided this point of entry to our argument: groups that are ‘co-present’ are known to their members

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as particularly affective in addressing shared purposes; these particularities consist in giving priority to holistic relationships, socially, through shared experiences in particular places.

6.3.1 Finding a Place ‘Place’ is a central underpinning concept for our argument, and we advance it by claiming that place, as well as the group, is constituted in relationality. The simple answer to the question, ‘Where are these co-present groups?’ is, ‘Each has its place’. As Malpas explains, a place has ‘a character that is proper to it alone’ (2015: 65). A place’s distinct identity, this ‘sense of place’ or genius loci, is constituted by its relations. For us, building on Malpas, the same holds if ‘co-present group’ is substituted for ‘place’. Place is essentially qualitative. It has a content, a character that belongs to it alone, that encompasses what is present within it. Likewise, each co-present group will have a distinctive qualitative character that will emerge from the relational interplay of its members. The unity of a place, its holism, consists in the relational connections of its elements. This plurality of elements in relation to one another constitutes the holistic unity of the place. Thus, unity and plurality are in an indispensable relation to one another. Similarly, co-present groups will be in a ‘place’ and group members will constitute the elements of the group. This holism and relationality means that both ‘place’ and ‘co-present group’ are anti-foundationalist and anti-reductivist notions. They exist entirely through the relations that constitute them. Whilst it is tempting to regard places and co-present groups as geographically located (and they often are: a ‘sense of place’ can be about the village you grew up in, or a community where you can go, in the present, and be accepted as part of it, such as a favourite bar), places and co-present groups can extend over time. For Malpas, a place has a singular character that reflects and represents what we know most intimately (and in which we are ourselves most intimately known) … [and] in which we live – our homes, workplaces, neighbourhoods. (2015: 68)

So it is with co-present groups. Our four examples of groups show how a ‘sense of place’ transcends (although also includes) geography: juries, sub-schools, a mother and baby, and a string quartet are locatable in places, primarily geographically, but their distinctive identities as groups emerge over time in what we may call ‘stretched places’ of intensive intimacy as well as of extensive significance. A jury is embedded in a legal system that persists over generations, if not centuries; a sub-school persists over several years of students’ and teachers’ engagement; a maternal bond lasts a lifetime, and a string quartet (both the entity and the performances it gives) contributes to musical history. Just as place is fundamentally heterogeneous (places contain differences within them, as well as being differentiated from other places), so, too, are co-present groups.

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Over time, as well as in a location, they generate a ‘stretched’ sense of place within which individual members differ in various respects from one another, as time elapses. Time ‘stretches’ the activities of co-present groups. In Chap. 2, we drew upon an authoritative survey of how sociology has theorised agency (Sect. 2.3). Emirbayer and Mische refer to ‘temporal-relational contexts of action—which, through the interplay of habit [the past], imagination [the future] and judgment [the present], both reproduces and transforms’ diverse social structures (1998: 970). If we take each of these, we can say, of co-present groups, that their heterogeneity plays out in ‘recounts’ of the past. This recounting, or recollection, to use Malpas’ term, brings the past into the sense of place which is occupied (inevitably) as the present. The present contains what is contemplated and foreseen—we weigh up what is to be done, as the future. Our sense of place includes the world in prospect, as well as in retrospect. Each is experienced dialogically in the actions of the present. Co-present groups’ places are prime examples of dialogical communities, where Emirbayer and Mische’s ‘common values, interests and purposes’ (1998: 995) find their expression in the affective relations of the group. These range across accounts and recounting of the past and into ‘deep involvement and participation’ in imaginative and persuasive dialogue, often about contemplations of the future. Stretched over time and transcending geography, ‘senses of place’ locate copresent groups. Co-present groups are locatable in the present place, marked by the agency of practical judgement-making. But this is rarely merely about the ‘here and now’. Rather, the present is often about groups’ ‘working up to something’, which is ‘in’ the future, but is ‘projective’—foreseen, and desirable, now (see Beckett 2012: 114–120). Having located co-present groups in a sense of place, and as stretched over time, we now take this further, in formalising the underpinning concept of the ‘present place’. The ‘present place’ of a co-present group consists in (i.e. is constituted by) the willingness of the members to own its relational, holistic and social significance. A co-present group is engaged in shared makings of meaning (i.e. sense-making) of some aspects of the world in which the group operates—in its sense of ‘place’ (both its own place and its relation to the places of other co-present groups). A co-present group therefore has an onto-epistemological significance: it exists, in a present place, but stretched over time, to seek understandings of, and to progress, some significant experiences towards these becoming knowledge in, and of, the world.

6.3.2 Feeling the Affects Not surprisingly, affective relations between group members are vital to seeking and progressing these significant ‘present place’ experiences. Similarly vital are tacit (inarticulable) experiences. Because we are defining the co-present group as constituted by its relationality, its holism and its sociality, we believe the ideal size of such groups is between two and about twelve members. Moving further into double figures

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increases the relationships exponentially and unrealistically complicates expectations of shared experiences from which shared understandings and new knowledge can readily emerge. The affective and the tacit would be two early casualties of a large group trying to act ‘co-presently’: these central features of human life are simply less authentically visible once a crowd (of over twelve) gathers—and energy has to be given by (or to) a crowd by way of formal management. You get sub-groups. This structuring is desirable—no one wants a crowd to become a mob—but it is not part of the constitution of a co-present group. Instead of formal management, we believe co-present groups are structured through sensitivities to the performative nature of their relations. Members of groups are changed by participation in them. We claim these are ‘trans-actional’ activities because they are mutually iterative enactments of groups’ purposes. The term is Dewey and Bentley’s and encapsulates group members’ sensitivity to ‘the seeing together … of what before had been seen in separations and held severally apart’ (1949/1989: 112). But what is relational about the experiential breadth of holism and the depth of the affect, in a group’s self-understandings, and of its purposes? We now need to explore this relationship, which is, when coupled with a shared purpose—at the heart of a co-present group. It is important to recall what holism means for us: the complex unity of the cognitive (thinking), the affective (feeling), the conative (willing) and the sociomaterial (embodied) facets of human activity. Whilst for analytical purposes, it is often convenient to consider (say) the cognitive or conative dimensions in isolation, these strategies inevitably involve some reduction from the complex whole, i.e., at best, they provide limited, partial understandings. The original whole is more than the mere sum of its cognitive, affective, conative, (etc.) dimensions. This something more is the relatedness, i.e., the interactions and (ideally) transactions, between the various analytical dimensions. As we showed in Part I of this book, the common strategy of relying solely on explicating the specific analytical dimensions (such as the hands and the heart, to account for skills, or tacit ‘lightbulb’ moments, to account for expertise) fails to provide an understanding of the phenomenon in question—its efficacy in particular contexts where what is most meaningful is the holistic ‘appropriateness’ or rightness, of that judgement. It is common for analytical thought to separate the cognitive and affective. Reason is often thought of as the antithesis of emotion. Actually, as many philosophers have concluded for some time now, and as most educationalists understand, any sound understanding of human experience subsumes these supposed ‘opposites’ within one another, i.e., in close relational connection. This is the basis of Spinoza’s antiCartesianism: desire (emotion: the affect) is inter-penetrated with cognition. Similar close connections apply between conation (the will) and cognition, as well as between conation and emotions (one prominent class of affect). In Part III, we directly develop this holism with reference to Spinoza. However, it is worth noting how influential reductive strategies of investigating human actions by rigidly separating the cognitive, affective, conative, (etc.) domains remain.

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For example, Bratman (1987) proposed the Belief–Desire–Intention (BDI) model of human practical reasoning. The model is focused on motivations for action: beliefs issue in desires, with some desires causing intentions, i.e., the planning and carrying out of actions to fulfil the selected desire (goal). Though the BDI software model was supposed to programme rational agents, its main applications thus far have been the more modest ones of simulating the choice of a plan and its execution. The BDI literature is marked by proposals to extend the model, either to more fully reproduce rationality (e.g. adding deliberation concerning goal selection: Pokahr et al. 2005) or to incorporate other overlooked human factors (e.g. obligations, norms or emotions: Dignum et al. 2000). It is the claim of this book that such bit-by-bit summation strategies will prove to be very limited since it is our contention that human activities are shaped by relational interactions that require a more holistic approach. With its focus on the isolated individual, the BDI model not only omits the crucial effects of social–relational interactions on an individual’s choices but it also ignores the roles of diverse relational interactions within the whole person. This points us to a more detailed consideration of the affective in order to illustrate its wide scope. Affect is a central but neglected aspect of human functioning, defined by the Macquarie dictionary as an ‘observable feeling or emotion, as linked to a thought process or as a response to a stimulus (opposed to conation)’. In defining ‘conation’ out of the affective, what is lost is the inclusion of willing or desiring. Yet humans are motivated, not merely ‘feeling’, creatures. The derivation of the word itself points to these further key, but vital, aspects: ‘affect’ derives from two Latin words, ad, meaning ‘to’, and facere, meaning ‘to do’. One dictionary captures this idea by giving ‘the emotion that lies behind action’ as the meaning of ‘affect’. But this dictionary definition also points to the need for a broader understanding of ‘emotion’, to include the motivational elements of action. Thus, a key feature of the concept of affect is that it captures a reaching out to one’s environment, implying a desired relation to the world, and to a bodily engagement within it. Clearly, emotions are part of affect—anger, sadness, joy and jealousy are all typically aroused by, hence are related to, happenings in one’s environment. They are one kind of bodily engagement with the world. However, affect also includes other kinds of human relating to the world, of bodily engagement with it, kinds that are not usually classified as emotions. Some aspects of human bodily engagement with the world are, of course, fairly familiar. There are the basic sensorimotor contingencies that underlie human interactions with their environment. These sensorimotor contingencies centre on the ‘body schema’, which pertains to motor control and facilitates a person’s interactions with their surroundings. This body schema contrasts with the ‘body image’ which refers to ‘the ways in which the body shows up for consciousness, in certain circumstances, as its intentional referent’ (Gallagher and Bower 2014: 234). In both cases, these are conscious qualitative psychobiological experiences. But, as Gallagher and Bower stress, the ‘lived body in its full sense … involves more than the sensorimotor body schema and body image’ (2014: 234). There is a further ensemble of bodily factors that govern conscious life whilst operating ‘below the level of conscious monitoring

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and manipulation’. These factors may or may not be accessible to conscious awareness, but, crucially, they include ‘the large realm of affect’ (Gallagher and Bower 2014: 234). Proprioception (sensing of stimuli within the body) and kinaesthesis (sensing where parts of one’s body are and how they are moving in space) are familiar instances of this broad realm of affect. The significance of these particular instances of affect, of bodily engagement with the world, is that they draw attention not just to movement through space, but to locations, that is, to particular places within space. As we discussed earlier, Malpas (2015) has argued cogently that place is the source of relationality. This confronts the common view that space is the basis of relations— that is, if you have the map, you can find your way around, as if sense-making in one’s environment depends on the surveying that went on first. That common view locates the space within which we locate ourselves (where we are). By contrast, the Malpas thesis supports the crucial idea that relationality (where we find ourselves; where we want ourselves to be) is an essential feature of affect, and we return to this aspect in the next section, where we set out the definition of ‘co-present groups’. However, equally important for the purposes of this book is the fact that there is a further large class of affective factors that also needs to be considered as expressions of holism. This class comprises those instances of affect that ‘involve a complex motivational dimension that animates body–world interaction’ (Gallagher and Bower 2014: 234). This type of affect concerns a sense of interest or investment in interacting with the environment. Bower and Gallagher (2013) call this ‘perceptual interest’. It ‘denotes the affective sense of the stakes or the costs involved in exchanges with one’s environment’ (Gallagher and Bower 2014: 236). Thus, in addition to a sensorimotor (practical) understanding of how to interact with one’s environment, humans also have an affective take on the relative values of various interactive possibilities—the why of which interactions to pursue and which ones to avoid. As Gallagher and Bower put it, ‘One’s environment affords many possibilities for action, but each has its affective price tag, and they are not equally affordable’ (2014: 236). Examples of these cost/benefit action choices range from the vital (e.g. judging how long to persevere with a particular treatment of a problem before trying an alternative treatment; or judging which aspects of a particular case require the most immediate attention) to the routine (e.g. looking after one’s equipment; or keeping adequately detailed records). Thus, the deeper relational question becomes this: Is ‘where we find ourselves’ actually ‘where we want to be’? This is what we previously set out as the ‘present place’ which we identified as an onto-epistemologically significant underpinning concept. ‘Place’ leads us to where and how the affective plays out in groups’ functions. In short, ‘where we want to be’ is where we feel we are ‘placed’—where our affective functioning shows us is appropriate. In claiming this, it is important to include the significance of other broadly affective factors encompassing qualitative psycho-emotional experiences. These experiences are also ‘non-cognitive’, often not commonly recognised as emotions, and often tacit, for example, the experience of novelty, the recollections of memory and the

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recognition of phenomena experienced previously (encountering discordance, being empathetic, judging rightness, feeling satisfaction). These many and various dimensions of the affect resonate strongly with the holistic relationality that this book is seeking to elucidate. Already, we can identify significant features of holistic human experiences which bear upon the limitations of traditional accounts of these which we discussed in Part I. Since affect encompasses the diverse aspects of bodily engagement with the world, it is thereby central to any adequate understanding of human agency. Likewise, it underpins other core concepts such as the normativity of practice and the notion of professional judgement. Equally, the various dimensions of affect will be shown to offer a productive platform for resolving problematic issues for our understanding of the suite of concepts closely related to agency: learning, practice, competence, expertise, skills, (etc.), to which we return in Part III. Overall, we claim that affect, in its many dimensions, is best understood as affective functioning, that is, a relational function of the mind, both conscious and unconscious, for the processing of raw experience. Affective functioning is, then, a crucial underpinning concept for the notion of ‘co-present groups’. So, for us, in summarising the underpinning concepts leading to the formulation of the concept of the ‘co-present group’, we claim that co-present groups are to be found in the sharing of relationally holistic and social activities, particularly affective functioning, in distinctive places. In particular, the onto-epistemological significance of a co-present group is apparent in how it makes experiences meaningful: through undergoing performative activities where affective relations, and the tacit, are each included. It thus owns its intimacy, whilst recognising it is amongst myriad other intimacies, other groups. This chapter began with three new emphases: the significance of holistic relationality, the centrality within holism of long-overlooked affect, and from them both, the focus on the sociality of human life—that is, life as groups. Having established the locus (the present place) and the focus (the affect, holistically) as underpinning concepts, we now turn to the formalisation of the concept of the co-present group itself.

6.4 Defining the Co-Present Group 6.4.1 Affective Functioning If we were to follow the assumptions adopted by traditional approaches to these topics (discussed in Part I), we would develop our account of affective functioning by focusing on the qualitative psychobiological experiences of individual agents. However, we maintain that this approach would be mistaken because affective functioning is essentially a group or social phenomenon. As we will demonstrate, affective functioning, in its fullest sense, is emergent from relevant co-present groups,

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such as an operating theatre team or a string quartet. Even the affective functioning of an individual agent draws significantly on affective reactions that originate from previous participation in multiple co-present groups. Our emphasis on the role of affective functioning (or processing) is influenced by the work of Lancaster: The processing of affect is a primary function of human groups of two or more individuals, known as co-present groups. These are the familiar small groups that individuals engage with for the whole range of human activities; groups such as couples or families; friendship, social interest, ceremonial or work groups; committees, working parties, task forces, teams, mentorships, therapy dyads, apprenticeships, classes, tutorials, supervision groups, clubs, or community groups. They are based commonly on face-to-face or some other form of direct relating, that extends over time, so that group interactions are constituted of more than an exchange of information, but, by including degrees of the non-verbal aspects of communication such as body language, facial expression and vocal intonation, come to facilitate the unconscious sharing of affect necessary for the processing of human experience in such groups. (Lancaster 2012: 128)

As we have shown through our four examples of such co-present groups, individuals meet with a purpose, even if that purpose is not well-articulated—they have, as it were, been brought together by a common or shared affective commitment to sort something out, i.e., to make sense, or meaning, out of some aspect of human experiences. What brings individuals together? Lancaster continues, introducing the notion of an ‘attractor’: The group’s attractor, determined by the group itself, includes both the overtly understood purpose and the sharing and processing of affect, that is, of the wishes, interests, intentions, emotions and understandings of the group participants. (129)

The widespread familiarity of these small groups throughout our lives has a profundity beyond affective functioning because such groups shape our sense of our ‘place’.

6.4.2 A Sense of Place-in-Time As we discussed earlier in this chapter, a prominent contributor to the significance of place (in contrast to ‘space’), Malpas (2015) notes that place has a character which constructs meanings and identities, and stretches over time: memory is part of that construction. The phenomenon was celebrated as such from as far back as the Greek chora (Malpas 2017: 3–4). This ‘place’ has ‘a character that is proper to it alone’ (2015: 65). It is found in how it is experienced, and that is found in reflexive temporal relationships between various memories (retrospectively) and strivings (in prospect). These are not reducible to individuals’ experiences of place, nor are these unique. To make the case for the stretched and relational character of ‘place’, Malpas argues that the experience of ‘place’ is singular (but not individualistic), partly because our memories of place are unique (‘interior’) but made intelligible more

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widely. It is important for our notion of co-present groups that we understand how Malpas moves from the individually unique ‘place’ to his (and our) socially relational account. First, he claims that perhaps all explicit and genuine attentiveness to place has this recollective character … [place is] a repository of memory (places hold memory) … and a memory is a repository of place (memories hold places). (2015: 76)

Given that I (as the Self) am ‘essentially embodied’ (77), my memories have a place in ‘my space’—within me. But, importantly, even ‘my’ memories involved then, and involve now, others in groups: the interiority of place is no more reducible to the interiority of any one life than it is reducible to the interiority that is given in the many places that any one place contains and that it opens into. (77)

The interiority of place gives it its singularity, but groups are where this is experienced (I experience ‘my’ memories in involving others). So, Malpas is able to claim that we find ourselves in place, and only there, … and yet in finding ourselves, we discover we are given only as a singularity … [and] are possessed of an identity that is always to be worked out, never completed, always, indeed in question. (78)

Co-present groups therefore function affectively, not only in providing a place as a locus of attention, to the past (through recollections), but also in providing relationships that constitute that locus in the present, and point it towards the future. We are placed-in-time through diverse groups’ relationalities, and these, as we discussed earlier, are always heterogeneous. A co-present group provides a ‘place-in-time’ where these various heterogeneities are displayed and sorted out. The affect is the locus of this functioning; we can claim that this locus enables two relational outcomes: • first, places as ‘distinct identities … arise’ (‘since no place exists except in relation to other places, and every place contains other places that are related within it’); and, • second, ‘the distinctive character of places is thus something that emerges through the interplay of places, rather than their absolute separation (which is impossible)’ (Malpas 2017: 4, emphasis added). What ‘arises’ and ‘emerges’ implicates temporality. As we have argued earlier (Sect. 6.3.1), co-present groups thus work in prospect, as well as retrospectively. Their activities, and therefore their identities, arise and emerge, as they contemplate the future. Kant calls this ‘anticipative experience’. In his criticism of the empiricist and sceptical David Hume, Kant notes (Critique 1787/1929: A766–768) that when sunlight both hardens clay and melts wax, we (as does Hume) know this from experience. However, pace Hume, we can ‘anticipate’ (predict) future experiences (where the sun

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will do one or other of these in the right context without any need for our scepticism), because, says Kant, we are able, in relation to a third thing, namely, possible experience, to know the law of its connection with other things, and to do so in an a priori manner. (A766)

What is possible is what Kant calls ‘anticipative experience’ (A 767). This is a very helpful concept for this book. Without taking on the ontology of Kantian Transcendental Idealism, our claim is more epistemological: that co-present groups construct the emergence of ‘anticipative experiences’—what we think is going to happen, and is worth happening because the affective functioning of the group enables the possibility. Affective functioning is, for us, Kant’s ‘relation to a third thing’, the construction of possible experiences: what the co-present group wants to emerge— what it ‘anticipates’ emerging. Our senses of place-in-time situate our identities in the two ways noted earlier— as our sense of being ‘us’ arises, and as our sense of being ‘us’ is distinguished from what emerges from what is around ‘us’. This temporality is apparent in each of the four examples. The jury, the sub-school, the mother–baby dyad, and the string quartet all reveal, to themselves and to one other, their group identities, and they do so in prospect: each moves forward in meaning-making (relationally, holistically and socially), as we set out. Each functions ‘in relation to a third thing’—these are possible experiences, possible not because the group already knows what these are, but seeks them as emergent phenomena, thus ‘anticipatively’, to use Kant’s term. They will be known when they are apparent, just as the sun will both harden clay and melt wax, depending on the material situation. Our ‘relation to a third thing’ is ontologically basic. Rovelli, in his superb bestseller, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics closes with this reminder of our restlessly anticipative nature, and how it works in places, or, as he states, ‘home’: We are born and die as the stars are born and die, both individually and collectively. This is our reality. Life is precious to us because it is ephemeral. And as Lucretius wrote: “our appetite for life is voracious, our thirst for life insatiable” (De rerum natura, III, 1084). But immersed in this nature which made us and which directs us, we are not homeless beings suspended between two worlds, parts of but only partly belonging to nature, with a longing for something else. No: we are home. Nature is our home, and in nature we are at home. (2014: 77)

Lucretius captures our human striving—itself a temporal concept. We strive over time; we stretch our efforts towards some desired goal or outcome. Our relationality is thus integral to our very being. In the face of our mortality, we ‘voraciously’ strive together—that is, prospectively, anticipatively—towards experiences we value. Kant’s ‘third thing’ (anticipative experience) emerges from the affective functioning of co-present groups, which, as we have shown with four examples, are fundamental to humans’ sense-making. Through co-present groups, intelligibility emerges from how we ‘read’ our homes—our ‘places’ in the world. We speak of ‘knowing our way around’, and of being more or less ‘street-wise’. Whilst these seem to be spatial metaphors, they are more basically ‘placial’ (to coin a term). We ‘get our bearings’,

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not from a grid, but from our readings of places over time in which we are naturally placed, and which place us, through our various group participations (families, households, communities, workplaces and so on). Our participations are never inert. We strive, in places-in-time. What arises and emerges throughout this (over time) draws on recollections we share, which ‘place’ us, from which identities are shaped, and which drive, as Lucretius has it, our ‘appetites’ and ‘thirsts’.

6.4.3 Particularity and Accountability A co-present group’s affective functioning will possess the present character of the place in which it finds itself, and, reflexively the character of the place which it carves out for itself. As we have just seen, this ‘presentness’ will be both retrospective, and also, importantly, prospective—the group will ‘anticipate experience’, as Kant has it. What will be sought in many cases are outcomes that are singular—that is, unique, or, as philosophers say, sui generis (‘of their own kind’). Non-routine outcomes are ways to move novel and seemingly intractable features of daily life to resolution. They are singular, both in process and in outcome. But because making the world intelligible normally requires outcomes which fit into patterns, or routines, of ‘possible experiences’ already identifiable as known activities and explanations, co-present groups more often strive, not for what is singular, but for something which is part of something more general. A particular process or outcome would be a manifestation of a co-present group’s functionality where what is emergent is understood (at that point) as an existent part of the world already. Indeed, one way to regard a co-present group is to see its purpose, and its authority, to reside in its capacity to convert the singular to the particular. What might be temptingly sui generis (if it resolves a unique set of circumstances) might, from another ‘place’, or with hindsight, seem annoyingly idiosyncratic: an indulgence with which few other people can be bothered, and which has no effective impact on any larger aspects of human life. Particularity, more than singularity, points us on from place per se, to ‘placial’ events. Whilst places situate ‘us’ and, as Malpas argues, work the reflexivity between our ‘interiority’ and our openness to the rest of the world, co-present groups meet, and meet again and maintain memories of, and patterns in, engaging tensions between their interiority and the wider world. A playing of a string quartet, or more significantly, a jazz improvisation, on any singular occasion, may be memorable—for all the wrong reasons! A particular performance will connect to another ‘place’, such as a wider, more general consideration of Ravel’s String Quartet, of which it is a manifestation. Similar examples arise in sport. Do particular football or tennis matches fit with other understandings of similar events involving the same or similarstandard players, across time and in diverse circumstances? Judgements are made, both within the groups and across the wider public understandings of success and strivings, which these co-present groups, cast as teams or quartets, or jazz ensembles, represent. These judgements have varying implications, depending on the place the

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co-present group occupies in the wider social world. Amidst the genre of classical music, what counts as a worthy performance of the Ravel String Quartet will be a critical point in how a particular event, in which it is played, is regarded. And the ‘interior’ regard the players may have for their work could differ from the audience’s view, and both may differ from the music critic’s view. Similarly with sport—how the team is going across the season will be the subject of diverse opinions. Moreover, in many places, diverse judgements come up against the hard edge of particular accountabilities, especially for workplaces where co-present groups’ functioning and outcomes have far-reaching implications. Juries and sub-schools, where justice and learning are, respectively, desired, exemplify the long haul of emergent affective functioning, where decisions and outcomes are ‘anticipative’ of, respectively, justice and learning. Both these are particularly representative of a wider social significance beyond the singularity of a co-present group (which, to emphasise, looks inwards, and outwards, but only does so for its particular purposes). A more dramatic example of particular accountabilities is found in surgery. The far-reaching decisions and outcomes of a co-present group around the operating table are rightly ‘anticipative’ of the restoration of health—these particular decisions and outcomes have a wider social significance beyond the singularity of the surgical team. In turn, these accountabilities are reflected in the ways a co-present group shapes its own participation, which is our next feature of such groups.

6.4.4 Participation and Nonlinearity It would be naïve to assume that a co-present group is democracy-in-action. Enough has been outlined so far to show that affective functioning (the ‘glue’ of the group), place and its ontological priority in the present (but retrospectively and prospectively, as ‘place-in-time’), and particularity and accountability, all combine to constitute a tight locus of participative practices. But the character of this participation is provided, not by any amorphous democracy (at one extreme), nor by an oppressive hierarchy (at the other extreme), but rather by the sort of decision-making that is called forth by the nature of the group. A mother–baby dyad requires the adult to lead, and the baby to engage, the nurturing. Over time, some infant agency grows. In the string quartet, the violin, taking the top line of music, probably takes the artistic lead, at least initially. In a jazz ensemble, this may be deliberately moved around the performance as the improvisation shifts. In a jury, a foreperson is elected from amongst the twelve members. In a sub-school, expertise will lead the advice and accountability for student learning, but this may be discipline-based (e.g. Maths) or pastoral (the Home Room teacher), depending on the need to liaise with the family. The main point is that the decision-making process is not linear—neither assumed to be horizontal (every opinion is equally authoritative), nor vertical (the only opinion comes from the top of a hierarchy). For co-present groups, leadership, which is always essential, is distributed: it arises through the contingencies of the case, or

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the ‘reading’ of the place (as Malpas would argue). Leaders will be those with the authority to direct attention to salient aspects of the situation: ‘look at it this way’; ‘I recognise these features—can others see these?’; ‘if we try this, we could …’; and so on. These invitations to ‘see’ differently do not fit with a linear model of decision-making, where there is a pathway to be traversed with a desired outcome just in view at the end. This is far too reductive, and denies the evidence that highly skilled, even expert, performances, in a group, call for leaps and twists in decisions, as the situation unfolds. Nonlinearity, therefore, demands highly skilled performances and performers, but the expertise these display is dispositional—it is called forth in the doing, alongside novices’ more technicist and programmable contributions. In a co-present group, the artfulness of participation central to the group’s success is found in the mastery of affective functioning across all members of the group, to the extent that decisions are made with the support of all. These are owned by all. The co-present group is, as we argued previously, accountable to the wider world in its very particularity. Yet the processes of decision-making and arriving-at-outcomes will themselves have been ‘called forth’ amidst a model of distributed leadership within the co-present group.

6.4.5 Distributed Participation Just as leadership will evolve and engage differently across the co-present group, depending on the particularity of its functioning, we now make the wider claim that participation itself will also be distributed—or, to reuse a term, ‘stretched’. One of our underpinning concepts is the ‘present place’, which we set out, with help from Emirbayer and Mische (1998), Malpas (2015), and Kant (1787/1929), as the ‘present’ which includes the retrospective (or recollective experience) and the prospective (or anticipative experience). Just as temporality is stretched, so too is space, but only in a ‘particular’ sense: for participation in a co-present group, only some of the participants need to be geographically co-located. Consider a small international community of scholars. They meet on occasion at the annual conference of their discipline or field of study, they exchange e-documents and communications variously throughout the year (maybe using public social media), amongst themselves in various combinations, and, we argue, when, amongst all that, they also meet in a virtual or tele-conference environment, then, they form a co-present group. If this recurs, it is probably because the group has a link to the wider world of academic or other workplace practice—a pattern of such events is more significant than any single meeting in one ‘place’. These events fit our criteria for a co-present group because, whilst they are mainly located in an ‘e-place’, they are sustained, ‘stretched’, over time. The group’s members are distributed participants. Similarly, a learning environment may be a virtual or blended classroom. Geographically on campus, but with most participants logging in for their tutorial or seminar, if the other main features are apparent, these groups are co-present. Leadership of learning would be more obvious (a ‘tutor’), and the affective functioning

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would need early attention (since the learners may be strangers to one another), but there would be a Malpasian sense of ‘place-in-time’—a classroom with the character of permeable ‘walls’ but with e-linkages; perhaps including imaginary or actual recollections of this or that campus or city (the iconic clock-tower image), and perhaps also with a strong sense of Kant’s ‘anticipative experience’ (1787/1929) because there would be assessment tasks as outcomes. Similar to the case of the scholars, if there was a link to a wider world (such as a subjects and courses leading to qualification for, or registration as, a professional), then the co-present group of learners has a wider social significance given that most of its activities are uniquely ‘online’. Participation in this sort of learning environment may be distributed around the world, but its affective and social functioning fit our criteria for a co-present group.

6.4.6 Deliberation Under the section ‘Participation and Non-Linearity’, we stated that ‘decisions are made with the support of all. These are owned by all’. We develop that now. We understand deliberation in a co-present group in the broad sense as weighing up what to do, when something is required to be done. So, the judging or deciding is emergent from the co-present group’s understanding that actions are required, and that the appropriate actions will arise from, and often amidst, shared deliberation. In empirical research amongst staff in an aged care facility who manage residents with dementia (Beckett 2001), researchers found that deliberation occurred throughout the workday, as staff discussed what to do with challenging behaviours (such as food-throwing). The staff were asked the question, ‘which of these more accurately describes what you find yourself doing [in what we now can call a co-present group]?’ General points to emerge in discussion, agreed on by participating staff, were: • trying, for example, suggesting, ‘I think she should have a spoon’ at mealtimes; • guessing that the resulting food-throwing represents ‘going back to the farm’, feeding chickens as a young girl; • and from this, showing is assumed to be the least apt—staff wouldn’t find themselves ‘showing’ residents what to do because, for example, bottom-washing has a dignity aspect (2001: 150). Here, staff in meetings were able to piece together pattern-making and re-making, ‘reading’ a critical situation or challenging behaviour with their colleagues, such that it then can be better understood. A diversity of practical responses and reflective explanations was shared by the group, and judgements were made about the future management of these behaviours. This was a regular, daily and deliberative process. Referring to Dewey’s central notion of ‘practical reasoning’, Garrison notes that ‘[d]eliberation in practical reason is about what we should do and how we should do it’ (1999: 305), and that ‘[t]he disruption of a habitual function initiates inquiry for Dewey’ (293). Deliberations and practical action emerge as a creative effort to

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overcome what Dewey, in general, calls a ‘disrupted context’—and a dementia unit is very disruptive. Beckett went on: These staff, it will be noted, engage in practical reasoning, in attempts to shape stability within the unit. This is fundamentally an Aristotelian epistemology, since it is concerned with the fluidity of purposes with respect to a fluidity of means to achieve those purposes. Neither ends nor means are fixed in a linear fashion. Again, following Aristotle, we notice in the fieldwork findings a respect in the workplace for practical (as opposed to theoretical) action and for the embodied subject. As history tells us, this confronts much of Western education, with its traditional focus on Platonic epistemology, and on Cartesian ontology, both of which emphasise theory over practice, and the mind over the body. Even more fundamentally, they emphasise linear logic, with rigorous truth conditions (validity being the test of an argument), whilst in the workplace, practical logic, aimed at what will work by drawing laterally on experiences, prevails. (2001: 150–152, emphasis added)

Events in the dementia unit of this aged care facility occur in a ‘place-in-time’ and require actions that are appropriate. ‘Trying’ (rather than ‘guessing’ or ‘showing’) was regarded by the staff as the best way to proceed, given a ‘disruption’. Their end-in-view was residents’ dignity and wellbeing. Deliberation towards a norm is both Deweyan, and Aristotelian, as we can see. Indeed, as we have pointed out earlier in this book, one of the main features of Aristotle’s (1941) notion of phronesis, or practical judgement (also known as practical wisdom) is its efficacious purpose. It gets a group where it wants to go. Co-present groups make decisions—they judge what is best to do now, and for the next little whilst, until their next meeting, for example. Places are, as we claimed earlier, stretched in time, and over time. And so are deliberations. Because they are located in particular places-in-time, and thus connected to the wider world, they work within and towards norms, such as welfare, wellbeing, justice, profitability, efficiency, learning and so on. All co-present groups work normatively, and they do so through their affective functioning towards making ‘right’ (appropriate) judgements with their purposes in view. Deliberation is thus a main feature of their work. Towards the end of Chap. 8, we return to the significance of deliberation, viewed as practical judgement, in light of complexity thinking.

6.5 Co-Present Groups: Three Narratives 6.5.1 Narrative One: Wine-Tasting and Judging The Narrator: Ian is a Lecturer in Wine Studies in an Australian higher education institution. He undertook a student role in an international wine-tasting course, to advance his professional development and expertise in his field. In each class, the instructor invites a student to provide their evaluation of the specific characteristics of the wines [by appearance, by nose or aroma, by palate (flavour and texture)], and then confirms if they correspond with the instructor’s own evaluations. If they do not correspond, then the instructor will invite other students’ responses to see if variation exists.

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The instructor ultimately “corrects” the responses of the class members if they differ. This establishes the instructor’s judgements and evaluations [as] correct and thus [these] serve as a benchmark. Once all of the individual characteristics have been established [in this way], the overall judgements of quality and price point is considered … The students taste the wine “blind”, i.e. the students have no additional information about the wine, whereas the instructor knows the identity of the wine and … technical features such as alcohol, acid and sugar levels. … This Systematic Approach to Wine Tasting provides a standard lexicon for those without prior experience … [which] maximises the likelihood of shared responses within the group when evaluating the wines. This seems to result in a growing confidence in students as [they] share and others confirm the same observation. (Frost 2016: 14–15)

6.5.2 Narrative Two: The Futures Trading Floor The Narrator: Ying was a graduate intern in a small annual intake for an international bank in Hong Kong. After ten years in business, she has now re-trained as a secondary school teacher. Multinational banks run various lines of trading businesses. Bankers trade bonds, equities, interest rate swaps, foreign exchange, commodities and other asset classes. If you ever have the opportunity to step onto a trading floor, you will be immersed in the electrifying atmosphere and feel the buzz and energy. The trading floor is a lively and fast-paced place. It is packed by traders and flashing monitor screens; you see live updates of the latest financial news being broadcasted on Bloomberg TV; you see the times of major trading centres such as London, New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Singapore flashing and you get continuous updates of the major global stock market indices. The trading floor is also a place full of traders busy speaking to clients on the phone while frantically typing on their computers. You can gauge the mood of the markets by observing the level of volume on the trading floor. In times of frantic activity, you will also hear crowds of traders’ open outcry. Markets can be volatile, hence the trading floor is a place of excitement and stimulation and definitely not a place for the fainthearted. My personal experiences of working in the different departments within the multinational bank, including the Corporate Client Coverage department, Foreign Exchange Trading department and Equity Research department are examples of an individual learning through engaging in workplace participatory practices in changing workplace contexts, as each department is a unique culturally and situationally-shaped environment. … [E]ach department can be considered as a unique co-present group that has its own culture and internal working dynamics. As the individual participates in the shared affective functioning of each co-present group, the interpersonal interactions reshape the individual. As the individual moves across various co-present contexts, namely, from one department to another during the rotation program, this may facilitate continuous lifelong learning, and in any case supports the notion of learning on the move. … For instance, the “affect” of working on the fast-paced, stimulating and noisy foreign exchange trading floor provides a different subjective experience to working in a quiet and analytical Equity Research department. The ‘affect’ is again different in the client coverage sales team where client meetings, conference calls and sales pitch consume most of the energy. Hence, it is natural to see that, over time, the individual learner is being reshaped in different ways depending on the specific workplace context and different skills sets (such

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as technical, programming, familiarity with trading systems, analytical modelling, valuation, reporting writing, presentation, interpersonal, negotiation and social skills) are being developed. (Zhang 2016: 17–22, passim)

6.5.3 Narrative Three: TV Comedy Writing The Narrator: Steve is an American TV comedy writer, and was a guest at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, Australia, in 2016. [I]f I tell you the truth about TV [comedy] writing, you won’t believe me anyway. You would not believe me, for example, when I tell you how much time is spent thinking and talking about lunch. Let me try and be as clear as possible about this. Imagine the most amount of time you think a group of 10 or so people could possibly spend talking about lunch … An hour? Two hours? Come up with what you think is a very generous number. Now, multiply that number by two…I promise you there is no danger of overestimating. Another secret of TV writing is that it’s very collaborative. It’s true, on some shows a lone genius is said to write almost everything. But even they draw on ideas and stories and jokes suggested to them by their staff. On American Dad, an animated show I worked on, more than 60 people have contributed to writing more than 200 episodes over 12 years. Every episode has a writer with the “written by” credit, but by the time it’s done, everyone’s contributions are so blurred it’s hard to tell who pitched what. It’s hard to think of another art form that’s quite like that, and it makes the work better and faster. You generate so many more ideas that way. When I started writing this piece, the first thing I did was mention it to another writer on the show I work for now, Veep. “You should talk about how important lunch is,” he said. A good idea I am putting to use. That leads us to another secret. Sometimes actors contribute quite a bit to the writing. They think about their character all day, and they often have great, interesting, or fresh ideas. And sometimes they point out something that’s off about the script. You look at it again, and realise they’re right. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is when an actor is right. On the American version of The Office, the actors were given a lot of room to improvise and play off each other and generate new lines and fresh comedy. Lots of great actors come out of improv groups or theatres such as the UCB in Los Angeles and New York. The best of them are brilliant at inventing and listening to each other and feeding each other comedy back and forth. (Hely 2016)

6.6 Co-Present Groups and the Narratives Across these three accounts we can immediately read that work life is messy—even, perhaps, frantic! Ying and Steve foreground this. There is a sense of being driven to sort it out, to make the best of it, and indeed to flourish with it. For Ian, the action is slightly cooler (more room temperature, as befits a wine-tasting environment), but the need to do well is still apparent—can a codification of seemingly idiosyncratic tastes, and tastings, ever occur? Each account is embedded in social situations, where action drives the relations that emerge across the events of the day.

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The groups in these three locations are not large, and participants in them have a common purpose, shaped by desires to succeed (in futures trading acumen, in codifying tasting and therefore improving teaching, and in coming up with ratings-winning comedy scripts). Affective functioning is central. So also is an acute understanding of the work ‘place’—what it does in generating a shared retrospective and prospective ‘present’. But this is not ‘singular’ (unique); each workplace has a ‘particular’ link to wider social significance: multinational banking’s high finance, the hospitality industry’s market appeal and the voracious demands of the entertainment industry. Participation in these co-present groups is never shaped by linear reasoning, especially so for comedy writers, but also for the futures traders and the wine-tasters. Sense-making in each group comes about through a ‘feeling’ for the decisional pathway which may lead to an outcome; what emerges (the right trade, the right wine, the right script) cannot be identified beforehand, nor can the leadership through the decision-making be pre-specified, yet the outcomes are known to be what is sought once they have been arrived at. We see that for comedy writing, actors can contribute well—so the distribution of a co-present group can include non-writers on occasion; and on the trading floor, international e-contributors can beam in from afar, participating in the ‘place’ whilst physically absent. Deliberation occurs through each co-present group’s functioning: decisions are made within non-linear weaving, through the messiness of relationality.

6.7 The Power of the Co-Present Group We began this chapter with four common examples of small groups where, in each of them, an understanding of their ‘holistic relationality’ offers a way to redress some main difficulties identified (in Part I) for various aspects of human experience. Then, building on their commonalities, we set out some underpinning concepts which the notion of a co-present group would need, and summarised thus: co-present groups are to be found in the sharing of relationally holistic and social activities, particularly affective functioning, in distinctive places. Then, across the main parts of this chapter, we have conceptualised the specific notion of a ‘co-present’ group through its six main features: • • • • • •

its affective functioning a sense of place-in-time particularity and accountability participation and non-linearity distributed participation deliberation.

Finally, we presented three narratives where vivid accounts of personal workplace experiences show how what we can now term ‘co-present groups’ have progressed this ‘holistic relationality’.

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These accounts are vivid because the three groups’ activities are generative. Each co-present group has to stay with the telos, with the specific purpose of the whole enterprise—co-present groups exist, not ‘singularly’ in places, but ‘particularly’ in multiple series of relationships which have the character of events, or meetings, or conversations. These are relational terms for phenomena that are sustained in time, as much as in space: ‘Present and presence means what is with us. And that means: to endure in the encounter’, states Heidegger (1954/1972: 234). A shared commitment to staying with the activities of the group (the affect), and knowing that is important (the telos), brings with it sustained exposure to what Kant called ‘anticipative experience’. What emerges on the way through this ‘endurance’ exposes individuals to learning about each other and about themselves, through what is relationally undergone. We re-iterate a point already made: On the way through to an outcome (whether agreed or not) – say, a judgement that this is indeed valuable learning, or new knowledge, or worth thinking about – the group’s affective and social functioning intertwine over time. Time and being are thus co-implicated in the existence of the co-present group. Following Heidegger (1954 Lecture X passim), time is both always experientially present, and also is always ‘the present’. (Beckett and Hager 2018: 148)

Co-present groups are fundamental to our intelligibility of experience. They are a hitherto overlooked human phenomenon. In the next chapter, we locate them at the heart of an onto-epistemological framework which animates complexity theory for key aspects of the social sciences.

References Aristotle. (1941 version). Nicomachean ethics. In R. McKeon (Ed.), The basic works of Aristotle. New York: Random House. Beckett, D. (2001). Workplace learning as postmodernist enactment: A model from dementia. Journal of Vocational Education and Training, 53(1), 141–160. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 13636820100200145. Beckett, D. (2012). Of maestros and muscles: Expertise and practices at work. In D. Aspin & J. Chapman (Eds.), Second international handbook of lifelong learning (pp. 113–127). Dordrecht: Springer. Beckett, D., & Hager, P. (2018). A complexity thinking take on thinking in the university. In S. Bengsten & R. Barnett (Eds.), The thinking University (pp. 137–153). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer Nature. Bower, M., & Gallagher, S. (2013). Bodily affects as prenoetic elements in enactive perception. Phenomenology and Mind, 4(1), 78–93). Bratman, M. (1987). Intentions, plans and practical reasoning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dewey, J., & Bentley, A. (1989). Knowing and the known. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The later works: 1949–1952 (Vol. 16, pp. 2–294). Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press (Original work published 1949). Dignum, F., Morley, D., Sonenberg, E. A., & Cavedon, L. (2000). Towards socially sophisticated BDI agents. In Proceedings Fourth International Conference on MultiAgent Systems (ICMAS–2000) (pp. 111–118). Boston, MA: IEEE Computer Society.

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Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. (1998). What is agency? The American Journal of Sociology, 103(4), 962–1023. https://doi.org/10.1086/231294. Frost, I. (2016). How can wine tasting be best learned, best taught? Unpublished postgraduate research project, University of Melbourne, Melbourne. Gallagher, S., & Bower, M. (2014). Making enactivism even more embodied. AVANT, 5(2), 232–247. Garrison, J. (1999). John Dewey’s theory of practical reasoning. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 31(3), 291–312. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-5812.1999.tb00467.x. Glanville, R. (1900). A translation of Glanville (J. Beames, Trans.). Washington DC: J. Byrne. (Original work published ca. 1190). Hager, P., & Johnsson, M. (2012). Collective learning practice. In P. Hager, A. Lee, & A. Reich (Eds.), Practice, learning and change: Practice theory perspectives on professional learning (pp. 249–265). Dordrecht: Springer. Heidegger, M. (1972). What is called thinking? (J. Glenn Gray & F. Wieck, Trans.). New York: Harper and Row (Original work published 1954). Hely, S. (2016, August 5). Steve Hely—30 Rock scribe, Melbourne Writers Festival guest—spills the beans. Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved from https://www.smh.com.au. Kant, I. (1929). Critique of pure reason (N. K. Smith, Trans.). London: Macmillan (Original work published 1787). Lancaster, J. (2012). The complex systems of practice. In P. Hager, A. Lee, & A. Reich (Eds.), Practice, learning and change: Practice theory perspectives on professional learning (pp. 119–131). Dordrecht: Springer. Malpas, J. (2015). Place and singularity. In J. Malpas (Ed.), The intelligence of place: Topographies and poetics (pp. 65–92). London: Bloomsbury Academic. Malpas, J. (2017). Thinking topographically: Place, space, and geography. http://jeffmalpas.com/ downloadable-essays/. Accessed June 22, 2017. Pokahr, A., Braubach, L., & Lamersdorf, W. (2005, September 11–13). A goal deliberation strategy for BDI agent systems. In MATES 2005: Proceedings of the Third German Conference on Multiagent System Technologies (pp. 82–93). Koblenz, Germany. Rovelli, C. (2014). Seven brief lessons on physics. London: Penguin Books. Simpson, J. (Director). (2014). The devil’s brood [Television series episode]. In C. Granlund (Executive producer), The Plantagenets. London: BBC Television. Zhang, Y. (2016). The world is your home: Permanently temporary. Unpublished postgraduate research project, University of Melbourne, Melbourne.

Chapter 7

Complex Systems and Complexity Thinking

The main purpose of this chapter is to introduce the reader to fundamental aspects of complexity thinking. The concept of complexity and its accompanying cluster of key ideas, such as emergence, will be outlined and discussed. Restricted complexity will be distinguished from general complexity, whilst several kinds of emergence will also be identified. Complexity thinking remains a contested field of inquiry. This chapter is not an attempt to resolve ongoing disputes within complexity thinking itself. Rather the aim is to present a coherent version of complexity thinking that will suggest novel and fertile understandings of the pressing issues identified in previous chapters. The remaining chapters of the book will demonstrate the power of complexity thinking to deepen and expand our understanding of these issues.

7.1 A Brief Introduction to Complexity Thinking Complexity thinking starts by proposing that we humans inhabit a world that from our perspective is infinitely complex. As Mitchell (2009: 1) puts it, ‘complexity is everywhere’. Richardson and Cilliers (2001) concur that complexity is ubiquitous. Yet we humans cope with this overwhelming complexity of the world, its ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’ as James (1890/1950: Chap. 13) so memorably expressed it, by engaging in some form of complexity reduction. Faced with this multi-faceted reality, we make sense of it by attending to some features and ignoring others, that is, we selectively reduce phenomena to facilitate thought. In order to function, humans have to make distinctions (Saljo 2002). To some extent, we can choose what reductive moves to make in order to engage with the processes or structures that are our particular concern. However, much complexity reduction is already done for us. As living human organisms, how we engage with and experience the world is already biologically and socioculturally constrained. James’s blooming, buzzing confusion was offered as a description of the experiences of a newly born infant. However, we now know that newly born infants © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 P. Hager and D. Beckett, The Emergence of Complexity, Perspectives on Rethinking and Reforming Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31839-0_7

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come into the world with a set of quite powerful discriminative cognitive structures that serve to reduce the complexity of their experiences. Thanks to biological evolution, humans come equipped with complexity-reducing sensory and cognitive structures. For instance, we are bombarded by cosmic particles and electromagnetic waves at all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. Likewise, our situation on the earth’s surface immerses us in magnetic and other fields. But our human senses detect but a small fraction of this bombardment. Animals from various other species are equipped somewhat differently for their distinctive complexity reduction. For instance, some species sense parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that we cannot detect whilst being ‘blind’ to wavelengths that are part of our normal perceptual range. Nevertheless, as this book will argue, particularly in the domain of the social, humans also have significant freedom to choose the degree of reduction that will serve their given purposes. According to Morin (2007: 5), three fundamental explanatory principles of classical science served, until recently, to mask the significance of complexity. These three influential principles are: • Universal determinism This is the Laplacean idea that, given sufficient data, all past events can be known and all future events predicted. • Reduction Knowledge of the basic constitutive elements of any composite suffices for knowledge of the composite. • Disjunction The difficulties thrown up by the seeming complexity of our world are best dealt with by dividing them into a series of manageable problems that can each be assigned for resolution to its respective autonomous discipline. Morin accepts that these principles gave classical science outstanding success, but they also represented a denial of complexity. Cilliers (1998) provides a nuanced discussion of the diverse strategies that many schools of thought have employed in order to avoid complexity. Morin traces the beginnings of science’s acceptance of complexity, and of related notions such as disorder and chaos, to the establishment of the second law of thermodynamics. Gradually, the concept of complexity has proved its utility within the natural sciences and mathematics. More recently, it has become quite prominent in the fields of philosophy and the social sciences. One outcome of the increasing use of the term ‘complexity’ within this diverse range of fields of inquiry is that it has come to be conceptualised somewhat differently between disciplines, but also, sometimes, within a particular discipline (see, e.g. Byrne and Callaghan 2014). Thus, there has been some disagreement about the essential features of the concept. As will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter, distinctions have been made between different kinds of complexity; for

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example, Morin’s (2007) influential distinction between ‘restricted complexity’ and ‘general complexity’. The variety of understandings of complexity explains our preferred usage of the term ‘complexity thinking’ rather than ‘complexity theory’ in this book. In this, we follow the lead of Richardson and Cilliers (2001). In our view, complexity thinking is a useful tool for critical reflection about the nature of the world that confronts us and how to best understand our interactions with it. The already noted diversity in the theorising of complexity coexists with near unanimous ontological agreement: that complexity is a key feature of ‘what there is’; that the world, which we humans inhabit and engage with, is itself inherently complex. One point of significant agreement is that complexity is a property of systems. Though the specifics can vary somewhat across different disciplines and fields (for example, physics, biology and information technology), a system in its broadest sense is ‘a set of connected things or devices that operate together’ (Cambridge Dictionary Online). Systems whose states can be readily specified and whose operations can be described in linear terms according to Newton’s laws are simple systems. Such systems are very common and may be very intricate and ‘complex’. However, as long as their states and operation can be specified and accurately described, such systems are best thought of as being complicated, but still simple rather than complex. Complicated things are such that ‘we can take them apart and put them back together again, like a jumbo jet’, whereas ‘the important characteristics of a complex system are destroyed when it is taken apart, i.e. when the relationships between the components are broken’ (Cilliers 2000: 41). A crucial difference is that the ‘behaviour of complicated things can be described by rules; the behaviour of complex systems is constituted through relationships’. Thus, ‘complex things have emergent properties, complicated things do not’ (Cilliers 2000: 41). This is so because a ‘complex system’ is a different kind of system altogether. As Cilliers puts it: Complex behavior arises because of the interaction between the components of a system. One cannot, therefore, focus on individual components, but on their relationships. The properties of the system emerge as a result of these interactions; they are not contained within individual components. (2013: 43)

Cilliers adds that ‘a complex system generates new structure internally’ (2013: 43). Thus, a complex system is one for which ‘the causal categories become intertwined in such a way that no dualistic language of state plus dynamic laws can completely describe it’ (Rosen 1987: 324). Unlike complicated systems, complex systems elude understanding and description via linear mathematics and Newton’s laws. Put somewhat differently, a complex system is ‘a set of interrelated elements … in which … the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ (Byrne and Callaghan 2014: 4). However, there is more to a complex system than just the whole. Byrne and Callaghan quote Newman (1996) in order to stress this important point: Causal theories of emergence suggest that emergent properties are properties of structured wholes which have a causal influence over the constituents of the whole … suggesting that one of the emergent properties that a system can have is the power to exert causal influence

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on the components of the system in a way that is consistent with, but different from, the causal influences that these components exert upon each other. (Newman quoted in Byrne and Callaghan 2014: 21)

So, the properties of emergent complex systems arise from several sources: both from the interactions of system components with one another and from the interactions of system components with the system as a whole. Emergence will be discussed at length later in this chapter. However, we can note from the preceding discussion that complex systems are not simply holist. If they were simply holist they would be the exact opposite of reductionist, that is, ‘the parts explained by the whole’ as against ‘the whole explained by the parts’. As the Newman quote suggests, there is much more to complex systems than this. Another major point of general agreement, evident in much of the complexity literature, is that complexity arises from the relations between entities, rather than from the entities themselves. Indeed, as the above brief discussion of complex systems suggests, they are characterised by multiple nonlinear relations between the entities within the system. Indeed, the interaction of these nonlinear relations may give rise to new structures or qualities, which, whilst being constrained by the original relations of the system, cannot have been wholly predicted from them, nor reduced to them. Again, this is the phenomenon of emergence, a prime characteristic of complex systems, that will be considered in detail shortly. Thus, an understanding of complexity requires a careful investigation of the relations (interrelationships) between entities, as against the traditional focus on entities themselves. This crucial principle will recur throughout this chapter. Because relations are such a central concept in complexity thinking it needs to be stressed that they have hitherto had a mixed reception within philosophy itself. Despite relations figuring in much traditional thought, they have commonly been relegated to secondary importance behind objects (things, substances) and their properties. Various common strategies in both philosophy and in thought more generally have sought to downplay their significance. At one extreme sits nominalism, the theory that not only relations, but also properties, have no independent existence beyond thought, and, as such, are mere names that represent nothing that actually exists. Nominalism can be seen as an extreme manifestation of classical science’s principle of reduction, mentioned above. It implies that understanding of a composite requires knowledge of the basic particulars that constitute it and that these basic particulars do not include relations. Less extreme than nominalism are theories that seek to subsume relations into the particulars between which the relations hold. This kind of move effectively reduces relations to their relata. The black-box or Lego views of relations (discussed earlier in Chap. 3) are instances of this move. Scepticism about the ontological status of relations has been amplified by the tendency of some relational realists to seemingly reify relations. That is, in talking and writing about relations, they appear to treat them as things (particulars, substances) on the same footing as non-relational things or entities. Quite rightly, this is viewed as a mistaken account of the ontology of our

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world. In short, for a variety of reasons, relations have been regarded widely as being ontologically inert and theoretically otiose. Thus, complexity thinking, with its insistence that it is the relations between entities that have ontological salience, rather than the entities alone, presents something of a challenge to much established thought. According to complexity thinking, any system is structured by its relations, rather than constructed out of its constituent entities. This important matter will be considered further in Sect. 7.3.1 of this chapter. So far in this chapter, the term reduction has appeared in several guises. Reduction of complexity has been suggested as the major means by which humans cope with the markedly complex world in which they find themselves. In many instances, complexity reduction is biologically programmed. In other cases, humans can choose the type and extent of complexity reduction to be employed in particular circumstances. Reduction has also been identified as one of the three fundamental explanatory principles of classical science. First of all, it is a claim about understanding: knowledge of the basic constitutive elements of any composite suffices for knowledge of the composite. But it can also be taken to be an ontological principle: composites are nothing more than the sum of their basic constitutive elements. We maintain that what is common to these diverse instances of reduction is that either the role of relations in the whole (or composite) is ignored or a simplified (or minimalist) understanding of the relations is adopted. Such simplified understandings serve a variety of purposes. Take, for example, a piano reduction of the score of a symphony or an opera. These enable the music to be heard in a reduced form in circumstances where no orchestra is available, e.g. in the early stages of rehearsals for an opera performance. Similarly, simplified arrangements of famous piano pieces are produced to enable beginning pianists to have some experience of these pieces. In both of these cases, the purpose of the reduction is a pragmatic decision that in certain circumstances, a thinner version of the musical score is preferable to the piece remaining inaccessible. Equally, there is an intent that these situations are but a prelude to later engagement with the pieces in their full-blown relational complexity. Similar considerations perhaps apply to reductions in other modalities, such as condensing or abridging books or plays. A further point that is suggested by these examples is that reduction is very often a matter of degree or level appropriate to the circumstances. For instance, an arrangement of a symphony for solo piano would likely be more reductive than an arrangement for piano four hands. Earlier (in Chap. 4), the concept of competence was discussed at length. Narrow understandings of competence were distinguished from more holistic conceptions. Understanding an occupation as a mere set of discrete skills is certainly an example of major complexity reduction! We argue that this is an instance of complexity being reduced to such an extent that it renders the resulting model of occupational performance overly simplistic and, therefore, less than useful for educational and training purposes. Somewhat different purposes are evident in the reductive strategies employed in science. Here, there is clear recognition that the complexity of the world is too great for its full extent to be taken into account all at once. One reason for this is that the mathematics would be far too complicated for an initial ‘all or nothing’

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approach. Hence, theories and models that deliberately simplify are developed, tested and refined till their predictive power closely approximates reality. Modelling is reductive in that it involves taking account of limited, but key, aspects of natural or controlled systems. The value of the model as a conceptual tool for understanding the particular system becomes a matter of empirical investigation (see, e.g. Mikulecky 2001). These deliberate simplifications ignore the roles of particular relations and interactions; for example, ‘ideal’ gases are assumed to have negligible interactions between the gas molecules; surfaces are assumed to exert negligible friction on moving bodies and so on. Statistical modelling is a further reductive strategy that provides quantitative data on many and diverse phenomena. Over the last few centuries, statistical tools such as surveys, budgets, maps, accounts and so on, have become essential underpinnings of bureaucratic administration, and hence of the continuation of the nation state. Even social life in general can be viewed plausibly as a site of complexity reduction. Broad social norms relating to how humans interact and communicate bring a semblance of order and even routine to situations that could potentially be extremely complex. Likewise, particular organisations, institutions, communities and the like engage in their own distinctive forms of complexity reduction shaped by their own particular aims and purposes. In these cases, the given entity develops its ethos and identity, as well as particular ways of doing things, all in the service of reducing complexity so as to facilitate timely achievement of the entity’s aims and purposes. Of course, in a changing world, the aims and purposes are very likely to evolve, so the nature of the complexity reduction should not be static. As the preceding discussion suggests, there are multiple ways by which complexity can be reduced and multiple reasons for doing so. Overall, the driving force for complexity reduction is to facilitate ease of thought or action. We maintain that it is typical of all forms of complexity reduction that they involve relations being downplayed or ignored. Whilst complexity reduction strategies may not be overtly nominalist, they do encourage scepticism about the significance of relations in the overall furniture of the world. The downplaying of the significance of relations is reflected in the intellectual frameworks that have dominated both the natural and the social sciences. Stemming from Descartes and Newton, our conceptual frameworks favour an ontology of particulars whether particles, substances, things or entities. Such particulars become the basic unit of inquiry within a given field or discipline, with relations between the particulars taking a subordinate role in inquiry. As Emirbayer has noted, within such substantialist ontology [s]ystematic analysis is to begin with … self-subsistent entities, which come ‘pre-formed’, and only then to consider the dynamic flows in which they subsequently involve themselves. (1997: 282–283)

Emirbayer illustrates the dominance of the substantialist perspective in Western thought with the statement that ‘the wind is blowing’. Here, the implication is that the wind is, first, a discrete particular, which only secondly might engage in the process of blowing.

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We can conclude then that the ontological assumptions that accompany our complexity reductions often go unnoticed and unacknowledged. The presuppositions that structure our conceptual frameworks themselves need to be the subject of searching inquiry. By treating relations reductively whilst focusing on particulars, our dominant conceptual frameworks are less open to the process-oriented, generative aspects of human functioning, aspects that are marked by more relational qualities. For instance, when it comes to theorising meaning, the dominant particularist frameworks have led to many attempts to understand meaning as determinate. None of these attempts has proved to be widely accepted. However, Malpas (2002) has argued, in our view convincingly, that meaning is inescapably relational. For Malpas, meaning is always context-dependent. It emerges from the ‘object of presentation–context’ relationship. Hence, meaning can never be fully determinate since it is always ‘in the making’. There are many other broad facets of complexity thinking that merit our attention. For instance, complexity thinking suggests the necessary incompleteness of all theorising. Apart from the things that we know that we do not understand, it implies that there are other gaps in our knowledge of which we are not even aware—‘unknown unknowns’ (see, e.g. Cilliers 2001, 2013). It follows that since all theorising is necessarily incomplete, complexity thinking offers but one perspective. Rather than being a replacement for other theories, complexity thinking is a helpful adjunct to our theorisation of social phenomena. In a world of rapid change, where speed is promoted as a virtue, Cilliers (2006) maintains that a complexity thinking perspective actually recommends that we adopt a certain slowness in our theorising. Perhaps the main idea from this introductory section that needs to be stressed is that, from a complexity perspective, the relations between entities, rather than the entities alone, assume central ontological salience. This should not be interpreted as maintaining that entities (or particulars) are irrelevant. However, in complexity thinking, it is the processes of the relations between entities that are central. The difference is that here, structure is regarded as being emergent from these processes of the relations, rather than being thought of a mere assemblage of entities, as it is from substantialist perspectives. We turn now to further elaboration of key concepts in complexity thinking.

7.2 The Different Kinds of Complex Systems As we have seen, complex systems need to be understood by contrasting them with simple systems. The differences between complex and simple systems noted in the previous section can be amplified as follows. A simple system is one whose state can be definitively specified. This means that it ‘can be taken apart into its bits and reassembled from those bits’ or more formally, ‘it can be described by a mathematical system founded on linearity’ (Byrne and Callaghan 2014: 4). Rather than being complex, such a simple system is merely complicated. A state of the art submarine is an example of a complicated yet simple system. In contrast, a complex system is one that cannot be taken apart and reassembled in this way. That is, a complex

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system is a system that ‘can not be analysed and integrated either in reality or in mathematical representation’ (Byrne and Callaghan 2014: 4). In plainer language, this is so because in a complex system ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ (although, as we will see, there is more to it than this). Whereas the operation of simple systems can be described by linear mathematics, complex systems are nonlinear. The linearity of simple systems means that from knowledge of the initial parameters of such a system, we can describe how the state of the system will change in response to changes in the values of the initial parameters. This is not so for complex systems. In such systems, changes can be ‘disproportionate to the changes in the causal element(s)’ (Byrne and Callaghan 2014: 18). Nicolis elaborates this crucial difference as follows: In a linear system the ultimate effect of the combined action of two different causes is merely the superposition of the effects of each cause taken individually. But in a nonlinear system adding two elementary actions to one another can induce dramatic new effects reflecting the onset of cooperativity between the constituent elements. This can give rise to unexpected structures and events whose properties can be quite different from those of underlying elementary laws … Nonlinear science is, therefore, the science of evolution and complexity. (1995: 1–2)

Thus, the nonlinear relationships within complex systems mean that there can be changes in the effects that are disproportionate to changes in the causal elements. In this respect, the concept of the bifurcation point is important in mathematical descriptions of nonlinear systems. Prior to reaching the bifurcation point, effects remain proportionate to changes. The bifurcation point is where future trajectories of the complex system diverge markedly as the values of the input parameters continue to change. The key point is that there are no exact mathematical means of capturing nonlinearity. At best we have a kind of experimental, pragmatic mathematics that can provide approximate descriptions of the trajectories of nonlinear complex systems. It should be noted that the phenomenon of nonlinear complex systems does not mean that ‘law-focused Newtonian science is wrong but rather that it is limited in its rightness’ (Byrne and Callaghan 2014: 18). It works well for some aspects of reality, but not for the whole of reality (Quantum physics is another challenge to the supposed universal applicability of Newtonian science). There is a strong connection between the nonlinearity of complex systems and emergence occurring within such systems. This has both ontological and epistemological significance. The ontological significance is that our catalogue of ‘what there is’ needs to include the emergent properties that characterise complex systems. Such properties are not reducible to the properties of the individual components of the complex system. The epistemological significance is that any adequate understanding of reality needs to include an account of these emergent properties that characterise complex systems. Byrne and Callaghan aptly capture the onto-epistemological character of complexity thinking with the following summary description:

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[It is] a framework for understanding which asserts the ontological position that much of the world and most of the social world consists of complex systems and if we want to understand it we have to understand it in those terms. (2014: 8)

Complex systems, as stressed already, are systems of relations. Instead of being externally controlled, complex systems feature internally generated processes, that is, self-organisation, in relation to an attractor. As well, complex systems feature a capacity for emergence, that is, they can produce emergent phenomena. In addition, complex systems are typically open systems, since they are open to material or information exchange with their environment. The terms in italics in this paragraph are all key concepts in the characterisation of complex systems. These and some other important concepts will be considered in detail shortly. But before that, it needs to be established that there are, in fact, different kinds of complex systems.

7.2.1 Restricted Complexity Morin’s (2007) influential distinction between ‘restricted complexity’ and ‘general complexity’ has already been mentioned. Byrne (2005) had earlier made essentially the same distinction under the rubric of ‘simple and complex’ complexity. Morin’s distinction is likewise endorsed by writers such as Cilliers (e.g. 2010, 2013; Preiser and Cilliers 2010) and Lancaster (2012, 2013), who employ the terms ‘reductive complexity’ and ‘non-reductive complexity’ for essentially the same distinction. Using Morin’s terminology, we will consider the significant differences between restricted and general complexity. Restricted complexity refers to the complexity that is ‘the emergent product of interaction amongst simple agents’, that is, the kind of complexity that ‘emerges from rule-based interactions amongst simple elements’ (Byrne and Callaghan 2014: 5). It has been closely investigated using agent-based modelling. This involves a type of modelling that uses computational models to simulate the actions and interactions of autonomous agents, both with each other and with their environment. Examples of autonomous agents are cells, people, groups and organisations. However, as Morin observes, though agent-based modelling may have led to ‘important advances in formalisation, in the possibilities of modelling’, it is firmly anchored in the ‘epistemology of classical science’ (Morin 2007: 10). That is, restricted complexity adheres as much as possible to three fundamental explanatory principles of classical science outlined at the start of this chapter. As we noted, Morin maintains that these three explanatory principles have served to mask the significance of complexity. In particular, restricted complexity retains the principle of reduction as is suggested by the focus on rule-based interactions amongst simple elements. Thus, for restricted complexity, the micro-level site tends to be at the physical level. Thus, key features of the Newtonian science framework are preserved. However, it is acknowledged that restricted complexity arises from nonlinear relational interactions. The emergents from the processes of these nonlinear relational interactions are diverse. They

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range from relational patterns to apparent regularities. Patterns or networks can be expressed in algorithms that can be employed to simulate or model the complex processes. Apparent regularities can be tested and refined to establish their law-like potential. In all cases, the aim is to develop greater understanding of the nature of the emergents from these cases of restricted complexity. This maintenance of strong ties between restricted complexity and the classic Newtonian framework of science carries other baggage. It ensures that there remains a focus on particulars (substances) with relations taking a back seat. Here is a typical example of a statement of restricted complexity that exemplifies this point: Complexity focuses on what new phenomena can emerge from a collection of relatively simple components … simple bits interacting in a simple way may lead to a rich variety of realistic outcomes – and that is the essence of complexity. (Johnson quoted in Byrne and Callaghan 2014: 40) (See Byrne and Callaghan for further examples.)

Sand dunes provide a paradigm instance of ‘simple components interacting simply’. Simple relations between multiple grains of sand powered by environmental forces over time create a sand dune. Reflecting its origin in mathematics and the natural sciences, together with the belief that restricted complexity was the only kind of complexity, it was unsurprising that this was the understanding of complexity that was first applied to the social and human sciences. However, this reductive form of complexity turns out to have limited applicability within these arenas. Its usefulness is confined to more reductive areas of inquiry where individual persons can be treated as statistical variables. Examples of such applications are: traffic flows; voting behaviour and patterns of disease, infirmity or infection across different localities. That is, restricted complexity provides broadbrush understandings of organisational, institutional or population-based aspects of social functioning, in circumstances where neither humans as distinct individuals nor the nature of the specific interpersonal relations between individuals are relevant to the particular focus of the inquiry. But note that the full complexity inherent in these situations has been reduced to provide a statistical analysis or representation. This employment of restricted complexity results in useful information for tasks such as improving traffic flows, redrawing electoral boundaries or dealing with a pandemic. However, if complexity was to be limited to restricted complexity, it would have limited applicability to the social and human sciences. To further understand the possibilities for applying complexity thinking to the social and human sciences, we need to consider another kind of complexity—general complexity.

7.2.2 General Complexity As already noted above, complexity thinking comprises an onto-epistemological framework. It places relations firmly in the fore of considerations about ontology. In so doing, it also entails what Morin (2007: 10) calls ‘an epistemological rethinking,

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… bearing on the organisation of knowledge itself’. Morin elaborates on this by contrasting the respective ‘paradigms’ of classical science and of complexity thinking. According to Morin, the knowledge paradigm of classical science is one of simplification regulated by ‘a principle of reduction and a principle of disjunction’ that are applied to any knowledge. On the other hand, the knowledge paradigm of complexity features ‘a principle of distinction and a principle of conjunction’ (2007: 10). Morin characterises this complexity paradigm as follows: In opposition to reduction, [generalized] complexity requires that one tries to comprehend the relations between the whole and the parts. The knowledge of the parts is not enough, the knowledge of the whole as a whole is not enough, if one ignores its parts; one is thus brought to make a come and go in loop to gather the knowledge of the whole and its parts. Thus, the principle of reduction is substituted by a principle that conceives the relation of whole-part mutual implication. (Morin 2007: 10)

Early in this chapter, we saw that Morin identified three fundamental explanatory principles of classical science. Restricted complexity, which has been influential in mathematics and science, seeks to remain as faithful as possible to these three principles. According to Morin, general complexity, on the other hand, substitutes three contrasting principles. As the quotation in the previous paragraph attests, the principle of reduction is replaced by a principle of whole-part mutual implication. Likewise, the principle of disjunction is replaced by a principle of conjunction—whilst recognising the distinctions between things, we also need to take proper account of the relations between them (Morin 2007: 11). Finally, for the principle of determinism, Morin substitutes a ‘principle that conceives a relation between order, disorder and organisation’ (2007: 11). He goes on to elaborate this principle using the key terms system, emergence and organisation and the relationships between them. These terms and their relationships will be discussed shortly under the heading of ‘Key Concepts and Ideas in Complexity Thinking’. Byrne and Callaghan strongly endorse the vital significance of general complexity for the social and human sciences: [A]ny general complexity social science has to get beyond micro-determined emergence. It has to allow for structures with causal powers and it has to address human agency as capable of transcending narrow rules for behavior. (2014: 56)

In taking account of the causal powers of social structures as well as the role of human agency, Byrne and Callaghan go well beyond the rule-based interactions amongst simple elements that characterise agent-based modelling and other typical examples of restricted complexity (see also Cilliers 2000, 2001, 2013). Even when human agency is normatively governed, it is characteristically richer than mere rule following or rigid adherence to standard procedures. As Winch notes: in many if not most cases, the normative structure of an activity is not disclosed explicitly or discursively through the promulgation of rules but implicitly and sometimes non-discursively through observation of the patterning of the activity itself and of the normative activities that underpin it. (2010: 81)

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In fact, once human activities become even moderately complicated, mechanical rule following is not a sound strategy. Taylor draws attention to the ‘suspense and uncertainty’ of human practices, which he attributes to: • ‘the asymmetrical time of action’, which refers to the common need to act irreversibly in a situation of uncertainty; • the fact that rules do not apply themselves, but require finely tuned judgement to work out what they mean in the given particular situation; • the way in which practice requires ‘continual interpretation and reinterpretation of what the rule really means’ (1995: 177ff.). We strongly endorse these conclusions, including the central role that they posit for judgement, as the remainder of this book will demonstrate. As many writers on complexity thinking stress, individual humans are themselves complex systems (see, e.g. Cilliers 1998, 2006; Byrne and Callaghan 2014: 41; Lancaster 2012, 2013). They are more complex in every way than the rule following agent in the agent-based simulations that exemplify restricted complexity. They have the power of agency both individually and collectively. By positing collective agency, Byrne and Callaghan are maintaining that ‘collectivities have a reality beyond the individuals who constitute them’ (2014: 41). Applications of this idea will be central to later chapters of this book. It opens up the important notion of ‘the ontological reality of nested and interpenetrating complex social systems beyond individuals, although of course with individuals as elements in those systems’ (Byrne and Callaghan 2014: 41). Like Cilliers (2001), Reed and Harvey (1992), Byrne and Callaghan view social systems and entities as both nested and interpenetrating with causal powers running in all directions (2014: 45). Byrne and Callaghan summarise this idea as follows: [T]here is a ‘social’ at whatever level from the smallest collective assemblage of human beings to the level of the world system as a whole. The social we see as emergent but not simply as emergent from individual interactions. There is a reality within which all the entities operate, interpenetrate, and mutually and reflexively express causal powers. Of course there is not one social but many, themselves interpenetrating, but we have to recognize in a Durkhemian mode that we exist within a social world and that all the entities which are social exist also within that world. (2014: 45)

Apart from the important distinction between restricted complexity and general complexity, there are various other specific versions of complexity (for a detailed account, see Byrne and Callaghan 2014, Chap. 2). Thus, the field of complexity remains one of vigorous debate. As Cilliers succinctly observes, ‘the ‘discipline’ of complexity is a house divided’ (2010: 41). It is not the aim of the present book to reconcile these ongoing debates within the field of complexity. Rather our aim is to highlight and draw upon significant aspects of these ongoing developments within complexity to demonstrate that they offer significant new insights on the issues raised in Part I of this book. In doing so, of course, we will of necessity adopt a stance on certain contentious issues. In such instances, we will seek support from the views of prominent contributors to complexity thinking.

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Having considered some major characteristic features of complex systems, we turn now to a consideration of some central concepts and ideas that will be pivotal in deepening our understanding of these systems.

7.3 Key Concepts and Ideas in Complexity Thinking As stated previously, complex systems are systems of relations. Rather than being externally controlled, complex systems feature internally generated processes, that is, self-organisation, in relation to an attractor. As well, complex systems feature a capacity for emergence, that is, they can produce emergent phenomena. In addition, as noted earlier in this chapter, complex systems are typically open systems, since they are open to material or information exchange with their environment. The italicised terms in this paragraph and other key concepts in the characterisation of complex systems will now be considered. The following discussion draws upon authors such as Goldstein (1999), Lancaster (2012, 2013), and Cilliers (e.g. 1998, 2000, 2001, 2013). Complex systems have been characterised by the following crucial concepts and ideas.

7.3.1 The Definitive Role of Relations in Complex Systems As stressed already, complexity involves a shift of focus from particulars, that is, things that may be parties to relationships, to the relationships themselves. Complex systems are, essentially, systems of relations. Complexity arises from relations within systems, which over time are processes of relations. Complex systems are constituted by the emerging patterns of the relations that characterise their processes (Cilliers 1998, 2000). Complexity addresses the relations between the parts, between the parts and the whole, and between the whole and the system’s environment. Treating relations in this way allows function or functionality rather than substance, to be the primary object of inquiry (see, e.g. Lancaster 2012: 123; 2013: 1271). Thus, complexity thinking is able to deal innovatively and informatively with the ten characteristic features of complex systems identified by Cilliers (1998: 2–5), characteristics that prove elusive when reality is conceived in terms of substances and their properties. Notable features of these complex systems include: their inherent relationality; their evolution over time such that their past is co-responsible for their present state though not in a deterministic way and the changing patterns of their interacting relations over time. The interactions of multiple nonlinear relations result in emergent qualities or structures. As well, the relations that are definitive of complex systems are themselves nonlinear; they are recursive in that they can respond to feedback. All of this contrasts with traditional substantialist thinking which reduces or downplays relations in favour of a focus on particulars.

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Whilst linear relations are logically reversible, can be read backwards or forwards, remain constant over time, and, at least in principle, are amenable to algorithmic formulation, the nonlinear relations of complexity are very different. Time plays a significant part in complexity. Complex systems are susceptible to change; their system output is never fully determinate and system feedback can recursively influence the ongoing relational processes of the system. Though sensitive to initial conditions, changes in system input can produce unpredictable effects. Complex systems have both an intrinsic instability (feedback can amplify sensitivity to their context or environment) and intrinsic stability (feedback can drive self-correction) (Lewis 2000). Thus, small changes may result in very large effects on the system. But, equally, large changes may be cushioned, resulting in minimal effects. Because the nature of a complex system’s context sensitivity in any given case is determined by constraints within that system, the resulting outcomes cannot be predicted with any exactness. So, for instance, the particular effects of a therapist’s intervention with her clients cannot be specified in advance, although she can predict that the effects will not be arbitrary and, based on experience, she will have some understanding of the likely range of the effects. Thus, complexity thinking also raises the important issue of the inherent limits to knowing in any particular situation, something that traditional thought usually ignores by assuming that knowledge can be accumulated indefinitely. A fuller understanding of complexity thinking presupposes an acknowledgement of the crucial fact that there are qualitatively different kinds of relations. Already linear and nonlinear relations have been distinguished. But there are still further distinctions between different kinds of relations that are important for the purposes of this book. These further distinctions between kinds of relations will be vital for understanding the complex systems of human social processes. As discussed above, as living human organisms, we already reduce complexity in various ways as we seek to understand the world about us. Since relations are centrally significant for complexity, it will be important to be clear, not only about the kinds of relations that feature in a complex system, but also the effects of our reductive moves on the underlying kinds of relations that are taken into account. It seems that some complexity reduction is an inescapable starting point for any conceptual work, but both its form and extent will have significant ontological and epistemological implications. Yet in much writing on complexity, the significance of any reductive moves is ignored as the relations involved are assumed to be of the Newtonian kind associated with mathematics and logic. We maintain that a lessreductive conceptualisation of such relations is required if we are to better understand human practices from a complexity thinking perspective (see Lancaster 2012, 2013). In order to achieve a less-reductive conceptualisation of the relations implicated in human practices, we turn to the work of John Dewey and his colleague Arthur Bentley (Dewey and Bentley 1949/1989). Lancaster (2012, 2013) proposes that their work serves to highlight important differences between the Newtonian relations that characterise logical and mathematical relations and the relationships that characterise the complex relations between living organisms. In the Dewey and Bentley

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terminology, it is a contrast between inter-action and trans-action. We endorse Lancaster’s estimation of the significance of the Dewey–Bentley account of relations for complexity thinking. The following summary of their work and its implications is based on her analysis. Even in his early work, Dewey adopted a relational approach to the understanding of human life and processes. He viewed living organisms as being engaged in a process of co-ordination with their environment, in which the organism and its environment were in a reciprocal relationship that constituted a whole. For Dewey, the distinction between an organism and its environment is not a natural given. Rather, it results from the human activity of making distinctions in the process of conceptualising and re-conceptualising subjective experience (Garrison 2001; Garrison and Watson 2005). Organism and environment can neither be merged to make a whole entity with no internal distinctions nor can they be separated for purposes of individual consideration, without recognising that such moves are the result of human conceptual processes. Inevitably, such conceptual processes are accompanied by some loss of complexity. The vital significance of these organism–environment relations is reflected in the Dewey and Bentley account of the differing kinds of relations involved in the differing ways that humans see the world. The differing perspectives reflect differing degrees of relational reduction. Dewey and Bentley named the differing kinds of relations self-action, inter-action and trans-action. Self-action is the most reductive kind of relation as things are viewed as ‘acting under their own powers’ (Dewey and Bentley 1949/1989: 101–102). Instances of self-action include concepts like ‘individual will’ or ‘soul’ (Garrison 2001), or social groups or processes, such as a social movement, that seemingly function under their own power with no apparent external connections (Emirbayer 1997). This makes the relations of self-action inaccessible to the investigator. If no observation of them, or engagement with them, is possible, they become irrelevant to understanding. In effect, they become a self-contained black-box. For Dewey and Bentley, a somewhat less-reductive kind of relation is inter-action. Here, ‘thing is balanced against thing in causal interconnection’ (Dewey and Bentley 1949/1989: 101–102). They regard inter-actional relations as being important in specific areas of human inquiry, such as scientific research, where the focus is on ‘provisionally separated segments of inquiry … for convenience of study’ (Dewey and Bentley 1949/1989: 103). In these cases, relations are able to be observed, but they are still somewhat reductive in nature, since their value or meaning is fixed or inherent. These relations are independent of context and remain unaltered for the duration of the process in which they are involved. If the focus is squarely on the entities that are related, a tendency can arise to treat the inter-actional relations much like entities themselves: ‘It should be fairly well evident that when ‘things’ are too sharply crystallised as ‘elements’, then certain leftovers, namely ‘relations’, present themselves as additional ‘things” (Dewey and Bentley 1989: 100–102 fn.). Inter-actional relations are the relations of logic, mathematics and computation of Newtonian frameworks. Common examples include: the relation between a marble

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and a glass jar that contains it (Garrison 2001); between building blocks in a wall (Hager 1996); between grains of sand in a sand dune or between cars in a traffic jam. Dewey and Bentley propose that trans-action is the least reductive kind of relation. The main feature of a trans-actional relation is that both the relation itself and the entities related by it are altered by their participation in the relation. For Dewey and Bentley, a trans-actional relational situation is one where systems of description and naming are employed to deal with aspects and phases of action, without attribution to independent ‘elements’ or other presumptively detachable or independent ‘entities’ … and without isolation of presumptively detachable ‘relations’. (Dewey and Bentley 1949/1989: 101)

In such cases, both the relation, and the parties to it, are influenced by, or created by, their participation in it. The parties to the relation, and the relation itself, cannot be separated from one other without some loss of meaning. All elements are changed by their participation. Nor is the relation itself static, but rather it evolves through the process of engagement. Lancaster (2012: 124; 2013: 1271) proposes the ‘yin-yang’ symbol of Chinese philosophy as a visual representation of this concept. Yin and yang are both irreducibly distinct from, and yet complementary to, each other. They co-create each other; neither can be meaningfully separated from the other nor from the relation between them, so that together what they represent is a holistic creation that is not so much more than, but rather other than, any sum of the two of them. We can conclude that the Dewey and Bentley trans-actional view of relations is sufficiently non-reductive to exclude a sharp distinction between relations and the entities that they relate. Thus, trans-actional relations are less determinate than inter-actional relations. They represent processes that have the capacity to change or create the very entities that are related, whilst the relations themselves are changed or created by the process, as they unfold over the time of their existence. Lancaster (2012: 123; 2013: 1273) suggests as an example a hawk and a dove becoming predator and prey, respectively. It involves a trans-actional relationship with each other, the outcome of which is indeterminate and cannot be known one way or the other, until the relationship finishes. Trans-actional relations appear to be exemplars of living relations. It is true that living organisms often relate instrumentally to their environment, including sometimes with each other. Such instrumental ways of relating are best viewed as Dewey–Bentley inter-actions. However, Dewey–Bentley trans-actions exemplify a function that is limited to living organisms—the potential for generativity or creativity, for the production of radical novelty. In agreement with Lancaster (2012, 2013), we view trans-actional relations as exemplars of the living, generative aspects of the relations of consciousness, interpersonal interacting and social functioning. For the sake of clarity, hereafter we will use terms such as ‘interaction’ or ‘relational interaction’ to refer to relational processes in general. That is, ‘relational interactions’ will be applied in contexts where it is not important to distinguish Dewey–Bentley interactions from trans-actions. In doing so, we are following common practice within the complexity thinking literature by key writers such as Byrne and Callaghan, Cilliers and Bedau. In those cases where we are specifically referring to a particular

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type of Dewey–Bentley relation, the context will make this clear; for example, for Dewey–Bentley trans-actions, we will use terms such as ‘transaction’ or ‘relational transactions’. Relations are central to productive complexity thinking and, courtesy of Dewey and Bentley, we have several ways to understand the different relations involved in the various kinds of complexity, particularly restricted complexity and general complexity, as outlined above.

7.3.2 Open and Closed Systems and Far from Equilibrium States Systems can be isolated, closed or open. Isolated systems exchange neither energy nor matter with their environment; closed systems exchange only energy; open systems exchange both energy and matter (Byrne and Callaghan 2014: 25–26). As well, living systems, especially humans, characteristically exchange information with their environment. This results in such systems being adaptive in that they are able to change as a result of experience. These concepts enable us to characterise complex systems. As Cilliers puts it, ‘complex systems are open systems which constantly interact with their environment in rich ways’ (2008: 31), that is, they constantly exchange information, energy and matter with their environment. Because complex systems are open systems, ‘we need to understand the system’s complete environment before we can understand the system, and, of course, the environment is complex in itself’ (Preiser and Cilliers 2010: 268–269). In order to do this, we need to reduce the complexity of the system by making a model of it (There will be more on this shortly). As Byrne and Callaghan (2014: 25) state, systems can be equilibric, close to equilibric or far from equilibric. Equilibric systems stay as they are, whilst close to equilibric systems typically move back towards equilibrium. However, far from equilibric systems, which include complex systems, can change rapidly. At the macro-level, new properties or qualities emerge from the micro-level relations.

7.3.3 Emergence Emergence is one of the most central concepts in complexity thinking. However, as we will see, there is more than one type of emergence. As well, there is a wide variety of possible emergents, such as ‘properties, objects, behaviour, phenomena, laws, whole systems’ and more (Bedau 2002: 7). Bedau highlights the somewhat contentious nature of the concept of emergence by elucidating its ‘twin hallmarks’ as follows:

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All emergence involves macro-level phenomena that (1) arise from and depend on some more basic, micro-level phenomena, and yet (2) are simultaneously autonomous from that micro-level base on which they depend. (2010: 47)

As Bedau points out, various understandings of ‘depend on’ and ‘autonomous from’ will lead to different concepts of emergence. Indeed, on some interpretations of these key concepts, the twin hallmarks might well appear at first sight to contradict one another. Bedau attributes both the fascination and the controversy that have surrounded the topic of emergence to this plurality of interpretations. Chalmers agrees that plural interpretations of emergence have been a problem: The term ‘emergence’ often causes confusion in science and philosophy, as it is used to express at least two quite different concepts … strong emergence and weak emergence. (2006: 1)

Bedau agrees with Chalmers that strong emergence and weak emergence constitute two major, but quite different, kinds of emergence. However, he also identifies within each a variety of possible understandings according to different interpretations of ‘depend on’ and ‘autonomous from’. In addition, Bedau specifies a third kind of emergence, which he calls nominal emergence. In proposing three distinct kinds of emergence, Bedau stresses that they ‘are not narrow definitions but broad conceptions each of which contains many different instances’ (2002: 8). Nor does he claim that this classification is exhaustive. However, he does maintain that each of these kinds of emergence is marked by a distinctive interpretation of the twin hallmarks, as will be explained below. There is a range of other accounts of emergence. Byrne and Callaghan, whose understanding of complexity in the social sciences we have strongly endorsed, discuss five assorted accounts (2014: 20–24) (Some other prominent accounts include Bedau and Humphries 2008; Cilliers 1998, 2000; Osberg and Biesta 2007.). Most of these have sufficient overlap with the Chalmers and Bedau accounts that further detailed consideration of them will not advance the main arguments of this section. Some significant instances of disagreement with Chalmers and Bedau will be taken up in later discussion. Accordingly, we will now outline main features of the three kinds of emergence already noted, drawing primarily on the work of both Bedau and Chalmers. Nominal Emergence Nominal emergence involves an entity having a macro-level property that cannot be possessed by the micro-constituents of the entity. A common example is the liquidity of water. In this case, ‘the liquid properties emerge from relations amongst molecules and are not properties of molecules in isolation’ (Byrne and Callaghan 2014: 23). Deacon calls such nominal emergence ‘first order or supervenient emergence’ and characterises it as ‘higher order properties of an aggregate, such as statistically or stochastically determined ensemble behaviours’ (Deacon 2007: 97). Bedau (2002: 9) views nominal emergence as the ‘simplest and barest notion of an emergent property’. In principle, and often in practice, nominally emergent properties such as the liquidity of water are fully explicable from known specifications of the situation.

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In fact, the characteristic feature of nominal emergence, that is, an entity having a macro-level property that cannot be possessed by the micro-constituents of the entity, is shared by all three kinds of emergence. However, weak and strong emergence are more circumscribed phenomena, since as well as having this common feature, they need to meet additional stringent requirements. As might be expected, nominal emergence meets Bedau’s ‘twin hallmarks’. Macro-level phenomena, such as the liquidity of water, arise from and depend on some more basic micro-level phenomena (the conjunction of very large numbers of water molecules). Yet simultaneously, the property of liquidity at the macro-level is autonomous from the micro-level base in that none of the micro-level entities themselves can share it. Strong Emergence According to Chalmers, a high-level phenomenon is strongly emergent with respect to a low-level domain when the high-level phenomenon arises from the low-level domain, but truths concerning that phenomenon are not deducible even in principle from truths in the low-level domain. (2006: 1)

Thus, for Chalmers (2006: 4), ‘strongly emergent phenomena’ are ‘systematically determined by low-level facts without being deducible from those facts. In philosophical language, they are naturally, but not logically, supervenient on low-level facts’. Further, the strongly emergent high-level phenomena exert ‘downward causation’ on the low-level domain, whilst the impact of this high-level downward causation ‘on low-level processes is not deducible even in principle from initial conditions and low-level laws’ (Chalmers 2006: 6). Bedau (2002: 10; 2010: 50) defines strong emergence (‘the most stringent conception of emergence’) as follows: In addition to the entity in question having a macro-level property that cannot be possessed by its micro-constituents, the entity must also have properties that ‘are supervenient properties with irreducible causal powers’. Bedau adds that these irreducible macro-causal powers have effects at both macro- and micro-levels. The macro-to-micro effects are called ‘downward causation’ (Bedau 2002: 10; Bedau 2010: 50; Mitchell 2009: 26). Both of these accounts of strong emergence meet Bedau’s twin hallmarks since the emergent macro-level properties are supervenient on the underlying micro-level properties, whilst the irreducible causal power of the emergent macro-level properties explains how they are autonomous from the micro-level base on which they depend. Chalmers regards the emergence of consciousness as the only current clear candidate for strong emergence. Consciousness supervenes on the physical domain in that, though having its own distinctive qualities, it nevertheless depends on physical structures that themselves have purely physical qualities. In addition, consciousness can exert downward causal efficacy on the physical domain. As Chalmers (2006: 6) notes, a consequence of consciousness meeting these twin hallmarks is that ‘lowlevel laws will be incomplete as a guide to both the low-level and the high-level evolution of processes in the world’.

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Though strong emergence is, at best, rare, it ‘is the notion of emergence that is most common in philosophical discussions of emergence’ (Chalmers 2006: 1). This is because for philosophers, strongly emergent properties or causal powers constitute brute facts. As Bedau expresses it, the very notion of strongly emergent causal powers is problematic … By definition, such causal powers cannot be explained in terms of the aggregation of the micro-level potentialities; they are primitive or “brute” natural powers that arise inexplicably with the existence of certain macro-level entities. This contravenes “causal fundamentalism” – the idea that macro-causal powers supervene on and are determined by micro-causal powers … (2010: 50–51)

In philosophy, there is an unwelcome absoluteness about brute facts. A brute fact is its own explanation. Instead of being explained through other facts, it is a starting point for explanation. It has a fundamental or underlying role in a series of explanations. We normally cannot give a full account why the fact should be what it is, but must accept it without explanation. The first principles of systems of thought generally possess such a status. Brute facts correspond to causa sui or necessary existence in traditional metaphysics and are ultimately inexplicable. Their explanation leaves no role for science or the laws of physics. This is why philosophers find them suspect (see, e.g. Bedau 2010: 51). Osberg and Biesta (2007) differ from the widely held view that strong emergence is, at best, very rare. Drawing on their interpretation of Prigogine’s work (Prigogine 1997; Prigogine and Stengers 1984), they maintain that since determinism is false, all emergence must be strong emergence. By determinism, they mean that ‘given one set of circumstances there is only one logical outcome’ (Osberg and Biesta 2007: 34). But if, as they think that Prigogine has shown, reality is indeterminate, and then all emergence must be strong emergence. There are several problems with this conclusion. First, the determinism/indeterminism dichotomy is a very blunt instrument for dealing with what is a set of very nuanced and complicated issues. There are many and contested understandings of both determinism and indeterminism. Underlying this is the fact that our understanding of causation is partial at best. It remains a hotly contested domain of inquiry. As Byrne and Callaghan perceptively observe: there is a real difference between recognizing that our knowledge, and in particular our knowledge in relation to causation, is generally incomplete – we don’t know enough, and the assertion that it can never be complete because of some fundamental and random indeterminacy in reality as a whole. (Byrne and Callaghan 2014: 20)

It is clear that the Osberg and Biesta argument mistakenly elevates an epistemic limitation into an ontological one. This leaves weak emergence as the kind of emergence that is of most interest for the concerns of this book. We turn now to its specification. Weak Emergence According to Bedau (2002: 11–12), weak emergence is an intermediate form of emergence. Whilst it involves more than does nominal emergence, it also involves less than strong emergence. For Bedau, weak emergence

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refers to the aggregate global behavior of certain systems. The system’s global behavior derives just from the operation of micro-level processes, but the micro-level interactions are interwoven in such a complicated network that the global behavior has no simple explanation. (2002: 11–12)

Crucially, for Bedau (2002: 12), weak emergence is ‘a proper subset of nominal emergence’. That is, a situation might well involve both weak and nominal emergence simultaneously (This point will be taken up in a later chapter). Chalmers defines weak emergence somewhat differently, but is still in broad agreement with Bedau. For Chalmers: a high-level phenomenon is weakly emergent with respect to a low-level domain when the high-level phenomenon arises from the low-level domain, but truths concerning that phenomenon are unexpected given the principles governing the low-level domain. (2006: 1)

For both Bedau and Chalmers, weak emergence is very common. It is the idea of emergence that is most common in recent scientific discussions of emergence and is the notion that is typically invoked by proponents of emergence in complex systems theory. According to Chalmers (2006: 2), ‘it often happens that a high-level phenomenon is unexpected given principles of a low-level domain, but is nevertheless deducible in principle from truths concerning that domain’. He illustrates this with the example of the emergence of high-level patterns in cellular automata—‘a paradigm of emergence in recent complex systems theory’. In these cases, Chalmers argues, the weakly emergent phenomenon ‘is straightforwardly deducible from the rules (and initial conditions)’. He also admits that to deduce the facts about such weak emergents ‘may require a fair amount of calculation, which is why their formation was not obvious to start with. Nevertheless, upon examination, these high-level facts are a straightforward consequence of low-level facts’ (Chalmers 2006: 2). However, in many cases of weak emergence, deducing the emergent causal powers from the micro-level information is a far from straightforward matter. Bedau (2002: 12) quotes Simon (1996) on this: ‘given the properties of the parts and the laws of their interactions, it is not a trivial matter to infer the properties of the whole’. Stressing that derivability is often challenging, Bedau comments further: Weak emergence attributes the apparent underivability of emergent phenomena to the complex consequences of myriad nonlinear and context-dependent micro-level interactions. (Bedau 2002: 12)

In later chapters of this book, we will appreciate just how difficult derivability can become when many of the myriad nonlinear and context-dependent micro-level interactions take place between humans. Again, both of the Bedau and Chalmers accounts of weak emergence meet Bedau’s two hallmarks. Clearly, weakly emergent macro-phenomena depend on underlying micro-level phenomena. Indeed, as Bedau (2002: 12) maintains, this dependence is both ontological and causal. However, the weakly emergent macro-phenomena are also autonomous in that their derivation from the micro-level phenomena can be extremely difficult and, in some cases, impractical ‘due to the complex way in which the iteration and aggregation of context-dependent micro-interactions generate the

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macro-phenomena’ (Bedau 2002: 13). Bedau goes on to suggest that the explanatory autonomy (irreducibility) of weak emergence together with its ontological and causal dependence (reducibility) ‘dissolves the problem of emergence’ (2002: 13). In our view, all of the many cases of emergence, discussed later on in this book, are weakly emergent in the Chalmers and Bedau sense. However, the crunch for us is that the micro-level of our co-present groups (as introduced in the previous chapter) will centrally involve humans and their agency. This will mean that the counterpart of ‘the rules (and initial conditions)’ of Chalmers’ cellular automata example will be much more fluid and flexible in both our co-present groups examples and in social science examples more generally. Hence, the nature of the emergents will typically be unexpected. However, if we had known enough about the initial conditions (such as who the co-present group members are, the nature of the contexts of the co-present groups, etc.), then the eventual emergent might look somewhat less unexpected. Thus, if a co-present group was sufficiently significant to gain the later attention of a historian, it would not be surprising to find that detailed research might result in a plausible retrodictive account of the group processes that resulted in the once-unexpected novel emergent. Similarly, whilst evolution frequently gives rise to new species with surprising features that could not have been predicted in advance, evolutionary biologists, by making a close study of the relevant species-environment interactions, can retrodictively develop plausible understandings of how the novel features might have arisen. We accept both the Bedau and Chalmers views that strong emergence is at best very rare, and that weak emergence is very common. We note, however, that their examples of weak emergence tend to fall into the restricted complexity category which was discussed earlier in this chapter. Our view will be that general complexity examples, such as those discussed in this book, also fit into the weak emergence category. It is noteworthy that, since Bedau and Chalmers are mainly thinking of examples of restricted complexity, their micro-level tends to be at the physical level. However, macro and micro are clearly context-dependent terms. As Bedau points out: a macro level in one context might be a micro level in another, the macro/micro distinction is context dependent and shifts with our interests. In addition, a nested hierarchy of successively greater macro levels gives rise to multiple levels of emergence. (Bedau 2002: 8)

Typically, in our co-present group examples, the group members interacting with one another constitute the micro-level. Bedau’s (2002: 12) ‘myriad nonlinear and context-dependent micro-level interactions’ within a group of (say) eight humans interacting to achieve a common goal have the potential to be very complex indeed— so much so, that it will be beyond the capacity of any one group member to comprehend the totality of the interactions. In such cases, ‘the apparent underivability of emergent phenomena’ will be very acutely felt by anyone who cares to try. Yet, in these cases, it is these very complex, somewhat elusive, interactions within the co-present group that sometimes lead to very unexpected but fruitful emergents.

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Because emergence is such a crucial concept for this book, it may be helpful to provide a brief summary of the main points established in this section. Three distinctive conceptions of emergence—nominal, strong and weak—have been explained and discussed. All three conform in different ways to Bedau’s twin hallmarks of emergence, that is, macro-level phenomena that arise from and depend on some more basic micro-level phenomena, whilst simultaneously being autonomous from the micro-level base on which they depend. This sub-section on emergence has been rather lengthy. This is rightly so since strong and weak emergence are of major interest for the arguments of this book. Their main features can be compared and summarised as follows: Strong Emergence • Lies outside of the scope of current physical explanation. It thereby suggests the incompleteness of scientific understanding. Strong emergence entails that ‘our conception of nature needs to be expanded’ (Chalmers 2006: 2). Thus, if strong emergence exists, it reveals ‘the physicalist picture of the world as fundamentally incomplete’ (Chalmers 2006: 3). • This kind of emergence remains a brute fact. This severely limits our capacity for explanation. • As already noted, strong emergence severely limits our capacity for explanation. • It is, at best, very rare. Weak Emergence • Fits well within the scope of current physical explanation—‘no new fundamental laws or properties are needed’ (Chalmers 2006: 2). Thus, weak emergence ‘can be used to support the physicalist picture of the world, by showing how all sorts of phenomena that might seem novel and irreducible at first sight can nevertheless be grounded in underlying simple laws’ (Chalmers 2006: 3). In showing how unexpectedly complex outcomes can arise from simple beginnings, weak emergence serves to soften the overly reductionist reputation of physicalism by demonstrating that it ‘can accommodate all sorts of unexpected richness at higher levels, as long as explanations are given at the appropriate level’ (Chalmers 2006: 3). • For this kind of emergence, the macro arises from and depends on the micro, yet is also autonomous from the micro-level base because ‘the reductive microexplanation is especially complex’ (Bedau 2010: 51–52). Such complex explanations are possible in principle, but often not in practice. Sometimes, only a partial, necessarily incomplete, retrodictive account is feasible or even possible. • ‘… weakly emergent phenomena … require in many cases the introduction of further levels of explanation above the physical level in order to make these phenomena maximally comprehensible to us’ (Chalmers 2006: 3). • It is very common.

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7.3.4 Modelling Complex Systems and Self-Organisation This chapter began with the observation that from a human perspective, our world is infinitely complex. We deal with this situation by reducing complexity, that is, our inquiries into aspects of the world selectively concentrate on some features whilst leaving others out of consideration. As was noted earlier (in Sect. 7.1), we make models of reality in order to understand it. Scientific theories, laws and concepts can all be viewed as models, as can systems of rules. All models reduce complexity in the quest for understanding. A good model is one for which what has been omitted in order to reduce complexity is unimportant for the particular inquiry. But there is always the possibility that something that is left out of a given model is important for the inquiry (for detailed discussion of models and complex systems, see Cilliers 2000: 46ff.; 2001: 137–138; 2013: 47; and Preiser and Cilliers 2010: 269). So, according to complexity thinking, our models are always provisional. This situation is unavoidable given the nonlinearity of complex systems. What do our models of complex systems describe? Cilliers maintains that ‘models attempt to grasp the structure of complex systems’ (2001: 139). Here, the key idea is structure—it refers to ‘the patterns of interaction in the [complex] system’ (Cilliers 2001: 140). So here, structure has nothing to do with pre-ordained patterns. Rather, it is the outcome of action within the complex system. As Cilliers notes: ‘Some … structures can be stable and long-lived (and are therefore easier to … model), whilst others can be volatile and ephemeral’ (2001: 140). The emergence of novel structures at the macro-level of complex systems is sometimes called self-organisation. Lancaster explains self-organisation as follows: Complex systems exhibit self-organisation, which is an elaboration of internal complexity due to the workings of the complex relations in the system over time. It results from the continuing adjustments and adaptations the system makes in managing its internal processes whilst adapting to its external environment. (2012: 122)

To appreciate more about the role of structure within complex systems, we need to consider their boundaries and other related matters.

7.3.5 Boundary Functioning As has been emphasised already, complex systems are constituted by the emerging patterns of the relations that characterise their internal processes (e.g. Cilliers 1998, 2000). Such systems relate via their boundary functioning to their environment, which may well include other complex systems. So, understanding the boundary of a complex system becomes important. But this is not a straightforward matter, as Cilliers (2001) notes: [C]omplex systems are open systems where the relationships amongst the components of the system are usually more important than the components themselves. Since there are also relationships with the environment, specifying clearly where a boundary could be is not obvious. (Cilliers 2001: 140)

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As we have seen, our models inevitably involve some reduction of the complexity of the system. This means that boundaries of complex systems are simultaneously a function of the activity of the system itself, and a product of the strategy of description involved. In other words, we frame the system by describing it in a certain way (for a certain reason), but we are constrained in where the frame can be drawn. The boundary of the system is therefore neither purely a function of our description, nor is it a purely natural thing. We can never be sure that we have “found” or “defined” it clearly, and therefore the closure of the system is not something that can be described objectively. … We often fall into the trap of thinking of a boundary as something that separates one thing from another. We should rather think of a boundary as something that constitutes that which is bounded. This shift will help us to see the boundary as something enabling, rather than as confining. (Cilliers 2001: 141)

Cilliers uses the example of the eardrum to illustrate this important point. The eardrum is the boundary between the inner and the outer ear. But it is also the indispensable means by which sound waves pass from the outer to the inner ear. Cilliers explains this key point further: If the boundary is seen as an interface participating in constituting the system, we will be more concerned with the margins of the system, and perhaps less with what appears to be central. (2001: 141)

A further important consideration about boundaries concerns their location or ‘place’. The human tendency to favour visual metaphors leads us to think of boundaries in spatial terms. Hence, we think of a system as being a contiguous entity within a limited space. Biological examples of complex systems fit this pattern thereby reinforcing the tendency to think that all complex systems involve spatial co-location. But, as Cilliers stresses: Social systems are obviously not limited in the same way. Parts of the system may exist in totally different spatial locations. The connections between different components could be seen as virtual, and therefore the system itself may exist in a virtual space. This much should be self-evident to most inhabitants of the global village … (2001: 141–142)

Cilliers draws two important implications from this. First, non-contiguous subsystems might simultaneously be a part of many different complex systems. This implies that ‘different systems interpenetrate each other, that they share internal organs. How does one talk of the boundary of the system under these conditions?’ (Cilliers 2001: 142). Second, abandonment of the spatial understanding of boundaries suggests that in a critically organised system we are never far away from the boundary. If the components of the system are richly interconnected, there will always be a short route from any component to the “outside” of the system. There is thus no safe “inside” of the system, the boundary is folded in, or perhaps, the system consists of boundaries only. Everything is always interacting and interfacing with others and with the environment; the notions of “inside” and “outside” are never simple or uncontested. (Cilliers 2001: 142)

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7.3.6 Attractors Attractors are subsets of the possible states of a complex system. An attractor is a state ‘towards which a dynamical [complex] system evolves over time’ (Byrne and Callaghan 2014: 27). The attractor concept originally derives from mathematical solutions of nonlinear equations that model certain complex systems. Attractors are not numerical values, but rather a pattern towards which the system is moved by its long-term dynamics. A ‘strange attractor’ is a set of possible states of the complex system about which it moves without ever reaching these states. The result is an ongoing pattern of variations, which describes the complex system’s limits. So attractors do not ‘attract’ so much as delineate the complex system’s limits (Manson 2001). Attractor patterns reflect the situation that, though these complex systems are indeterminate, they are not random. For the inanimate complex systems found in nature, such as sand dunes or the weather, the attractor in no sense represents a purpose, since such systems lack any investment in or control over their emergents. However, for living complex systems, their attractors are associated with the system’s functional purpose, which, commonly, is to live. For instance, bird flights patterns, such as starling murmurations, provide safety in numbers as well as enabling the most efficient use of the available air currents. Likewise, schools of fish move in patterns that minimise their chances of being taken by predators. Such patterns, which can be understood as multiple ‘variations on the theme’ of the attractor, demonstrate the flexibility that makes living complex systems adaptive and reflect the inherent cohesive wholeness of function of these systems. In effect, its attractor facilitates the functioning of the system. For complex systems consisting of humans, the attractor represents the group’s purpose or purposes. Here, the attractor will serve to facilitate the group functioning, in particular, the affective functioning. Also, ideally, the attractor will have the flexibility to evolve as the group’s processes unfold. As Dewey (1910) influentially pointed out, instead of rigidly following a pre-specified means to achieve a nonnegotiable end, it is more typical of human complex systems, and more productive for their outputs, if the means and the end constantly interact and evolve in response to changing circumstances. Thus, the means-end dichotomy is a false one. For instance, as noted earlier in this chapter, neither the full details of a therapist’s intervention with her client nor the particular effects of the intervention can be specified minutely in advance, although the details of the ongoing intervention will not be arbitrary and, based on experience, she will be able to predict the likely range of the effects. Overall, we can conclude that a complex system’s range of responses is determined by that system’s attractor.

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7.4 Concluding Summary Complexity thinking makes possible explanatory accounts of previously unpredictable, even inexplicable, phenomena and occurrences in both the natural and social worlds. Treating such phenomena and occurrences as complex systems does not provide the reliable predictability of classical science, but it does identify patterns of possible and probable outcomes of processes (Mikulecky 2001). In the natural world, it offers useful models for phenomena such as weather patterns, river course formation, and sand dune migration. Turning to living organisms, complexity thinking accounts for phenomena such as the patterns within bee communication, termite mound architecture, bird flocking or fish shoaling behaviours. In complex systems such as these, that involve colony forming, flocking or swarming behaviours, the living organisms are mostly replaceable one by another. This greatly simplifies the relations between organisms enabling patterns on a large scale to be explained. Each organism becomes a variable within patterns of reduced Newtonian relations that form networks with nodes. The instances discussed in the previous paragraph all involve restricted complexity. Given the successful use of restricted complexity in the natural world, it was only to be expected that it would also be applied to the social world. This has proved to be successful in cases where relatively reductive outcomes are being sought, such as investigations at the level of populations into phenomena such as the spread of pandemics, traffic flow improvements or stock market fluctuations. In such cases, the complexity of the social system is significantly reduced because neither individuals as persons nor the interpersonal relations between particular individuals are of interest to the investigation. Individuals (the relata) become variables, abstractions underlying statistical figures, such as ‘an individual in location A, infected with disease B’, ‘a car driver’ or ‘a stock market investor’. In these kinds of investigation, the reduced relations are amenable to algorithmic formulation. They provide novel information about patterns of social behaviour. However, restricted complexity is not helpful for understanding many other aspects of the social world. In examples of complex systems that include persons, it is often the case that individuals as persons having their own distinctive interests, motivations, experiences and so on make a unique contribution to the system’s functioning. Even more significant is the fact that the interpersonal relations of all kinds (affective, cognitive, volitional, etc.), between a whole range of particular unique individuals within a complex system, constitute the micro-level from which arise novel emergent phenomena. As noted above, these novel emergent phenomena can be very diverse—a structure, a property, a pattern, a behaviour or (with suitable reduction) a report, a hypothesis, a theory, an equation, a proposed law and so on. As argued above, these are situations whose investigation requires that persons no longer be treated as variables. In such complex system situations, the relations that give rise to emergence exemplify the Dewey and Bentley transactional relations—they are ‘living’ relations in the sense that they unfold over time as they change or co-create their relata. For these kinds of complex systems, which are common across the social

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and behavioural sciences, restricted complexity is too limited. What is needed for understanding the functioning of these social systems is general complexity. The next chapter will explore this claim in some detail by developing a complexity thinking account of the co-present group concept, which was introduced in the previous chapter.

References Bedau, M. A. (2002). Downward causation and the autonomy of weak emergence. Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology, 6(1), 5–50. https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/principia/ article/view/17003/15556. Accessed November 23, 2016. Bedau, M. A. (2010). Weak emergence and context-sensitive reduction. In A. Corradini & T. O’Connor (Eds.), Emergence in science and philosophy (pp. 46–63). London & New York: Routledge. Bedau, M. A., & Humphries, P. (Eds.). (2008). Emergence: Contemporary readings in philosophy and science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Byrne, D. (2005). Complexity, configuration and cases. Theory, Culture and Society, 22(5), 95–111. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276405057194. Byrne, D., & Callaghan, G. (2014). Complexity theory and the social sciences: The state of the art. London & New York: Routledge. Chalmers, D. (2006). Strong and weak emergence. In P. Clayton & P. Davies (Eds.), The reemergence of emergence (pp. 1–13). Ox-ford: Oxford University Press. http://consc.net/papers/ emergence.pdf. Accessed November 23, 2016. Cilliers, P. (1998). Complexity and postmodernism. London: Routledge. Cilliers, P. (2000). Rules and complex systems. Emergence, 2(3), 40–50. Cilliers, P. (2001). Boundaries, hierarchies and networks in complex systems. International Journal of Innovation Management, 5(2), 135–147. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1363-9196(01)00031-2. Cilliers, P. (2006). On the importance of a certain slowness. Stability, memory and hysteresis in complex systems. Emergence: Complexity and Organization, 8(3), 105–112. Cilliers, P. (2008). Responses. In C. Gershenson (Ed.), Complexity: 5 questions (pp. 27–32). Copenhagen: Automatic Press. Cilliers, P. (2010). The value of complexity: A response to Elizabeth Mowat and Brent Davis. Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity and Education, 7(1), 39–42. Cilliers, P. (2013). A crisis of knowledge: Complexity, understanding and the problem of responsible action. In P. Derkx & H. Kunneman (Eds.), Genomics and democracy: Towards a ‘lingua democratica’ for the public debate on genomics (pp. 37–59). Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi. Deacon, T. W. (2007). Three levels of emergent phenomena. In N. Murphy & W. R. Stoeger (Eds.), Evolution and emergence: Systems, organisms, persons (pp. 88–110). Oxford: Oxford Universi-ty Press. Dewey, J. (1910). How we think (pp. 56–67). Lexington, Mass: D.C. Heath. Dewey, J., & Bentley, A. (1989). Knowing and the known. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The later works: 1949–1952 (Vol. 16, pp. 2–294). Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press (Original work published 1949). Emirbayer, M. (1997). Manifesto for a relational sociology. American Journal of Sociology, 103(2), 281–317. https://doi.org/10.1086/231209. Garrison, J. (2001). An introduction to Dewey’s theory of functional “trans-action”: An alternative paradigm for activity theory. Mind, Culture and Activity, 8(4), 275–296. https://doi.org/10.1207/ S15327884MCA0804_02. Garrison, J. W., & Watson, B. W. (2005). Food from thought. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series, 19(4), 242–256. https://doi.org/10.1353/jsp.2006.0006.

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Goldstein, J. (1999). Emergence as a construct: History and issues. Emergence, 1(1), 49–72. https:// doi.org/10.1207/s15327000em0101_4. Hager, P. (1996). Relational realism and professional performance. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 28(1), 98–116. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-5812.1996.tb00234.x. James, W. (1950). The principles of psychology. New York: Dover Publications (Original work published 1890). Lancaster, J. (2012). The complex systems of practice. In P. Hager, A. Lee, & A. Reich (Eds.), Practice, learning and change: Practice theory perspectives on professional learning (pp. 119–131). Dordrecht: Springer. Lancaster, J. (2013). Complexity and relations. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 45(12), 1264–1275. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2013.763595. Lewis, M. (2000). The promise of dynamic systems approaches for an integrated account of human development. Child Development, 71(1), 36–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00116. Malpas, J. (2002). The weave of meaning: Holism and contextuality. Language & Communication, 22(4), 403–419. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0271-5309(02)00017-4. Manson, S. (2001). Simplifying complexity: A review of complexity theory. Geoforum, 32(3), 405–414. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0016-7185(00)00035-x. Mikulecky, D. (2001). The emergence of complexity: Science coming of age or science growing old? Computers & Chemistry, 25(4), 341–348. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0097-8485(01)00070-5. Mitchell, S. (2009). Unsimple truths: Science, complexity and policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morin, E. (2007). Restricted complexity, general complexity. In D. Aerts, C. Gershenson, & B. Edmonds (Eds.), Worldviews, science and us: Philosophy and complexity (pp. 5–29). Singapore: World Scientific Publishing. Newman, D. (1996). Emergence and strange attractors. Philosophy of Science, 63(2), 245–261. Nicolis, G. (1995). Introduction to nonlinear science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Osberg, D., & Biesta, G. J. J. (2007). Beyond presence: Epistemological and pedagogical implications of “strong” emergence. Interchange, 38(1), 31–51. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10780-0079014-3. Preiser, R., & Cilliers, P. (2010). Unpacking the ethics of complexity: Concluding reflections. In P. Cilliers & R. Preiser (Eds.), Complexity, difference and identity: An ethical perspective (pp. 265–287). Dordrecht: Springer. Prigogine, I. (1997). The end of certainty: Time, chaos, and the new laws of nature. London: The Free Press. Prigogine, I., & Stengers, I. (1984). Order out of chaos: Man’s new dialogue with nature. London: Bantam Books. Reed, M., & Harvey, D. L. (1992). The new science and the old: Complexity and realism in the social sciences. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 22(4), 353–380. https://doi.org/10. 1111/j.1468-5914.1992.tb00224.x. Richardson, K., & Cilliers, P. (2001). What is complexity science? A view from different directions. Emergence, 3(1), 5–23. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327000em0301_02. Rosen, R. (1987). Some epistemological issues in physics and biology. In B. J. Hiley & F. D. Peat (Eds.), Quantum implications: Essays in honour of David Bohm (pp. 314–327). London: Routledge. Saljo, R. (2002). My brain’s running slow today—The preference for “things ontologies” in research and everyday discourse on human thinking. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 21(4), 389–405. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1019834425526. Simon, H. A. (1996). The sciences of the artificial. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Taylor, C. (1995). To follow a rule. In C. Taylor (Ed.), Philosophical arguments (pp. 165–180). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Winch, C. (2010). Dimensions of expertise: A conceptual exploration of vocational knowledge. London & New York: Continuum.

Chapter 8

Complexity Thinking and Co-Present Groups

Chapter 6 introduced the co-present group concept, thereby extending and consolidating common-sense understandings of the purpose and functioning of small work groups. It is helpful to recall that concept, because the main aim of Chap. 8 is to synthesise the achievements of the previous two chapters. This chapter expands and deepens our understandings of the processes and significance of co-present groups by employing the complexity thinking concepts presented in Chap. 7. In Chap. 6, we set out some underpinning concepts which the notion of a co-present group would need and summarised these as follows: co-present groups are to be found in the sharing of relationally holistic and social activities, particularly affective functioning, in distinctive places. Based on this, the specific notion of a ‘co-present’ group was constituted through six main features: • • • • • •

its affective functioning; a sense of place-in-time; particularity and accountability; participation and nonlinearity; distributed participation; deliberation.

And we argued that co-present groups are onto-epistemological phenomena, because they exist, ‘not “singularly” in places, but “particularly” in “series” of relationships which have the character of events, or meetings, or conversations’. These relationships are sustained in time, as much as they are located in space. We begin this chapter with a general discussion of various ways in which a complexity thinking account enriches our understanding of the co-present group concept and its pertinence to addressing the topics presented in Part I of this book. Since co-present groups persist and are sustained by their activities over time, complexity thinking’s focus on the concept of ‘emergence’ has significance. Emergence is at the very least a temporal phenomenon. This involves two main cases, to which this chapter gives detailed attention: emergence within a co-present group itself (i.e. within a complex system of complex systems) and within individual co-present © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 P. Hager and D. Beckett, The Emergence of Complexity, Perspectives on Rethinking and Reforming Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31839-0_8

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group members (i.e. within a single complex system). After these, the chapter broadens into a consideration of what light complexity thinking might shed on larger scale phenomena, such as the relations between sets of co-present groups, and cases where individuals are simultaneously and/or successively members of several co-present groups. We end this chapter by considering the implications of the foregoing account of copresent groups and complexity thinking for the concept of professional ‘judgement’, understood in its broadest sense. The notion of professional judgement will be central in Part III to our constructive response to the problems and issues identified in Part I of this book.

8.1 Some Ways Complexity Thinking Enriches Co-Present Groups In Chap. 6, we drew attention to the traditional view of small groups working on assigned tasks as follows: a set of individuals of appropriate size working on shared human problems or issues of importance to society as a whole. Often these small groups are appointed and controlled by some suitable authority (usually external to the group) and have their work delegated to them. These may be as old as the hunting party (for nomadic societies), right up to today’s boards, or committees, of management, briefed to resolve a particular task or problem. A group’s output is expected to be the sum of the best ideas, suggestions or actions that arise from its deliberations or activities. The delegation of societal concerns requires accountability, so usually small groups are required to report their processes and outputs to the external authority in a clearly understandable form. We believe parenting is an example of such a small group: family life is itself socially significant, since how inter-generational care is provided is obviously part of ensuring that society has a future. Small groups are, we stated, ubiquitous. We explored four examples to show the diverse yet common significance of these: the jury, the staff of a sub-school, mother–baby relations and the performance of a string quartet. The problem or task that small groups such as these have been set up to address is often one that is too complicated for any one person alone to solve or complete, and yet it is socially significant. Typically, the range of experiences, attributes and skills that are needed for the overall task is identified and a suitable group of individuals, that between them appear to meet all of these requirements, is appointed to the small group. And often, small groups are not formed by ‘appointment’: in the case of parenthood, they result from sociobiological needs! Clearly, however, in all cases of small groups’ formation, members who can function effectively and harmoniously are desirable. Similarly, the originator of the small group exerts overall control, including the power to dissolve or reform the group when its perceived usefulness has come to an end. A further role for the originator

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is to consider and, possibly grant, requests from the group for additional resources needed to complete its allotted task. Chapter 6 then highlighted some major limitations of the traditional view of small groups. Most prominent is the limitation that a group is not helpfully viewed as the mere aggregation of individuals’ capabilities, (especially problematic when these are reduced to cognitive capabilities). Just as important are the affective contributions that each individual brings to the group. As was argued in Chap. 6, the success of the group hinges on it developing its own unique affective processes. The latter are vital for group harmony, for mutual commitment, for trust and for a sense of belonging to evolve. These are all features of a well-functioning co-present group. We concluded our analyses of the four examples by emphasising that we see, and hear, the coming together of various core relationships: the social, the affective and the technical in a holistic and emergent performativity (for the quartet, literally, a ‘performance’). The whole is indeed greater than the sum of the parts and is constituted in the very relationships that bring that holism about. Chapter 6 identified and elaborated the following as key characteristics of a copresent group: • Affective Functioning The many dimensions of affect, both conscious and unconscious, contribute to a holistic group relational process that gives rise to emergent phenomena that are shaped by the group’s attractor. • A Sense of Place-in-Time A co-present group’s functioning reflects the character of the present place in which it finds itself, which includes temporality: recollectively (how the past is understood) and anticipatively (where experience is taking it). In this emergent sense of ‘place-in-time’, the co-present group’s identity forms and is reformed giving it both retrospective and anticipative dimensions. All of this represents its singularity. • Particularity and Accountability But co-present groups typically also have a wider social significance beyond their singularity. In their particularity, they connect to other groups’ ‘places-in-time’ and members’ diverse experiences and other co-present group participations. Retrospectively, what emerges from a given co-present group’s functioning might well enhance public understanding of past happenings in the relevant field of endeavour. Prospectively, a group’s emergent functions might well anticipate and contribute to future significant developments in that field. Thus, the co-present group has accountabilities beyond its own immediate concerns. • Participation and Nonlinearity The process of the functioning of a co-present group is neither hierarchical nor fully egalitarian. Rather, influential input is distributed across, and arises amongst, group

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members as befits the current contingencies of the case, that is, the ‘reading’ of the current place in which the group finds itself. This situation of distributed, contextstimulated leadership is a departure from traditional models of tightly specified, role-contingent leadership, implementing linear decision-making. • Distributed Participation As with leadership, participation within a co-present group can also be distributed according to the nature and circumstances of the group. Though the interactions within a co-present group usually constitute at least a singular geographical place, some of the group members can still be spatially separated. The particularity of a co-present group—where other places and times are wider social linkages of the copresent group—can include virtual participation, that is, ‘stretched’ over space—as well as stretched over time. • Deliberation All co-present groups are governed by the norms associated with their purpose. Outcomes are crucial. These norms guide the group’s affective functioning towards the making of particularly ‘right’ or ‘appropriate’ judgements or decisions. Just as the co-present group concept expanded and improved upon the traditional understanding of small work groups, let us now consider ways in which complexity thinking might inform and deepen our understandings of co-present groups already set out in Chap. 6. We recall the main features of complexity thinking. In Chap. 7, we provided an understanding of complexity that investigated ‘relations (interrelationships) between entities, as against the traditional focus on entities themselves’ (Sect. 7.1). Central to that investigation are the ways that these relations generate properties. With the support of Cilliers (2013) and others, in Chap. 7 we set out two ways properties can be said to ‘emerge’ from relations: both from the transactions of system components with one another and from the transactions of system components with the system as a whole. A co-present group is indeed such a system, and its components are relations of these two types: members (each individual is herself or himself a complex system) relating ‘with one another’ and members relating with the co-present group, considered as a system ‘as a whole’. It follows that to claim (as we do) that a co-present group is ‘holistic’ brings with it the necessity of distinguishing between various relations that interact within the co-present group (of the two types just specified), but also that each co-present group connects with the wider social world, relationally. The task of Chap. 8 is to show how these relationships can occur. We advocated what is known as ‘general complexity’, in Chap. 7, because this preserves the focus on both the parts and the whole. To repeat what Morin (2007: 10) has stated, ‘[t]he knowledge of the parts is not enough, the knowledge of the whole as a whole is not enough, if one ignores its parts’ (quoted in Sect. 7.2.2). Rather than assume the ‘restricted complexity’ of reduction to parts, (even although this is a fundamental and desirable way to cope with the world’s ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’, in William James’s famous phrase),

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‘general complexity’ maintains parts and wholes as mutually implicated. Humans make decisions, and they, typically, do so together. This phenomenon is what marks out complexity thinking in the social sciences from its traditional use in the natural sciences. How this decision-making occurs in co-present groups is where this chapter is heading. So, under general complexity, co-present groups function optimally when they persist in generating outcomes (through decisions on the way) which instantiate their purposes. This persistent purposefulness (i.e. over time and in particular places-intime) is manifest in the emergent relationality of the two kinds above: when the copresent group engages the participation of the members as a whole and when individual participants of the co-present group engage with each other. In this chapter—and across the book—we give ontological priority to the co-present group. So, the next Sect. (8.2) deals first and foremost with the relationality of the whole (the co-present group) (in Sect. 8.2.1), whilst later (Sect. 8.2.3) we deal with the relationality between the parts that comprise the whole, namely relations between group participants. Given this priority, it is important to bear in mind throughout the rest of this chapter that a co-present group typically represents a range of complementary knowledge, experience, expertise and shared normativity across the group selected for tackling its purpose. This means that there is group expertise reflected in the group knowing how to go on, that is, shared normativity. The leadership of a co-present group will vary, depending on the contingencies of the expertise required, and the distribution of participants (some members not being physically present). Overall, we will show that ‘general complexity’ can play out in functionality which is owned by the co-present group itself and which is beyond the capacity of any individual member. Moreover, we also claim that a particular co-present group can own its functionality beyond its singular place-in-time. Wider social significance is in the mindfulness, and in the decision-making, of most co-present groups: it is part of their identity, part of their reason for being. So, we deal at length with the ways a co-present group’s shared normativity—its avowed purposes—transcend the single, unique, place-in-time that it seems only to occupy. We turn now to the details of how these features of our synthesis of co-present groups are enriched by complexity thinking. As was emphasised in Chap. 7, complexity thinking focuses on the relations between the parts of a system, between the parts of the system and the whole system, and between the whole system and its environment or surroundings. This focus on the relations involved in the complex system, directs our inquiry to the ongoing relational processes within the system, rather than to the particular things that comprise the system. Thus, the internal function (or functionality) of the complex system claims our main attention, since the function of a complex system is the mode of action by which its purpose (attractor) is fulfilled. Thus, a co-present group, understood as a complex system, is characterised by its functioning, that is, the process of its working. Its functioning and its purpose (attractor) are distinct, though as we saw in Sect. 7.3, the purpose may well change over time. For instance, the meaning that members attach to the initial group purpose may evolve as the group starts to become absorbed in its work.

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From a complexity perspective, the co-present group’s agency centres on pursuing the attractor, a cooperative process driven by the group’s affective and other functioning. As was noted in Chap. 7 (Sect. 7.3.6), the attractor encompasses the range of responses that are open to a co-present group as it sets about fulfilling its purpose. Of course, some co-present groups have more freedom to evolve their purpose during the cooperative group process than do others. A student study group, for example, typically has an attractor that is sufficiently general for the group to be able to flexibly set the course of its functioning process to satisfy each occasion’s particular needs. On the other hand, for a co-present group such as a surgical team, the attractor and the group functioning to achieve it are much more tightly specified. In both of these instances, we are dealing with the relations between a complex system and its environmental systems. The surgical team has its functioning relatively constrained by its environmental systems: normally, it must carry out an operation of a particular kind according to prescribed protocols. In the case of the student study group, current shifting environmental contingencies will serve to shape the group functioning process on each particular occasion that it meets. In each case, however, the result of a co-present group’s agency is a socially produced outcome to which the various group members have each contributed, though the outcome is beyond the capacity of any group member to achieve individually. It should be clear by now that a co-present group’s functioning is much less about the composition of the group or about the actual number of its individual members, and much more about the group’s relational transactions that constitute its functioning. Emergence arises from this process of functioning. As was argued in Chap. 6, a co-present group’s emergent processes include, following Malpas, meaning-making, a sense of place-in-time, and a sense of identity, both at the group level and for individual group members. In short, in a co-present group the individual and the social transactionally interrelate with one another so that both are changed continually by the transactional experience, accompanied by the emergence of novel entities. In complexity terms, this results from a co-present group having a suitable structure. In the context of complexity thinking, structure has a very specific meaning. As Cilliers explains: The structure of a complex system enables it to behave in complex ways. If there is too little structure (i.e. many degrees of freedom), the system can behave more randomly, but not more functionally. The mere ‘capacity’ of the system (i.e. the total amount of degrees of freedom available if the system was not structured in any way) does not serve as a meaningful indicator of the complexity of the system. Complex behaviour is possible when the behaviour of the system is constrained. On the other hand, a fully constrained system has no capacity for complex behaviour either. This claim is not quite the same as saying that complexity exists somewhere on the edge between order and chaos. A wide range of structured systems display complex behaviour. (2013: 46)

Here Cilliers reminds us that a well-functioning co-present group is characterised by a balance of constraints and affordances. For instance, a jury is constrained by the need to reach a verdict. This is balanced by affordances such as sufficient time allowed to reach an agreed verdict, the capacity to consult the judge on points that need

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clarifying. Cilliers cautions us that, where the balance to be tipped too much towards either more rigid constraints or an excess of affordances, the interests of justice would be less likely to be served. The two extremes presented by Cilliers remind us that a key characteristic of co-present groups (discussed in Chap. 6) is that they are neither hierarchical nor fully egalitarian. Instead, they feature context-stimulated leadership that is distributed across group members as befits the contingencies of the situation in which the group finds itself. As was argued in Chap. 7, the causal powers of social structures together with the role of human agency ensure that co-present groups exemplify ‘general’ rather than ‘restricted’ complexity. Clearly, the major characteristics of co-present groups, as discussed in Chap. 6, significantly exceed the ‘rule-based interactions amongst simple elements’ that underpin restricted complexity (see Chap. 7). The magnitude of this difference becomes even clearer when we consider in more detail certain facets of a co-present group. The first notable point is that various unique individual humans comprise the micro-level of the complex system that is a co-present group. As such, each member of the co-present group is themselves a complex system in her or his own right. A group member can be understood as a complex system made up of several subsystems: physical, biological and psychological. Second, the co-present group as a whole is a complex system made up of various persons—it is a complex system of complex systems. The ongoing process, the functioning, of the complex system that is the co-present group will be driven by the patterns of the diverse relations between its members. These relations will encompass all kinds of human interrelations, including the affective, the cognitive, the conative, and the contextual domains. Some of these relations will be interactional; some will be transactional (in the Dewey and Bentley 1989 senses discussed in Chap. 7). So far, then, in terms of complexity thinking, it is evident that a co-present group involves two distinct kinds of the complex system: the group itself and each of the group members. The ongoing patterns of relations within the co-present group serve to change both kinds of complex system. The individual members interact to collectively create the group’s functioning and its emergent processes, such as meaning-making and group identity. Simultaneously, individual members, perhaps each uniquely, are changed by their participation in the group processes, for example, by learning new things which, of course, augments their identity. This latter point will be very significant later when we offer new perspectives on the issues about learning highlighted in Part I of this book. Thus, in an important sense, the two distinct kinds of complex system involved in a co-present group serve to mutually create one another. They are ‘mutually implicated’. Individual members of a co-present group collectively create the group’s functioning and its emergent characteristics, and, similarly, each individual can be changed in distinctive ways by the group’s functioning. One’s own identity evolves, as does the co-present group’s identity. But things are even more complicated than this. As we saw in Chap. 7, and which we restated earlier in this chapter, the properties of emergent complex systems arise from two directions: from the interactions of system components with the system as a whole, and from the interactions of system components with one another. Thus,

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individual participants in a co-present group can be changed significantly by the group’s functioning as a whole and by the influence of one or other group participants upon an individual. Likewise, an individual participant might have a major, even disproportionate, part in influencing the group’s functioning as a whole. As was argued in Chap. 6, influential participation and leadership are distributed across co-present group members in a nonlinear way, shaped by the pressing contingencies of the particular situation. The sheer range of possible significant relationships within a co-present group and their range of possible impacts lend credence to our key claim that co-present groups are precisely ‘structures with causal powers’ that are driven significantly by ‘human agency’ (Byrne and Callaghan 2014: 56). As such, they are examples of general rather than restricted complexity. However, the degree of possible complexity involved in a co-present group should serve to remind us of Cilliers’s observation (discussed in Chap. 7) that the models we employ to understand complex systems inevitably and desirably involve some reduction of the complexity of such systems to something immediately meaningful, or useful. Routines and other codifications of behaviour in and for the workplace (such as competencies regimes) are examples, and these are significant in the functioning of co-present groups when they make practical judgements. However, they are only part of the story, as the final section of this chapter discusses. A further notable feature of co-present groups, when viewed through the lens of complexity thinking, is that not all such groups will require that all members be in the one physical location. In Chap. 6 this feature was called ‘distributed participation’. Complexity thinking offers further elaboration because it enables relationality to be ‘stretched’ over time and space. No doubt the erroneous assumption that co-present group members need to be physically co-located has likely been encouraged by some of the typical examples that we have discussed so far, such as that of a mother and baby, or a string quartet. But as Cilliers observes: The propensity we have towards visual metaphors inclines us to think in spatial terms. A system is therefore often visualised as something contiguous in space. This tendency is reinforced by the prevalence of biological examples of complex systems. We think of systems in an “organistic” way. (2001: 141)

Sand dunes and flocks of starlings are complex systems that feature spatial contiguity, as does a human being. However, co-present groups, as well as being social systems that exhibit general complexity, can also function satisfactorily when their members are not co-located. Continuing the previous quotation, Cilliers adds, as we saw previously, Social systems are obviously not limited in the same way. Parts of the system may exist in totally different spatial locations. The connections between different components could be seen as virtual, and therefore the system itself may exist in a virtual space. This much should be self-evident to most inhabitants of the global village … (2001: 141–142)

An important implication of this, as Cilliers stresses, is that

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non-contiguous subsystems could be part of many different systems simultaneously. This would mean that different systems interpenetrate each other, that they share internal organs. (2001: 142)

This interpenetration of complex systems will be further discussed later in this chapter. As this section has demonstrated, complexity thinking converges with and amplifies major characteristics of co-present groups that were discussed in Chap. 6. But it is particularly in its account of emergence that complexity thinking substantially adds to our understanding of co-present groups.

8.2 Emergence Within a Co-Present Group (as a Complex System of Complex Systems) Because a co-present group is a complex system of complex systems, we can investigate two types of emergence within such a system. Consistent with our ontological priorities stated in Sect. 8.1, we first examine emergence amongst the overall group processes as a whole. Here the micro-level consists of the individual group members whose relational participation contributes to emergence at the macro- or group level. What emerges pertains to the group as a social entity situated in the context of its surrounding environment. Second, there is emergence within individual members of the group. Each group member is already a complex system made up of interacting physical, biological and psychological sub-systems. In these cases, emergence arises from physical–biological–psychological relational interactions of a group member with the ongoing social processes of the group. Once again, the micro-level consists of the individual group members, with their various ongoing relational participation producing emergent processes. These emergent processes are changes in one or more of the complex systems that are the individual group members. That is, one or more group members learn from their participation in the co-present group. This emergent learning is primarily at the individual group member level rather than at the social level, though, of course, it arises out of social participation. In these cases of learning by individual co-present group members, the group as a whole is part of the surrounding environment that constitutes the context within which emergence takes place in a complex system. The learning emerges from social interactions, but it is individuals who learn, each in their distinctive way. This situation accords with the Salomon and Perkins (1998) account of the various kinds of social learning (discussed in Chap. 5). These two types of emergence can be illustrated by considering each of the four characteristic examples of co-present groups discussed in Chap. 6—the jury, the staff of part of a school, a mother and baby, and a string quartet. In the case of a jury, the unique group level emergent may turn out to be so significant as to become an important legal precedent. At the same time, each juror may well gain their own individual and specific insights and understandings about human

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behaviour and its motivations from the process. The sub-school staff as a group can, between them, initiate and implement an educationally productive management plan for their part of the school, a holistic plan that lies beyond the capacity of any one individual to devise. But out of this process, each staff member, according to their experience and motivations, will simultaneously very likely add to, or enhance, their own teaching practice. The mother–baby case sees the development of a unique, holistic interpersonal relationship. But at the same time, the mother comes to multiple understandings of her baby and its needs, whilst the baby progresses through identifiable individual learning stages. Finally, the string quartet produces unique holistic performances of its repertoire alongside various kinds of emergent learning on the part of individual group members. For instance, with growing experience, the viola player will likely gain deeper appreciation of (say) the particularities of how a given composer writes for the viola. These two distinctive types of emergence will now each be considered in more detail in the following sub-sections.

8.2.1 Emergence Within a Co-Present Group as a Whole In this sub-section, we will consider in some detail various features of the diverse emergent processes that arise from the affective relational processes of co-present groups as a whole. We will then discuss the significance of the common situation of co-present groups’ performances being accountable to one another. The diversity of emergent processes resulting from interpersonal relational processes within co-present groups is a compelling contribution from complexity thinking. As we will see, there are many reasons both for the diversity of co-present group emergent processes and for how they are understood, both by group participants and by others. For a start, individual co-present group members will each have their own understanding of the group’s purpose and its significance. They will each have a distinctive view of what this means for them and for the group as a whole, based on their level of awareness of the prevailing normative expectations for such a group serving its particular purpose. Each group member’s distinctive view will reflect their conception of the value of being part of this particular group. In turn, this will shape each individual’s initial input into the group’s affective functioning as the group begins the process of addressing its task. A group affective outcome will emerge via the processing of affective relational transactions within the group, one that will gradually refine and modify individual understandings of the group’s achievements. As the co-present group functions to achieve its purpose, various understandings, judgements, and so on are modified in the interplay of the affective relating to the various group members. From this ongoing interpersonal relational process, a group outcome emerges: an outcome that integrates cognitive, affective and conative participation. It is truly a group outcome because it is not attributable to any one of the group members. Indeed, though each individual group member will have their own

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individual understanding of the outcome and the processes that led to it, it seems that no one individual group member can have a complete understanding of what has transpired within the co-present group. For one thing, some aspects of the group process are ineluctably tacit including some of the affective dimensions. Hence, no group member or subgroup of members can control the group processes or its emergent processes. Likewise, any description of the group process is necessarily selective. On this point, Cilliers comments as follows: Since different descriptions of a complex system decompose the system in different ways, the knowledge gained by any description is always relative to the perspective from which the description was made. This does not imply that any description is as good as any other. It is merely the result of the fact that only a limited number of characteristics of the system can be taken into account by any specific description. Although there is no a priori procedure for deciding which description is correct, some descriptions will deliver more interesting results than others. (2013: 46)

It should come as no surprise that each individual group member’s particular understanding of the emergent outcome of the group’s relational process may well differ somewhat, as well as, in each case, being a thinner version of the whole that emerged. Recall that the scope and range of affective functioning are quite wide. It encompasses such things as how individuals interpret the group task and how it should be carried out; what they personally hope to achieve in the co-present group; their perceptions of the strengths and limitations of their fellow group members; how comfortable they feel within the workings of the group; and how confident they are that their own expertise can make a significant contribution. As well, the affective functioning within a co-present group is intimately related to the qualitative content of its tasks, which includes ethical considerations. Thus, emergent processes from the group functioning, such as meaning-making and judgements, will also be shaped significantly by the group’s normative purposes. Various group members may interpret these somewhat differently. According to Cilliers, there are further reasons why, in principle, any description of a co-present group’s processes will capture less than the whole: In describing the macro-behaviour (or emergent behaviour) of the system, not all the microfeatures can be taken into account. The description on the macro-level is thus a reduction of complexity, and cannot be an exact description of what the system actually does. Moreover, the emergent properties on the macro-level can influence the micro-activities, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as “top-down causation”. Nevertheless, macro-behaviour is not the result of anything else but the micro-activities of the system, keeping in mind that these are not only influenced by their mutual interaction and by top-down effects, but also by the interaction of the system with its environment. (2013: 46)

In short, the upshot is that any individual co-present group member can have but a partial understanding of the group’s emergent outcomes. Of course, this important point will apply even more so to outsiders who seek to comprehend the group’s processes and outcomes. For instance, a co-present group set up by management to investigate possible solutions to a workplace problem will come up with a set of specific recommendations that result from considerable reduction of the actual complexity

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of the group processes and emergent processes. As we found in Chap. 7, the nature of co-present group emergent processes can be very diverse, such as ‘properties, objects, behaviour, phenomena, laws, whole systems’ (Bedau 2002: 7). To Bedau’s list of examples of emergent processes, we can add such things as judgements, decisions, recommendations, hypotheses, theories, rules, concepts and definitions. These diverse emergent processes can all be viewed as instances of meaning-making. However, for complexity thinking, meaning should not be thought of as merely cognitive. As was argued in both Chaps. 6 and 7, it encompasses and is shaped by the full gamut of holistic interpersonal relations (affective, cognitive, volitional, etc.) that characterise the micro-level (‘place-in-time’) of the co-present group, from which arises novel and particular phenomena. In all cases, specifying such emergent processes will involve some reduction of the overall processes that gave rise to them. For example, expressing them in words renders them more portable, but also abstracts and simplifies them from the full richness of the context of their emergence. Similarly, when any of these reduced emergent processes are taken up and further elaborated or acted upon by other copresent groups, they will necessarily be re-contextualised in the new situation. So, there is a trade-off between the benefits of portability and the inevitable losses of meaning occasioned by reduction and de-contextualisation. In short, there is an important sense of ‘whole’ in which no individual member of a co-present group can grasp the whole of the group’s processes and its emergent processes. All reports of the processes and outcomes from a co-present group involve some form of complexity reduction. However, there is a second sense of ‘whole’ in which co-present group members own (or are responsible for) the whole of the co-present group processes and outcomes. Consider, for example, performances by a string quartet. Each performance in itself (i.e. singularly) will be a unique occurrence, since in some respects, however small, it will involve novel emergent processes. In such cases, the quartet of musicians can be said to ‘own’ the whole performance, that is, to be responsible for it. Together they have set themselves a goal—to practise and, then, to play before an audience particular musical works. Their performance as a whole ‘belongs’ to them and they will, no doubt, have views on how well or otherwise they achieved their goal. The co-present group members ‘own the whole’, in the sense that they achieve the group’s purpose. Yet the same group members are unable to ‘grasp the whole’, in the sense of understanding the complete details of what was involved in achieving the particular purpose. The ambiguity of ‘whole’ here is easily explained. Each group member might understand in detail what achieving the particular purpose requires of their own area of expertise; at the same time they likely only partially understand the roles of other areas of expertise within the whole. For one thing, all different areas of expertise involve tacit dimensions that even an area’s practitioners only partly understand. Outsiders (themselves parts of the wider social world that moves a co-present group from the singular event, or performance, to a greater temporality, or ‘place-in-time’) will understand even less of these matters.

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These considerations serve to underline further the important point that what each co-present group member takes away from the group process is necessarily a reduction of the whole that transpired. Since language is inadequate to fully capture the whole, each co-present group member will necessarily have their own unique take on the whole. However, each of them can later take their partial (reduced) understanding of outcomes to additional further co-present groups as participants in new micro-level relational processes. This ‘transfer’ is not a linear process nor is it robotic. It will involve social and affective functioning wherever else the participation occurs. Reduction of the complexity of the holistic process that transpired during the co-present group’s work will also be typically reflected in any outputs that emanate from the group. For instance, a report and a set of recommendations coming from a co-present group that was set up to advice on how to deal with a pressing problem will clearly be a reduction of the overall transactional process that constituted the group’s functioning. Even decisions taken within the group on how to act so as to achieve their goal in a practical and timely manner will involve some reduction of complexity. This point is very significant for a key ongoing theme in this book, namely the holism of judgement. It gives us a strong clue as to how the normative shapes and reshapes individual practitioner performances, and in the final section of this chapter, we deal with the emergence of practical judgements, amidst helpfully reductive structures such as routines, rules and competencies, where the decision of the co-present group to enact these—or create something novel—is already incorporated into the holistic consideration of the situation.

8.2.2 Accountability of Emergent Processes and Performances Beyond the Whole Co-Present Group As was argued in Chap. 6, co-present groups commonly have a wider social significance beyond their unique singularity. Their particularity can connect them to other ‘places-in-time’ (including other co-present groups) and participant experiences. Time and place are ‘stretchable’. What emerges from a given co-present group’s functioning through recollections or memories over time (following Heidegger, as was set out in Chap. 6) might well increase understanding of past happenings. These might also, following Kant (as was set out in Chap. 6) ‘anticipate experience’, and contribute to, prospective developments in a ‘particular’ field of practice. A very common instance is when a co-present group’s performance is accountable to similar performances by other co-present groups (Rouse 2007), for example, the performance of a string quartet or of a surgical team performing a standard operation. That is, in some cases, performances by co-present groups are accountable to one another. In such cases, the performance of a particular co-present group is subject to multiple normative criteria that vary markedly with the type of group and its

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purpose. For example, a string quartet’s performance will be judged for its overall quality against a range of more specific criteria (polished ensemble playing, quality of interpretation, unity of sound adapted to the acoustics of the particular venue, audience reaction, etc.). Likewise, the surgical team’s performance will be shaped by a set of protocols and the overall outcome judged against a varied set of criteria. These examples suffice to show that accountability of co-present group performance can involve various distinct dimensions, such as competence, aesthetic value and ethical value. In addition, several of these items suggest that a co-present group’s performance is not just something internal to itself—it involves the co-present group interacting with key aspects of its environment. However, as both of these examples also suggest, for complexity thinking not everything outside of a co-present group counts as being its ‘environment’. Recall, from Chap. 7, Cilliers’s suggestion that ‘complex systems are open systems which constantly interact with their environment in rich ways’ (2008: 31). What this amounts to, for co-present groups, consisting as they do of humans, is that they constantly exchange information, energy and matter with their surroundings. So, for co-present groups, their environment is constituted by any parts of their surrounding context with which they exchange information, energy or matter in order to facilitate achievement of the group’s goal or purpose. Examples of information exchange might include the surgical team being provided with a revised protocol by health authorities and/or the surgical team itself requesting clarification of certain issues to enable them to conform to the new protocol. Likewise, a copresent group set up within an organisation in order to recommend how to address a pressing issue, might, during the process of approaching their final recommendations, be supplied with further relevant information that will require some refinement of their proposed recommendations. As the preceding discussion highlights, the performances of various co-present groups being accountable to one another are never simply a matter of ‘transferring’ the protocols or performance standards to each group for their precise implementation. A group’s functional processes are not ‘things’ that can be convincingly prescribed or conveyed in a written document. Inevitably, some details are missing from such reductive tools. Protocols or workplace performance standards are at best guides that assist co-present groups to achieve quality performances. They set out, in a reductive form, the normative expectations of co-present groups engaged in a ‘particular’ practice. But in each case, the group itself needs to interpret and apply the protocols or performance standards to the contingencies and specificities of the context in which it is performing. Thus, reduction applies in two directions. Starting with guidelines that are inevitably somewhat reduced, the group itself needs to fashion and enact a professional holistic performance. Out of the relational group processes that constitute this performance will come novel emergent processes. However, descriptions or codifications of these emergent processes will unavoidably be a reduction from the whole, for the reasons already elaborated. Nevertheless, where performances are rated highly, even in their reduced form, novel emergent processes can serve to stimulate revision or refinement of the protocols or performance standards.

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Of course, not all the performances of co-present groups are accountable, in Rouse’s sense, to those of other groups. For instance, a co-present group set up within an organisation in order to recommend how to address a pressing issue may be accountable only to those who initiated the group. Likewise, the initiators will probably be the sole judges of that group’s performance. Nevertheless, the case of co-present groups being accountable to one another is an important one. Copresent groups interrelating to one another in this way constitute the micro-level of a social system, in which major macro-level emergents are the evolving norms that characterise the broad functions of the interrelating co-present groups. On a larger scale, the social system might be (say) a profession. As will be discussed later, a profession can be fruitfully conceived as a large-scale social system that relies on multiple and diverse co-present groups to carry out its many functions. However, the foregoing accountability requirements should not be seen as being unduly limiting of a co-present group’s autonomy. For example, in the case of the surgical team, receipt of the revised protocol still leaves the team with plenty of scope to decide on how best to achieve its goal. For one thing, norms and even protocols need to be interpreted for their applicability to the particular prevailing circumstances. In the real world of practice, co-present groups judge how the norms and protocols apply in each particular case. These judgements emerge in the affective and other relational processes of the group’s functioning. The soundness of a given co-present group’s judgements will, in turn, be judged by peers in cases of performances that warrant such a follow-up, for example, when something goes wrong. But in itself, the fact that the performances of these kinds of co-present group are judged against multiple criteria does not significantly reduce the group’s professional autonomy in deciding how best to achieve its particular goal within the constraints of relevant protocols. Likewise, the co-present group set up within an organisation for a specific one-off purpose will be free to judge what effects the newly arrived information will have on its proposed final recommendations. So, viewed from the perspective of complexity thinking, a co-present group’s control of its ongoing relational processing, that is, its functionality, is what mainly constitutes its autonomy. In addition, as we have seen, this complexity of the group’s ongoing functional processes amounts to a life of its own that is not readily available for outside scrutiny. Yet, at the same time, the co-present group is somewhat dependent on its environment, for example, for its accountability requirements or its necessary resources. Equally though, aspects of the co-present group’s environment are dependent on the co-present group. For example, management are reliant on the group to satisfactorily complete its appointed task; the public at large are dependent on the professional performance of the surgical team. This fine balance of autonomy from, yet dependence upon, its environment is not unique to co-present groups. Complexity thinking offers a similar story for other complex systems. Consider, for example, a biological cell. Cells function so as to keep on living and to reproduce. This internal functioning comes from within—‘the internal management of its functioning is wholly self-contained’ (Lancaster 2012: 126). So, cells are not open to directions from outside of themselves. However, simultaneously, in order to go on living, they depend on importing matter and energy

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from their environment. Indeed, the cell’s capacity for self-organisation enables it to change itself internally in response to changes in its environment, so as to maintain its functioning. Here, autonomy does not entail isolation. Rather, it means independence of function combined with significant dependence on the environment. This situation of a delicate balance of independence and dependence is considerably more nuanced than the traditional conception of small groups working on assigned tasks, where the external authority controlling the group and its future is assumed to have a full understanding of the group’s processes and its outputs. It is also noteworthy that the norms that are employed for judging co-present group performances are almost never static. Typically, they are modified and updated over time, as the exemplary or novel performances of certain co-present groups’ model ways for others to improve their performance. Even the performance of a ‘one-off’ co-present group, (say) one that has been instituted to make recommendations of how best to handle a particular pressing issue, will likely be judged in broad terms on how well their working and outcomes compare with the performances of previous co-present groups within that organisation, notwithstanding that previous groups may have dealt with very different problems or issues. Such comparisons of performances of co-present groups become even more pointed and detailed when they involve the carrying out of the same or similar practices, for example, string quartets, surgical teams. Worthwhile innovations or revisions influence and are adopted, whether in whole or part, by other co-present groups in the relevant field, thereby leading to gradual refinement of the norms against which performances are judged. The accountability of co-present group performances to one another provides the mechanism by which innovations by one or a few groups can become the norm across the whole practice. Thus, the influence of innovative or creative members of co-present groups can be instrumental in changing practices well beyond their own particular groups. The above considerations can be applied also to larger scale, more complicated examples of groups working to carry out a practice. Take, for instance, an orchestra performing a symphonic work. As with a string quartet, an orchestra’s performance will be judged for its overall quality against a range of more specific criteria (polished ensemble playing, balance across the various sections of the orchestra, how well the sound was adapted to the acoustics of the particular venue, audience reaction, etc.). Thus, as several of these criteria suggest, an orchestra’s performance is likewise not just something internal to itself—it includes the orchestra interacting with aspects of its environment. Likewise, the points made above about autonomy and being subject to evolving norms will apply equally to the very large group, which is an orchestra—frequently anywhere between 40 and 130 musicians. Given our suggestion (in Chap. 6) that a co-present group consists typically of somewhere between two and about twelve members, very large groups, such as an orchestra, are clearly not co-present groups in the normal sense. However, an orchestra does consist of various subgroups (strings, wind instruments, brass, percussion), which in turn break into yet further subgroupings (e.g. violins, violas, cellos, double basses, and trumpets, trombones, tuba). Mostly, the instruments within these subgroupings play together as a unit. So, an orchestra might be thought of as a co-present

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group of co-present groups. Indeed, since each individual musician is themselves a complex system, and a co-present group is a complex system of complex systems, this suggests that an orchestra can be thought of as a complex system of complex systems of complex systems. So, both co-present groups and larger groups that perform or engage in practices are subject to a fine balance between autonomy and the norms of the practice. A reasonable question to ask is, ‘Is every performance of a practice unique’? It may well be that, for example, a string quartet’s playing of a particular piece of music varies little across performances. Any differences across performances may be so small as to constitute mere nominal emergence (as discussed in Chap. 7, Sect. 7.3.3). Perhaps repeat performances of routine surgical procedures, involving as they do unique individual patients, are more likely to also involve weak emergence. Of course, the more flexibility that any co-present or much larger group has in relation to its attractor, the more likely it is that the group’s performance will be unique. However, given the limitations on our gaining full understanding of the processes of a copresent group (discussed above), this question will, in most instances, be largely definitional. Assessment of the overall holistic performance usually suffices except where there are pressing reasons to engage in more minute analysis, for example, when something has gone badly wrong.

8.2.3 Emergence Within Individual Members of a Co-Present Group As noted earlier in this chapter, as well as emergence occurring within a co-present group as a whole (which itself comprises a complex system of complex systems), commonly there is emergence within individual group members, each of whom are themselves a complex system. These two distinct kinds of a complex system involved in a co-present group serve to mutually create one another. The individuals collectively create the group’s functioning and its emergent processes, whilst each individual can be changed in distinctive ways by the group’s functioning, that is, they can learn. In the light of this, it will be unsurprising to find that many familiar learning situations can be seen to be examples of co-present groups as they have been characterised in this book. Familiar instances of this include Mentoring Mentoring involves a suitably experienced peer being entrusted with advising and guiding one or several new, less experienced entrants in the early stages of their participation in a practice. Such arrangements are very common in workplace situations. The mentor-mentee relationship constitutes a co-present group in the same way that the mother-baby relationship did. However, the ‘suitably experienced’/‘less experienced’ tags should not be taken to imply that mentoring is a purely one-way process. Mentors frequently report that the mentoring process has significantly enhanced their own knowledge and understanding (see, e.g. Hager

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and Johnsson 2009: 106). For instance, in some cases novices have had the advantage of recent significant exposure to newer developments in the field. Similar to mentoring is tutoring. Tutors are responsible for teaching and guiding the learning of individuals or small groups in universities, schools, and the like. The co-present group character of a tutorial enables each participant to receive more detailed attention from the tutor than would be possible in a large class or lecture situation. Quality tutorial situations stimulate an active learning culture in which students can learn from one another as well as from the tutor. Likewise, in some instances, the tutor might well achieve significant learning, for example, in developing responses to students’ probing questions. Learning from Experience Learning from experience, (also known as informal learning, or incidental learning), occurs naturally as people engage in life activities of all kinds, for example, at work, in the family, in leisure activities (see, e.g., Hager and Halliday 2006). Typically, learning from experience takes place in situations where the focus is on purposes other than learning. This is generally true of the individual learning that happens in co-present groups, with the obvious exception of those groups, such as tutorials, that have learning as their main focus. For the rest, their focus is firmly on the specific group purpose and its achievement, not on what individual group members might happen to pick up from being involved in the group process. As noted earlier, each co-present group member is a complex system consisting of interacting physical, biological and psychological sub-systems. It is from the physical-biological-psychological relational interactions of the group member with the ongoing social processes of the group that learning by the individual emerges. Here, the group as a whole is part of the surrounding environment that constitutes the context within which learning emerges in the complex system that is the individual co-present group member. Thus, though this kind of learning emerges from social interactions, it is individuals who learn, each in their distinctive way. In the next chapter we will consider the further question of whether the co-present group itself can coherently be said to learn. Despite not reflecting the group’s main aim, the informal learning by individuals that occurs in the course of group processes can be very powerful learning. Because their focus is elsewhere, participants are often unaware of how much they are learning. Contributing to this is the fact that much of the significant learning relates to the tacit dimensions of practice. Unlike the learning that characterises formal education provisions, typically much valuable informal learning is not susceptible to explicit codification (Hager and Halliday 2006: 241–243). As Polanyi famously stated, ‘Experts know more than they can tell’ (Polanyi 1966).

Although learning by individual group members is a common outcome of copresent group functioning (as this section has maintained), we are definitely not associating all learning with co-present groups. We agree that significant learning can occur in didactic teaching situations that feature minimal opportunity for questions or discussion, such as mass lectures or instructional videos. Clearly, such teaching contexts are not situated in co-present groups as this book has characterised them. Likewise, an individual student reading a book does not count as a co-present group. We agree that in this case the individual reader might well learn something. But it does not involve the kind of emergent learning situation that a co-present group makes possible. It is only when the book-reading student interacts with others, such as peers or experienced elders, concerning the book’s contents, that learning may possibly emerge that exceeds the capacities of each of the group members acting individually.

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In sum, it is uncontroversial that the various emergent outcomes of the functioning of co-present groups include significant learning by some group members. What is notable about this is that, as the next chapter will show, our complexity thinking account of co-present groups will offer novel understandings of the nature of learning itself. These will serve to illuminate and address major issues about learning that were elaborated in Chap. 5.

8.3 Larger Scale Phenomena Involving Co-Present Groups In this section, we consider several ways in which co-present groups can prove to be highly influential. Some achieve significant influence by persisting for lengthy periods of time, thus enabling the value of their continuing outputs to be increasingly appreciated. Another way in which co-present groups can extend their influence is by having group members who are simultaneously or successively active members of various other relevant co-present groups. An extension of this arrangement is co-present groups instituting formal interactive arrangements with other co-present groups that have similar or related interests or goals.

8.3.1 Temporal Persistence of Co-Present Groups As Cilliers reminds us, persistence across extended periods of time is a feature of many complex systems: Living systems, including … social systems…, are neither random nor chaotic. Despite the fact that they are constituted through non-linear interaction and that they are capable of novel and surprising behavior, they are well structured and robust. They persist through time and maintain themselves. (2006: 110)

Various examples of co-present groups, discussed both in Chap. 6 and in the present chapter, provide multiple instances of such groups persisting over time, for example, string quartets, staff in a school department and surgical teams. However, other co-present groups are by nature more short-lived, such as juries, or the mother–baby relationship (as the child enters new phases of growth and development). Of course, over time, the membership of long-lived co-present groups will likely change gradually as some members retire or move on to other positions. It is common in such cases for string quartets, surgical teams and the like to carefully seek out replacements that will ensure satisfactory continuity of the spirit and performance values of the long-term co-present group. This careful process for selecting and inducting suitable new members is aimed at maintaining the group’s harmonious affective functioning. In the public sphere, co-present groups that achieve renown for the excellence of their performances are likely to be long-lived, and their achievements celebrated. As well, less visible to the public, within organisations of all kinds are long-term

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co-present groups that play vital roles in the optimal functioning of the organisation. Professional bodies, which are discussed later in this chapter, provide typical examples. They rely on long-term co-present groups to carry out many of their functions.

8.3.2 Individuals Being Simultaneously and/or Successively Members of Several Co-Present Groups Innovations frequently appear to be the work of a ‘single’ person and history often credits this individual practitioner view. However, closer investigation of the events that produced the innovation commonly reveals that its development is actually traceable to the supposed ‘originating individual’ interacting with various, often informal, co-present groups involving, for example, fellow practitioners and/or significant others, such as clients. In the course of carrying out practices of all kinds, practitioners frequently experience problem situations, many of which prove to be relatively minor or temporary, but others of which are much more intractable. Conscientious practitioners seek ways to alleviate such severe or persistent problems—they try to understand the situation more fully, to identify possible causes and to vary their practice in such a way as to overcome the particular problem. In doing so, they are often dealing with matters relating to the practice that are currently either unknown or at least not well understood. Traditional thought seeks to depict such situations very much in terms of what individual practitioners do. Even when, say, several practitioners in a team situation seek to alleviate a problem, the standard approach has been to view the overall response as the sum of the contributions of each of the respective individual practitioners. However, as our concept of the co-present group has shown, we take a very different approach to understanding situations such as these. The stimulation of an ongoing problem, or series of problems, leads to informal co-present groups arising with attractors such as ‘why can’t we do X better’? ‘how can we modify this process to improve outcomes’? ‘there must be a better way if only we can find it’. On our account, an individual practitioner’s significant response to a problem situation experienced in their practice is highly likely to be initiated within a copresent group (or a series of such groups). For instance, many practices involve a direct relationship between a practitioner and other parties, such as patients, clients and pupils. These can constitute initial co-present groups that experience the problem and make tentative attempts to deal with it or better understand it. For other practices, ones that are less centred on person to person relationships, it is likely to be significant others, such as peers, colleagues or supervisors, that are part of any initial co-present groups that might address the experienced problem situation. In any case, it is within relationships of this kind that the (supposedly sole) practitioner initially seeks to identify and understand better the nature of the problem. Though understanding of the problem may very likely be vague and provisional

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at this stage, it is through such co-present group interactions that clarification can emerge. This is so because, as noted earlier, a co-present group can achieve an understanding of the problem that was beyond the capacity of any of the participating group members to achieve by themselves. Even accepting that, as complexity thinking maintains, the total outcomes of the co-present group interactions may be beyond the full comprehension of any individual group member, participation in a sequence of co-present groups that wrestle with a given problem may greatly deepen an individual’s understanding of the nature and scope of the problem. This can in turn suggest new possibilities for alleviating the problem. Recall as well that much of what emerges from the interactions of a co-present group is tacit. In Chap. 6, we maintained that ‘co-present groups are to be found in the sharing of relationally holistic and social activities, particularly affective functioning, in distinctive places’. These activities, especially the affective, can generate various significantly tacit responses as well as more articulated recognition of salient links between the problem situation and phenomena experienced previously. Examples of the tacit include the clarification (in what is ‘shown’, not ‘said’) of how the problem situation is discordant with accepted practice; some felt empathy with the circumstances of those most affected by the problem situation; and perhaps an emergent sensitivity of new ways to understand the problem situation. All of these affective functionings could be implicated in practitioner responses to the problem. They each involve tacit as well as explicit aspects. Moreover, there is no reason to expect that the response to these partially tacit emergent processes will be the same for each co-present group member. As stressed previously, what emerges from the co-present group’s affective and other interactions is a persistent holistic relationality that exceeds the resources of any of the individual group members. Out of this, each member of the group will have their own partial take on this holism. In summary, initial diagnoses or partial understandings of the problem emerge from the relational interactions of complex human systems (co-present groups). In each case, the emergent arises from the relations between the parties to the interaction and is thereby not attributable to any one of the respective parties. As well, the parties to these interactions will have somewhat differing perspectives on what has emerged from the interactions. Thus far, the supposedly lone practitioner (a complex system), troubled by a pressing practice problem, has achieved a somewhat enhanced perspective that emerged from one or more relatively informal co-present groups (complex systems of complex systems). If the problem is sufficiently pressing, the lone practitioner will likely take their own particular perspective on what has emerged thus far to yet further co-present groups, involving such parties as trusted experienced colleagues, mentors, peers who may have encountered a similar problem, and so on. Thus, the particular perspective that the supposedly lone practitioner has taken from a previous co-present group can be steadily modified and refined in unpredictable ways as it is successively amplified by a series of co-present group interactions, each with a qualitatively different emergent. In each case, the particular perspective that the practitioner takes into the co-present group contributes to shaping the micro-level relations within the group.

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Of course, other practitioners will make their own distinctive contributions to each co-present group. Out of these relational processes emerge, in each co-present group, a macro-level group outcome, one that results in a somewhat altered perspective for the practitioners involved. In some cases, the altered perspective may significantly enhance understanding of the problem and its possible solutions. As was noted in Chap. 6, each one of this series of co-present groups is unique in its overall functioning—this represents its singularity. However, each co-present group also has a significance beyond its unique singularity—this resides in their particularity which connects them to other ‘places’ and wider social experiences and expectations. Retrospectively, what emerges from the functioning of any of the series of co-present groups might well enhance understanding of the significance of the emergent processes from other groups in the series. Likewise, prospectively, a given group’s emergent processes might well anticipate and shape future significant advances in the field. Thus, each co-present group has accountabilities beyond its own immediate concerns. Meanwhile, one or more of the practitioners and others involved in these various co-present group interactions might themselves be stimulated, either singly or with others, to pursue their own lines of inquiry in relation to the original problem. Thus, if the problem is viewed as an important enough one within the practice, parallel sequences of co-present groups, with cross-sequence interactions being possible, might well constitute an increasingly concentrated effort to deal innovatively with the problem. From here it is but a short step to more formal, centrally organised initiatives being instituted by influential parties, such as a research organisation or a professional body. For instance, a research project might be established to test and compare the various solutions to the problem that have emerged from the snowballing co-present group sequences. Or a mini-conference might be organised, one in which selected participants compare and debate the proposals that have emerged from various copresent groups. Note that, in both of these cases, specially selected co-present groups with clearly defined attractors will have resulted from the efforts of earlier, and more ad hoc co-present groups that started with somewhat less clearly defined attractors. These differences illustrate the important point that the identity of a co-present group features both retrospective and prospective dimensions. Though each would have its own singularity, the identities of the earlier, more ad hoc co-present groups would have reflected a retrospective determination to thoroughly understand and analyse experienced problem situations with the prospect of devising workable solutions, whereas later specially selected co-present groups would find themselves in somewhat different places. Their identities would be more reflective of a sense that they were actively forging a way forward that would be instrumental in alleviating the nagging problems of the past. If centrally organised initiatives, such as these, result in the conviction that the efficacy of the practice can indeed be improved in relation to the initial problem, then other types of co-present groups will be set in place in order to ensure that the innovation is implemented right across the practice (a common situation that is discussed in the next subsection). As usual, performances of a practice are answerable

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to one another, so the decision to change the practice will be founded on the conviction that more efficacious performance will result from the change. Overall, then, fresh concepts and strategies emerge progressively from sequences of co-present groups that are stimulated by the persistent problem situation. From actions taken by ‘single’ practitioners, or perhaps by small groups of practitioners, on a fairly informal basis, a chain of events is initiated that leads to more formal co-present groups being instituted to address the problem. Such co-present groups may oversee the testing of the efficacy of proposed innovations and may ultimately lead to formal modification of how the practice is performed. However, everyday ‘common-sense’ thinking assumes that when successful innovations are implemented, they are the work of one or a few creative individuals. This is a clear example of the human propensity to deal with complexity by drastically reducing it. In contrast, our complexity thinking analysis suggests that the answer to the question ‘who was the originator’? of an innovation may be far from clear-cut. In our example above, the practitioner most responsible for the earliest co-present groups that addressed the problem situation may not necessarily be an active participant throughout the sequences of such groups that ultimately led to the practice being modified. It is indeed likely that along the way, other practitioners become very active in the process of change. So, the simplistic question ‘who was the originator’? is more accurately replaced by ‘who were the originators’? with the answer being ‘a whole range of practitioners who, between them, produced an outcome that was beyond the capacity of any one individual practitioner’. To illustrate the power of the question ‘who was the originator’? when viewed through the lens of general (i.e. less reductive) complexity thinking, consider what many would regard as a paradigm instance of creative work by a lone individual—the writing of a novel. In fact, novel writing very often involves much more complex processes than the efforts of a lone individual. As a typical example of this, consider The Soloist, a 1994 novel by Mark Salzman. In the Acknowledgements (placed, unusually, at the front of the book), Salzman mentions [m]ore than a dozen good friends and an almost equal number of family friends [who] agreed to read early drafts of the manuscript in spite of my preposterous requirement that they be honest with me only if they loved it … I hardly realized I was being corrected, and for this I am deeply grateful. (Salzman 1994: x)

He also acknowledges ‘[o]thers who kindly shared their expertise on subjects ranging from life in organised Zen communities to the optics of lunar eclipses’ (1994: x). No one doubts that Salzman was the prime originator of this novel; yet he provides candid reflections on the ways numerous configurations of co-present groups (of at least two members, since he was a participant in all), significantly and tellingly shaped it. It is also clear that he was not the only originator of the novel—it emerged from the density of relationality, which was holistic throughout, and from which emerged the final single outcome. Unlike a practice situation, there was no ‘group outcome’. And yet, there was an emerging process of literary creativity enriched by the author’s

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participation in a series of co-present groups. From these co-present groups issued emergents that were crucial to the novel, but were beyond the capabilities of Mark Salzman alone. Similar complexity considerations will likely apply to familiar historical examples. For instance, the question ‘who invented human flight’? has no satisfactory answer if the questioner is seeking the names of one or two individuals. Likewise, cases of apparently simultaneous invention, such as the famous Newton vs Leibniz rivalry for the title of ‘inventor of the differential calculus’, focus exclusively on the competing claims of individuals. But this overlooks the roles of the relevant co-present groups from which each may have benefitted along the way to their innovation. So, the main arguments of this book suggest that invention in general may actually be a much more complex process than traditional reductive individualbased thinking assumes to be the case. In effect, complexity thinking suggests a fresh approach to understanding human generativity by insisting on the ontological salience of relations between entities rather than just the entities alone.

8.3.3 Co-Present Groups Relating Constructively to One Another Earlier (in Sect. 8.1) we noted Cilliers’s observation that, in complex systems, ‘noncontiguous subsystems could be part of many different systems simultaneously’. This creates the possibility that ‘different systems interpenetrate each other, that they share internal organs’. This section will demonstrate the significance of this phenomenon by discussing examples from diverse fields: schooling, the arts and the professions (including professional practice in its broadest sense); and scientific advances. Example 1: Schooling—Implementing a New Curriculum Imagine the process involved in implementing a new mathematics curriculum in a high school. A key co-present group obviously would comprise the members of the mathematics department itself. The nature of the changes would also need to be understood by teachers of related disciplines, such as the members of the science department: the notion of how best to teach a discipline (‘pedagogical content knowledge’ or PCK) has bearing on the expertise available in the school as a whole. Teachers of related disciplines might well need to make some minor adjustments to their own teaching in order to mesh with the new mathematics curriculum or would seek to engage the new curriculum from their respective PCK perspective. Also, the new curriculum might well necessitate the acquisition of new resources, both human and material. New e-learning and the virtual world make for what some call ‘digital disruptions’ to traditional curricula and PCK. The planning for, and enactment of, the new curriculum would clearly involve a variety of co-present groups working over a significant time span. Various members of the mathematics department would serve simultaneously as members of assorted co-present groups across the school. That is, different co-present groups (complex systems of complex systems) would interpenetrate each other by ‘sharing

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internal organs’, in Cilliers’s terms. Those who are members of several co-present groups simultaneously might not find themselves ‘in the same place’ in each group. But the ‘places’ need to be closely related, that is, ‘on the same page’. It is worth noting that each of the key characteristics of a co-present group (identified in Chap. 6 and summarised at the start of this chapter) is evident in this example. For instance, though each individual co-present group that is part of this curriculum implementation process will be marked by its singularity, its particularity lies in the fact that the successful implementation requires that, in an important sense, each of the assorted co-present groups is accountable to the others. Example 2: The Arts—Rehearsing and Performing an Opera Opera is a multidimensional performative art form in which success is predicated on a complex synthesis of diverse elements: a text that conveys a suitable storyline; music, mostly sung, that portrays the full gamut of human emotions and dilemmas; and stagecraft that convincingly supports the textual and musical unfolding of the storyline. The staging of a typical opera requires contributions from many kinds of specialist personnel, such as solo singers, a chorus, an orchestra of suitable size, dancers, set designers and builders, costume designers and fabricators, lighting designers and installers, dramaturges, choreographers, language coaches, stage managers and stagehands. Typically, this complex synthesis of diverse elements that is an opera production is overseen and directed by a co-present group that includes key personnel such as the producer/director, the conductor, the set designer, and the costume designer. This key co-present group will be responsible for such vital matters as the choice of the particular opera to be performed, the overall concept and interpretation, the choice of performers for the key roles and the kinds of sets and costumes required. Decisions by this key co-present group that set out the ‘internal organs’ of the opera production will stimulate the formation of numerous intersecting and overlapping co-present groups as the rehearsal process begins. For example, singers, both singly and in small groups (duets, trios, etc.) with piano accompaniment will work with vocal and language coaches to begin to mesh their vocal contributions into the overall concept and interpretation. Costume and set fabricators will work with directors and designers on how best to achieve practical realisation of the envisaged costumes and sets. The chorus will begin learning and practising its contributions under the guidance of the chorus master, whilst the dancers will evolve and perfect their sequences under the guidance of the choreographer. Eventually, the relational processing of these numerous intersecting and overlapping co-present groups will feed into full rehearsals that include the orchestra. This process will culminate in opening night. Along the way, the emergent processes of many co-present groups will have significantly influenced the processes of still other co-present groups. Though many people will have contributed to the final emergent opera production, it will be a novel unique performance whose exact features are beyond the control of any of the individuals involved. How successful or otherwise the production turns out to be only emerges in its performances.

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As expected by now, these multifaceted, diverse and constructively interacting co-present group functionings that constitute the process of preparing and presenting an opera performance exemplify the key characteristics of co-present groups as identified and elaborated in Chap. 6. Humankind’s affective dimensions are at the very heart of opera’s raison d’etre, so the affective will be uppermost in the functioning of the many co-present groups that shape the opera production. From these co-present groups will emerge the sense of the opera production’s place-in-time, its singularity or uniqueness, both with respect to opera’s past and to how this production anticipates the future. However, this production will also be marked by particularity and accountability in relation to other productions of the same or similar operas. The extreme diversity of purposes of the co-present groups that shape the production will entail that leadership is distributed and participatory. This diversity of purposes of the many co-present groups will mean that their multiple deliberations and judgements will need to converge ultimately into a satisfactory realisation of the overall concept and interpretation that distinguishes the opera production. This reminds us of Cilliers’s point, earlier in this chapter, that well-functioning co-present groups are characterised by a balance of constraints and affordances. Similar considerations, though usually on a smaller, less complicated scale, apply to producing and performing staged drama productions. In the case of the staging of new plays, it is common that the playwright’s text is treated as a work-in-progress. This means that the early stages of rehearsal become a workshopping of the draft of the play in order to modify and revise it so as to increase its dramatic effectiveness. In effect, the director, the actors and the playwright jointly become a co-present group seeking to turn the starting text into something that will stimulate a compelling staged performance. Even long-established plays are susceptible to this kind of revision. For example, references to events that will be unfamiliar to contemporary audiences are subtly revised to encompass more contemporary happenings that are familiar to audiences. A similar, though different, account applies to the preparation and performance of an orchestral concert. As discussed previously in this chapter, the various sections of an orchestra can be thought of as co-present groups that need to relate constructively to one another to achieve overall high-quality performances. In effect, an orchestra is co-present groups that work to perform harmoniously as a whole. Example 3: The Work of Professional Associations Professional associations (sometimes called professional bodies) are typically non-profit organisations having three main aims: to enhance the particular profession, to further the interests of the practitioners of that profession and to ensure that the profession serves the public interest in providing quality professional services. In order to achieve these aims, professional associations typically engage in activities such as • monitoring the functioning of accreditation, regulation and licensing systems for the profession; • working with higher education providers to ensure contemporary relevance of courses ranging from entry-level professional preparation through to higher levels (e.g. Masters, Doctorate);

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• planning and implementing continuing professional development programmes; • determining refresher course requirements and providing refresher courses for those seeking to return to practice after significant absences from the profession. This process is especially important for registered professions; • assessing and recognising the capacities of overseas qualified practitioners seeking to migrate from other countries to practice the profession. Again, this process is especially important for registered professions. If done well, each of these activities can be viewed as supporting each of the three main aims of a professional association. However, the contemporary era has seen greater public scrutiny of professions and their activities than once was the case. There have been instances of professional associations shown to be neglecting one or more of the three main aims, usually that of serving the public interest. This greater public scrutiny has encouraged professional associations to be more transparent and democratic in their processes and activities. In order to facilitate the timely carriage of their many responsibilities, a common strategy is for professional associations to use ongoing, suitably qualified co-present groups, who report regularly to the executive (another co-present group) that organises and oversees the activities of the professional body. These co-present groups often include relevant members external to the profession. For over twenty years, co-author Hager has worked with various professions as an external member of co-present groups charged with a wide range of tasks. Take, for instance, the implementation of a new scope of practice in a registered profession. A typical example is optometrists being enabled legislatively, for the first time, to prescribe certain medications. The smooth introduction of such a practicewide formal innovation required the constructive interaction of many kinds of copresent groups. It began with the executive of the Optometry Association setting up a co-present group to design and implement processes to, first, embed the new scope of practice into the existing professional standards, and, second, to invite all members into the process of the incorporation of the new arrangements into their practice. Updating the professional standards involved a long series of co-present groups, some meeting face-to-face, some virtually, so as to produce iteratively a new version of the professional standards. This strategy was designed to actively involve a large sample of the members in the process so that there would be a widespread sense of ownership of the revised professional standards. This first stage was followed by a further series of co-present groups—both face-to-face and online workshops—that tutored members on the practicalities of working within the new scope of practice. Finally, a further co-present group was charged with monitoring the progress of the practice innovation and handling any difficulties that might arise. Each co-present group in this interlocking series had their own specific attractor, but one that contributed to the overall purpose of facilitating the successful adoption of the expanded scope of practice. The constructive interactions of the various copresent groups so as to achieve the overall purpose were ensured by having key personnel as members of two or more of the co-present groups.

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Similar general considerations apply to professions implementing other innovations, such as establishing a formal system for the admission and registration to practice of overseas trained practitioners or designing refresher course arrangements for readmitting professionals who have been absent from practice for significant periods of time. In each case, an interlocking series of co-present groups, each with their own specific attractor, will interact in ways that serve the achievement of the overall purpose. Increasingly, contemporary professional associations are required to implement innovations as the practice of their particular profession (in common with many occupations generally) continues to change and evolve. Depending on the nature of the profession, some change more rapidly than do others. This means that, in effect, the duties that a profession has to the public good (listed above) are always a workin-progress. In common with the other major activities of a professional association, they require regular monitoring, updating and fresh thinking. The diverse range of co-present groups that professions typically employ to achieve their varied purposes clearly exemplify the general features of co-present groups identified in Chap. 6. For instance, each co-present group’s sense of place-intime will involve retrospective understanding of events that gave rise to the project of which it is a part, together with anticipation that the profession will benefit from the group’s functioning. Likewise, whilst each group’s contribution to the project will be uniquely singular, its contribution will also be particular in the sense that its outputs are accountable to the project as a whole and its specific role within it. Further, from the deliberations of each co-present group will emerge informed group professional judgements. The outcomes of the project as a whole, emerging from the sequences of interlocking and intersecting co-present groups, will in effect be group professional judgements. These emergent group professional judgements, resulting from the efforts of many representative and interested practitioners, arguably provide the profession with a more secure basis for shaping its future than would reliance on the judgements of one or a few individual practitioners. Although this subsection has focused on professions in the traditional sense of the term, the adjective ‘professional’ is employed widely to describe quality practice in all walks of life. And, of course, the use of suitable configurations of co-present groups to plan and carry out projects is common in organisations of all kinds. To take but one example of ‘professional’ in its broadest sense, think of professional sport. The ideas discussed in this section are clearly applicable to team sports. In general, sports teams are co-present groups from whose functioning can emerge performances that exceed the capacities of the team members taken individually. The old adage that ‘a champion team will defeat a team of individual champions’ has been illustrated, for instance, on several occasions at the Olympic Games by the defeat of the star-studded USA men’s basketball team by a team with seemingly less talented individual players, that is, a better team, whose emergent functioning was superior. Importantly, even where the size of a professional sporting team exceeds significantly our co-present group membership of between two and twelve, the co-present group concept remains applicable. Typically, larger sporting teams involve a variety

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of different roles, such as ‘backs’, ‘mid-fielders’ and ‘forwards’. Thus, a significant part of the coaching and training involves the team splitting into specialist co-present groups. Of course, there will be other coaching and training sessions that involve the whole team practising as a single unit. So, large sporting teams are similar to orchestras (discussed earlier in this chapter) in being co-present groups of co-present groups. Complexity thinking and the co-present group concept together shed light on why post-match interviews with individual players are typically very trite. No one member of the successful team (a co-present group) understands all about the emergent outcome. Most team members will have a very limited perspective. It is also worth noting that co-present groups are not absent from those professional sports that centre on individual performers. Typically, these professionals have an entourage of coaches, trainers, physiotherapists, motivators and so on. Example 4: The Sciences as Communal, Self-Correcting Enterprises A crucial dimension of science is that it is ‘a communal, self-correcting enterprise that grows from unsophisticated beginnings towards an increasingly detailed and adequate understanding of ourselves and the world’ (DeVries and Triplett 2000: xlvi, emphasis added). Indeed, the development of each of the sciences hinges on global communities of like-minded people seriously working with theories to refine them parsimoniously and to test their applicability, generality and consistency. These global communities of like-minded people actually consist of complex sequences of interacting co-present groups. Thus, the various activities that underpin scientific development, such as theory construction, experimental design and implementation and precise observation, are themselves ultimately communal. Typically, they are carried out by multiple interacting co-present groups of various kinds. Even the most eminent individual scientists are not exempt from participation in these self-correcting communal processes. For instance, on several occasions Einstein himself had his work significantly corrected by other physicists. Indeed, the Belgian physicist Georges Lemaitre had the distinction of twice identifying significant errors in Einstein’s published work (see Rovelli 2016: 175–178). However, it is too simplistic to view these disagreements as mere disputes between Einstein and Lemaitre. Rather, the claims of both physicists were subject to a global communal self-correction process, carried out by suitably qualified physicists, who judged that Lemaitre was indeed correct on both occasions. Though, understandably, he was initially reluctant, in both instances Einstein came to see that Lemaitre’s corrections were sound. Likewise, the experimental testing, that has confirmed the pre-eminence of Einstein’s relativity theories within contemporary physics, was not the work of Einstein himself. Rather, it was the later work of many intersecting co-present groups of physicists. Both special and general relativity arose from Einstein’s attempts to clarify certain conceptual issues in theoretical physics. The scope of his relativity theories was such that during Einstein’s lifetime many of their predictions were not readily testable. Most relativistic effects in human operations at or near the earth’s surface were too small to be detected. It required developments in technology, including the

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advent of the space programmes decades later, to create many and varied opportunities to test relativity; crucial tests in which Einstein’s theories have since repeatedly triumphed. It follows from the above that it is a mistake to exclusively attribute major scientific developments, such as special and general relativity, to a ‘lone hero’ scientist (in this case, Einstein). This is not to deny that, overwhelmingly, Einstein was the progenitor of relativity. But the ongoing appropriate communal agreement and correction are also vital parts of the story. Most major scientific developments, such as quantum mechanics or genetics, are more obviously communal enterprises. That is, their story involves vital contributions from very many leading scientists so that, unlike in the example of relativity, there is no one individual’s name that, taken alone, exemplifies the development. In summary, we can readily see that co-present groups relating constructively to each other is not rare, nor are the benefits of doing so atypical of everyday life. In widening the ripples on the ponds of complexity thinking, we are acknowledging that complex systems of complex systems frequently play out in co-present groups. By giving ontological priority to the relationality of the group itself, we can see, within it, individual practitioners and creative actors finding their energies and purposes catalytically developed, and expanded, by overlapping co-present group participants. In this way, the co-present group has an onto-epistemological significance for us all, because the extent of the emergent ‘ripple effect’ cannot be determined, much less foreclosed. It is by mechanisms and metaphors such as these that new concepts and decisions (or judgements) are made available to and are taken up by practitioners at large and are absorbed into practices, and beyond practices, as a whole. As always, no one member of the co-present group or, even, the leaders or facilitators of these groups, has a comprehensive understanding of all that is emergent from them. As well, the process of inducting all members of the practice into the new arrangements will typically involve some reduction of complexity so as to simplify the change to its essential features. Our claim, then, is that co-present groups under the model of ‘general’ complexity thinking do require reducibility to make sense of the messiness of the situations with which they are typically confronted. Just as Salzman had to distil his creative options in favour of the aesthetic power he wanted The Soloist to articulate, so do all copresent group participants distil what they could do, into what they want to do—to where they want to go. This requires practical judgement-making, to which we now turn.

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8.4 Judgements in the Light of Co-Present Groups and Complexity Thinking Throughout this book, we draw upon Aristotle’s notion of phronesis, or practical judgement (also known as practical wisdom). As we stated towards the end of Chap. 6: ‘It gets a group where it wants to go. Co-present groups make decisions—they judge what is best to do now, and for the next little whilst, until their next meeting, for example’. Through ‘deliberations’, co-present groups ‘work within and towards norms, such as welfare, well-being, justice, profitability, efficiency and learning. All co-present groups work normatively, and they do so through their affective functioning towards making “right” (appropriate) judgements with their purposes in view’ (see Chap. 6, Sect. 6.4.6). We claim that judgements that are made in the course of the functioning of copresent groups are emergent phenomena, central to the purposes of the groups itself in both the ways analysed in this chapter: within the group itself (within a complex system of complex systems) and within the individual co-present group members (within a single complex system). Many co-present group functions revolve around routine situations, where decisions about how to progress a situation are, seemingly, straightforward (such as following a script, score, rule book, or a practice that is unproblematic). But that already assumes that decisions have been taken that get the co-present group to ‘where it wants to go’. And let us be clear that even this kind of seemingly routine decisionality emerges from the co-present group’s dynamic functioning. As we saw in the case of the staff in an aged care facility managing residents with dementia (in Sect. 6.4.6), daily co-present group functions revealed decisions taken on the best available ‘reading’ of what is both routine and non-routine. Beyond the seemingly routine, co-present groups can often find themselves struggling to make sense of a situation that they encounter. So emergent processes within a ‘complex system of complex systems’ include judgements that are also emergent, both routine and non-routine, and this includes a judgement about where the distinction is made, in any particular situation. Even the distinction is porous, as the dynamic and agentive nature of co-present group functions suggest that judgements around addressing a situation will tend to coalesce what is regarded as routine with what is regarded as non-routine. A haemorrhage in the patient during surgery can be regarded as both routine (though unforeseeable) and non-routine (because unforeseen). How the surgical team regards this contingency will reveal practical judgement-making. What is done to stop the bleeding will demonstrate ‘intelligent action’. Less dramatically, a co-present group may in its deliberations over time and perhaps across several events, struggle with how to get where it wants to go. Projects in some school or university classrooms, or a very intricate legal process in some courtrooms, may require protracted attention from a jury or a judge-and-counsel. Dewey is very helpful here, when he defines inquiry. For us, in this book, Aristotelian practical

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judgement is central to what Dewey calls the ‘transformation’ of the ‘indeterminate’ into the ‘determinate’: Inquiry is the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinction and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole. (Dewey quoted in Garrison 1999: 293)

The co-present group’s intelligent actions are, we claim, following Dewey, constitutively determinate and relational. In every functioning of the co-present group, judgements move a situation towards a ‘unified whole’, and for us, that is a group outcome that ‘gets the group where it wants to go’. What is brought to bear on the outcome includes conceptually rich deliberations that would include varieties of ‘knowings’—theoretical (theoria and episteme) and practical (techne and poeisis), to expand the Aristotelian epistemology. But it also includes the normative—what will work and its ethos (praxis). Co-present groups function in nonlinear deliberations to make sense of struggles, as we have seen. This necessitates the group thinking differently about what is emerging, and what itself emerges in the co-present group is often a novel response to that situation. As Guile, a prominent writer on educative practices and the wider world of work, has put it, ‘recontextualisation’ captures ‘the forms of relationship between knowing, learning and acting in and between the contexts of education and work’ (2014: 80). For Guile, and for us, the notion of ‘context’ is entwined with the purposes of a group. These may take the form of normative deliberations, such as the epistemological ‘What knowings contribute to where we are going’? or they may include how a group makes decisions, asking: ‘Does this intelligent action get us where we want to go—to the Deweyan unified outcome we seek’? Guile supports practical judgements as a ‘mediated relationship’ (2014: 82) between traditional theory and the immediacy of practice contexts and concludes that these judgements are found in ‘inferrings’ made by groups that ‘commingle’ their various knowings ‘in a specific context to pick out the salient features of that situation or event’ (Guile 2014: 82). Overall, co-present groups cannot ‘know’ everything, nor should they expect to predict anything with complete certainty. By distilling what is salient to their particular circumstances, they signal to themselves and their members what is salient to the problem or issue at hand. This saliency is constructed through the fluidity and nonlinearity of decisional relationships found in co-present groups, as defined in Chap. 6. Central to the reduction that decisions entail (e.g. ‘we won’t do this, we will do that’), are the purposes a co-present group embraces. Reduction is deliberationin-action, and it is utterly normative. There is a ‘good’ in view. Following Brandom (1994), we have called this process of reductive saliency a process of ‘inferential understanding’: Judgements and justifications of how one proceeded, or intends to proceed, or (more commonly) finds oneself proceeding, are articulable in warranted ways depending on the values and norms of one’s community … We need not be too precious about this. There will be a range of these assertoric practices, all over-lapping, from the community of a workplace, of a profession, of a citizenry, and even up to the general level of humanity itself. Right across this range … inferential understanding, and the assertoric practices in which they are

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embedded, are normative. The public, socially-located articulation of justifications reveals understanding … which co-constructs practice. (Beckett and Hager 2002: 192–193)

Thus, we bring to reduction some selectivity. We make considered judgements about what to select. In this final section of Chap. 8, we have shown how and why co-present groups ‘convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole’ (as Dewey put it). They are best placed to do this by making practical judgements that drive forward together all the three elements: inferential understandings, desired purposes and agreed outcomes. General complexity thinking enriches co-present groups by establishing the holism of practices, whilst accommodating the reductions required for those copresent groups to get their work done. These range down to individuals who, as complex systems, are changed by participatory relations in such co-present groups, and also range right up—to the widest social significance that ripples of understandings, purposes and outcomes from a co-present group may convey.

References Beckett, D., & Hager, P. (2002). Life, work and learning: Practice in Postmodernity. London: Routledge. Bedau, M. A. (2002). Downward causation and the autonomy of weak emergence. Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology, 6(1), 5–50. https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/principia/ article/view/17003/15556. Accessed November 23, 2016. Brandom, R. (1994). Making it explicit: Reasoning, representing, and discursive commitment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Byrne, D., & Callaghan, G. (2014). Complexity theory and the social sciences: The state of the art. London & New York: Routledge. Cilliers, P. (2001). Boundaries, hierarchies and networks in complex systems. International Journal of Innovation Management, 5(2), 135–147. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1363-9196(01)00031-2. Cilliers, P. (2006). On the importance of a certain slowness. Emergence: Complexity and Organization, 8(3), 105–112. Cilliers, P. (2008). Responses. In C. Gershenson (Ed.), Complexity: 5 questions (pp. 27–32). Copenhagen: Automatic Press. Cilliers, P. (2013). A crisis of knowledge: Complexity, understanding and the problem of responsible action. In P. Derkx & H. Kunneman (Eds.), Genomics and democracy: Towards a ‘lingua democratica’ for the public debate on genomics (pp. 37–59). Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi. DeVries, W., & Triplett, T. (2000). Knowledge, mind, and the given: Reading wilfred sellars’s “Empiricism and the philosophy of mind” (contains full text of “EPM”). Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company Inc. Dewey, J., & Bentley, A. (1989). Knowing and the known. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The later works: 1949–1952 (Vol. 16, pp. 2–294). Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press (Original work published 1949). Garrison, J. (1999). John Dewey’s theory of practical reasoning. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 31(3), 291–312. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-5812.1999.tb00467.x. Guile, D. (2014). Professional knowledge and professional practice as continuous recontextualisation: A social practice perspective. In M. Young & J. Muller (Eds.), Knowledge, expertise and the professions (pp. 78–92). London & New York: Routledge.

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Hager, P., & Halliday, J. (2006). Recovering informal learning: Wisdom, judgement and community (Lifelong Learning Book Series) (Vol. 7). Dordrecht: Springer. Hager, P., & Johnsson, M. C. (2009). Learning to become a professional orchestral musician: Going beyond skill and technique. Journal of Vocational Education & Training, 61(2), 103–118. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13636820902933221. Lancaster, J. (2012). The complex systems of practice. In P. Hager, A. Lee, & A. Reich (Eds.), Practice, learning and change: Practice theory perspectives on professional learning (pp. 119–131). Dordrecht: Springer. Morin, E. (2007). Restricted complexity, general complexity. In D. Aerts, C. Gershenson, & B. Edmonds (Eds.), Worldviews, science and us: Philosophy and complexity (pp. 5–29). Singapore: World Scientific Publishing. Polanyi, M. (1966). The tacit dimension. New York: Doubleday. Rouse, J. (2007). Social practices and normativity. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 37(1), 46–56. https://doi.org/10.1177/0048393106296542. Rovelli, C. (2016). Reality is not what it seems: The journey to quantum gravity. UK: Allen Lane. Salomon, G., & Perkins, D. N. (1998). Individual and social aspects of learning. Review of Research in Education, 23, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.2307/1167286. Salzman, M. (1994). The soloist. New York: Random House.

Part III

Dissolving Problems as Complexity Emerges

Chapter 9

Fresh Approaches to Agency and Learning

9.1 The General Argument of Part III Part I of this book has identified several major difficulties common to received accounts of agency, expertise, practice, skills, learning and related concepts. These difficulties emerge progressively from Chap. 2 through to Chap. 5 as follows: • The near-universal assumption that the individual agent is the appropriate unit of analysis for understanding human performances fails to take account of crucial social aspects of human performances (This assumption is prominent in Chaps. 2–5). • There is a prevalent tendency to attempt to understand human performances by atomising them into their component parts. The sum of the parts is then assumed to be equivalent to the original whole. Part I showed repeatedly that this strategy is not notably successful. That is, summing the parts does not capture holism because it black-boxes relations. To capture holism, you need to say informative things about relations (This is prominent in Chaps. 3–5.). • A focus on the more overtly cognitive aspects of human performances results in ‘thin’ understandings that overlook many other crucial aspects of performances, such as affect, know-how, the role of judgement, and the various influences of context (This is noted in Chaps. 3 and 4, and is particularly prominent in Chap. 5.). The Part II accounts of co-present groups, complexity thinking and the interactions between these two, served to deepen our understanding of each of these major difficulties. As well, these Part II accounts pointed the way forward for us to reconceptualise agency, expertise, practice, skills, learning and related concepts in ways that dissolve the above three major difficulties. As noted above, first, Part II set out a conclusive case for rejecting the prevalent assumption that the individual agent is the appropriate unit of analysis for understanding human performances of all kinds. This assumption fails conspicuously to account for the ubiquitous case of performances by co-present groups. In fact, as

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this Part III will argue, social relations are often crucial even for understanding performances by seemingly lone individuals. Indeed, it turns out to be more fruitful to regard group or team instances of agency, expertise, practice, skills and related concepts as the typical norm, with performances by seemingly lone individuals being a limiting case. Second, Part II served to undermine the prevailing assumption that atomising human performances into their component parts is the key to achieving understanding, as noted above. This strategy fails because it seeks for understanding in the wrong place. Whilst reduction is useful up to a point and for some purposes, it fails to capture the holism (‘seamless know-how’) that characterises quality human performances. That is, by far the major feature of human performances is their holism, which is constituted by the relations between the parts, in particular, the processes of the relational functioning over time. Seeking understanding of the whole by atomising into discrete parts is futile as it dismisses the very features of the performances that require explanation. Of course, atomisation may be useful in some cases, for example, for identifying the main causes of a poor performance, but not for understanding the whole. As we saw in Chap. 8, complexity thinking explains this situation. Atomisation into component parts is a severe form of reduction that effectively eliminates from discussion the very features that underpin the original holism. This reductive loss of explanatory power is particularly significant where human beings are components of the whole, as in a co-present group. Third, the many case descriptions of co-present groups in Part II demonstrated the futility of the traditional over-reliance on cognitive aspects to explain human performances. Other dimensions, such as the affective, the volitional and the dispositional, have been shown to be essential components of any satisfactory understanding of human performances. Employing our accounts of co-present groups and of complexity thinking, we will, first, propose novel understandings of agency and learning. These novel understandings will provide the impetus for us to reconceptualise expertise, practice, skills, competence and associated concepts. These novel understandings and reconceptualisations will dissolve the trio of faulty assumptions identified in Part I by • stressing the importance of analysis at the level of groups, rather than the almost exclusive focus on individuals; • insisting on holistic, relational understandings, rather than the black-box or Lego approaches to relationality; • recognising the central role of judgement (‘professional judgement’, ‘practical judgement’), and the oft-overlooked contribution of affect, where judgement crucially involves dimensions other than the cognitive (or rational). To set the stage for Part III, we can usefully expand on each of these three corrective measures as follows: • Analysis at the level of groups rather than the sole focus on individuals As was argued in Part II, several aspects of groups will be vital for our analysis. First, a co-present group involves two distinct kinds of complex system: the group itself, and

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each of the group members viewed as an individual participant. Second, the ongoing patterns of relational functioning within the co-present group produces changes to both kinds of complex system. Collectively, the individual members interact to create the group’s functioning and its emergent processes. At the same time, individual group members, each perhaps uniquely, are changed by their participation in the group processes. In these simultaneous dual co-present group processes, the two distinct kinds of complex system involved act to mutually create one another. That is, individual co-present group members collectively create the group’s functioning and its emergent characteristics, whilst, simultaneously, each individual is changed in distinctive ways by the group’s functioning. The identities of both kinds of complex system, individual members and the group as a whole, evolve simultaneously. In complexity thinking terms, the properties of emergent complex systems arise from two directions: from the interactions of system components with the system as a whole and from the interactions of system components with one another. Further, the notion of groups and individuals interacting applies across multiple levels of analysis. The two interacting levels described in the previous paragraph can refer, respectively, to a co-present group and to the individual humans that are the members of that group. Equally, the two interacting levels might apply to co-present groups interacting with one another, with the various particular co-present groups constituting the individual level. Hence, given the possibility of complex systems of complex systems of complex systems, multiple levels of analysis are pertinent. Thus, we need to employ different levels of analysis depending on the kinds of issues that we are seeking to understand. Working at the holistic levels of groups and group interactions introduces different layers of explanation for different purposes. All such understandings are necessarily partial, but they are much more explanatory than theorising that purports to reveal all by focusing exclusively on analysis at the individual level. • Developing holistic, relational understandings We maintain that the traditional atomisation strategies need to be displaced by a holistic relational approach. This new direction comes at a cost. As was argued in Chap. 8, complexity thinking entails that no complete understanding of the whole is possible. The wholes that are our focus involve groups of humans and are very complex systems that are characterised by ongoing emergent processes. Various aspects of their relational processes (or functioning), for example, some of their affective dimensions, are ineluctably tacit. Any description of the whole system or its ongoing processes is necessarily selective. It presents a reduction of the whole. It represents the perspective from which the description was made. Thus, each human participant in the system’s relational processes will likely have a somewhat different understanding of the emergent outcomes. In each case, their description will be a selective version of the whole process that transpired. In addition, as stressed already, different levels of description will be appropriate for developing understanding of different aspects of the complex whole. So, complexity thinking combined with the co-present group concept enables us to gain significant understandings of the relational processes of complex systems and

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their emergents, the cost being that such understandings are necessarily incomplete. This deficiency parallels the well-known limitation of the traditional atomisation strategy. Its attraction was the promise of a complete listing of the system’s atoms. But the inherent defect was that the sum of the atoms constituted but a pale imitation of the whole. We can work with the limitation that all descriptions of a complex system are necessarily incomplete by developing different levels of description for different purposes. For instance, in Chap. 8 (Sect. 8.3.3), we saw that a typical profession constitutes an extremely complex system that encompasses the professional association, its members and a range of other interested parties. Whilst there is no such thing as a complete description of the complex whole that comprises the profession at any point in time, depending on our particular interest, we can develop informative descriptions that largely serve our particular purposes. Likewise, though the outputs from the many co-present groups that carry out the multiple tasks that are the responsibility of the professional association are necessarily a reduction from each particular group’s overall functioning, if done well they are useful outputs that serve their intended purpose within the professional association. • The central role of judgement Both of the above corrective measures provide cogent reasons for judgement playing a central role in the topics being investigated in this book. Given that descriptions of complex systems are necessarily incomplete and that different levels of description serve different purposes, there is an inescapable need for shrewd judgements when choosing what kinds of system descriptions to work with for particular purposes. Such wise judgements represent a balance between autonomy and conformity. The judges are required to take account of the particularities and contingencies of the given situation, whilst simultaneously being subject to a range of normative considerations. As discussed previously, there is no certainty about such judgements—they can be mistaken and they are defeasible. Nevertheless, we cannot do without them. Such judgements encapsulate how complexity thinking combined with the copresent group concept offers a productive alternative to the three seeming insuperable difficulties identified in Part I. These judgements emanate from group processes rather than being the work of lone individuals; they are holistic rather than atomistic, and they are shaped significantly by affective, practical and other such factors, rather than being confined to merely cognitive considerations. The many examples of group processes discussed so far in this book illustrate the crucial role that such practical judgements play in the full gamut of human activities. In Chap. 1, we described four typical examples of the kinds of small groups that are ubiquitous in human life. Each such group, be it the jury, the mother–baby dyad, the sub-school in a larger school or the string or jazz quartet, contributes its value through holistic practical judgements made on the way through and as outcomes of the group’s processes. These are better conceptualised as ‘co-present’ groups, which, we showed in Chap. 6, articulate some quite specific functional features, such as nonlinearity and distributed leadership, in specific places (i.e. sites) of practices, over time.

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Accordingly, here in Chap. 9, we present the main groundwork of these three corrective measures which, we claim, overcomes the problems identified in Part I by detailing our novel accounts of agency and learning. As was stated at the outset of Chap. 2, agency is the human capacity to act in the world. It refers to the basic capacity of human organisms to interact with and alter their environment. This interaction and alteration is two-way in that it brings about changes both in the human organisms and their environment. Many instances of these interactional changes in humans are what, in Chap. 5, were called learning. Hence, agency and learning have very close conceptual links. Both concepts apply to fundamental, complex, human relational activity. Agency and learning are closely connected fundamental concepts because moving around within and adapting to the environment are constitutive features of ongoing human existence. However, as argued in Part II, reality is very complex in that our descriptions (or understandings) of it always involve some reduction from the whole. Thus, our descriptions (or understandings) of agency and learning, both of their processes and of their outcomes, always involve some reduction from the whole. The most holistic kinds of agency and learning involve complex systems of humans transacting with other complex systems of humans to produce outcomes that are beyond the capacity of any single one of the complex systems of humans to attain alone. When complex systems of humans transact with other complex systems of humans, both the agency involved and the learning that emerges typically occur at various levels: first, at the level of the transacting complex systems (multi-group agency and learning); second, at the level of the individual complex systems (group agency and learning) and third, at the level of the individual members of the complex system (individual agency and learning). When dealing with such complex interactions, attempts to specify, or to infer (or translate) either the various types of agency involved, or the learning that emerges at any one of the several levels, inevitably involves reduction from the whole. Getting that inference productive is challenging. As we discussed in Chap. 5, there are various ‘levels’ of phenomena, say, from classrooms or other workplaces, right down to persons (each person being replete with neurons, implicating systemic complexity). In a discussion, of the productive potential of ‘learning analytics’ where ‘big data’ keeps accumulating, Lodge et al. (2017: 387) conclude that ‘[d]ata-driven inference … does not appear to be sufficient to provide a clear picture of psychological and social phenomena such as learning’. Paradoxically, the more precisely (that is, specifically) we try to build inferences towards particular instances of agency or of learning, the more reductive will be our specification. What is gained by the most productive inferences is a level of systemic meaningfulness which this book supports, namely that of the co-present group. But to do that, we need to minimise any claims that inferences from low-level, universal phenomena, such as neurons, can directly represent or express ‘learning’. Neurons do not and cannot learn. And, in like logical fashion, individuals can and do learn, but mainly, and best, through their associations in co-present groups—mainly, not ‘solo’. By focusing traditionally on the lowest levels of agency and learning (individual agency, individual learning and individual brains), common accounts have in effect

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maximised the degree of reduction, thereby restricting us to the thinnest, least holistic understandings. As well, such accounts have minimised the meaning-making that humans bring to their experiences of the world. In the case of learning, common or ‘received’ accounts have failed thereby to recognise crucial types of powerful learning and have restricted ‘human agency’ to the capacity for individuals to make meanings and act towards their realisation.

9.2 Constitutive Group Agency When groups of people gather to work, such as in an orchestra, or around an operating table, or in some school classrooms, what they bring to the doing of that work is a decisional capacity, distributed amongst those present. But they also bring some sense of shared commitment to the telos, or normative purpose, of the group, as we explored in Chap. 2. We had already named four ubiquitous examples of groups in Chap. 1 (the jury, the sub-school, the mother–baby dyad and the string quartet), then analysed them as potential co-present groups in Chap. 6. We return to them in this chapter. Complexity thinking offers a powerful recognition of these contributions to group activities. In fact, complexity relocates the decisional capacity from individuals to the shared normative buy-in of a group, as a feature of its very existence and functionality. That is, the dynamics of the group are, it has been argued in Chap. 6, constitutive of the decisionality and normativity of a group, which we then named as a co-present group. We concluded Chap. 6 with three examples of such groups, in the form of narratives: wine-tasting and judging (Ian); the futures trading floor (Ying); and TV comedy writing (Steve). The ways a co-present group functions generate decisionality and a sense of purpose, through the socio-material melding of the cognitive with the affective. Groups’ agency thus emerges from, and is constituted in, transactional relations, as Part II (particularly Chap. 7) explained. In this chapter, we want to show how this occurs, by advancing the notion of ‘constitutive agency’. This is a less reductive onto-epistemological account of a group, drawing differently than hitherto on groups’ inevitably normative and reasonable workings. Pauer-Studer (2014) has already claimed the notion of ‘constitutive agency’ in her critique of List and Pettit’s book, Group Agency (2011). She acknowledges that such a notion requires a ‘causal mechanism initiating certain movements and the reflective mind capable of making decisions triggering the casual sequence of movements’ (Pauer-Studer 2014: 1630). She maintains that these are unified normatively: ‘Being an agent requires that the standards constituting the practice of agency are in place’ (Pauer-Studer 2014: 1631). We might agree that this is fine for individuals, but how does this work for groups? Pauer-Studer emphasises sense-making:

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Group agents like companies, cartels, political parties and so on, must design their decision procedures and practices in a way that makes sense – given what they are and [what they] try to accomplish. (Pauer-Studer 2014: 1636)

These procedures and practices will ‘cohere with … self-understanding’ that enables the group to ‘come to justified outcomes which answer to the standards constituting their normative identity’ (Pauer-Studer 2014: 1636). We find this explicitly normative notion of constitutive group agency appealing in the world of professional practices and adult workplaces more generally. And it provides a novel way to advance complexity thinking into less reductive accounts of relationality. For Pauer-Studer, the ‘principles of practical reasoning’ apply in those group contexts (workplaces of various kinds), just as they do for individuals; we strive to make sense of what is happening with and around us. This is the ‘intelligibility’ criterion, and for groups, it is found in the constitutive identity-making which the group claims as its own. From our perspective, in a medical clinic, it is increasingly likely that interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary clinical structures will mark daily work life for busy staff. Physicians, nurses, allied and community health workers, office and management will combine in various ways for the welfare not just of the group practice but also for the patient/client. The focus is on the whole person, the case, and the shared decisions needed to progress the clinical situation, in its broadest sense (Beckett 2010, 2012). The direction of the group’s activities is the well-being of the patient; the ethic is caring, to this end. This is phronesis instantiated. Our account of groups’ agency, which takes as its exemplar the co-present group, such as, above, a medical team, acknowledges that Pauer-Studer’s notion of ‘constitutive agency’ has the right ingredients: people do indeed reflect and act in their individual quests to make life ‘intelligible’. This sense-making is indeed normative. We have standards, in the form of ideals, and purposes, which shape our ends—and we pursue them. Similar to Pauer-Studer, we also claim that groups can be regarded as constituted agentively: as wider versions of an individual quest. We (individually and collectively) are constituted in and through what we do. But we go even further. This book has shown in Part II that a co-present group is constitutable in and through its own activities, and those activities emerge from and thus make intelligible the group’s practice(s). This co-present intelligibility, emergent through the group’s practical judgements, is animated by agency and expertise— shaped by the contingencies of work and life, and not by a neat, linear emergence. Co-present groups occupy structures, and obviously functions arise from these, but such structures and functionality do not determine what emerges. Rather, co-present practical judgements give this normative momentum. For us, groups’ agency is valueladen through and through. What a co-present group takes on is inevitably normative; there is a telos (a purpose) which embeds the dynamics of the striving to bring it about (this is how intelligibility—making sense—is manifest). In a highly relational approach in her work on ‘intelligent virtue’, Annas (2011) claims, referring to individuals, Actions are related … not just chronologically but also by the relation of one being for the sake of another … the goals we have in life are nested. (2011: 121–122, emphasis in original)

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Co-present groups’ agency is expressed in making sense towards a telos by myriad practical reasonings (judgements and decisions). What such groups actually do is holistic and nonlinear. By this, we mean that groups like the ones we identified in Chap. 6 integrate human experiences: they materially, socially, cognitively and affectively address the focus of their attention. Intelligibility emerges through co-present group decisional dynamics. The intelligibility shown here is utterly normative. Whilst still referring to an individual ‘you’, Annas nonetheless has a key claim for ‘us’ (where ‘us’ could be a co-present group): Your actions fit into structured patterns in your life; a snapshot of what you are doing at one time turns out to reveal, when we think about these structures, what your broader aims and goals in life are … A life with any degree of complexity will surely have several larger goals within which smaller everyday goals are nested. But in fact once the structured way of thinking about our actions gets going, it turns out to have a unifying tendency which has us thinking about the goals revealed in our lives. (2011: 122)

Co-present groups inherit and require structures for their functionality; their constitutive agency is found in their capacity to move practices along, not in a linear way, nor with an over-reliance on cognitivist decisionality, but rather with a holistic perception of what practices in particular contexts are for—their telos. A co-present group’s striving for intelligibility is normative in that the ‘attractor’ is the shared adherence to such holistic perceptions—it is (in Annas’s term), the ‘unifying tendency:’ the health of the patient, the musicality of the performance, the justice of the litigation, and so on. What is co-presently agentive ‘is not thinking in the abstract about types of goal and how they could fit together, but thinking about how I [‘we’] can achieve … goals’. ‘It is practical thinking …’, states Annas (2011: 123).

9.3 Constitutive Group Agency and Spinoza’s ‘Wilful Rationality’ What would such an account of what we call ‘constitutive group agency’ need to contain? There are six features that jointly form that constitution: 1. Socio-materiality—the embodiments the world contains, as evident in the relationships that mark out entities such as associations, institutions and persons and artefacts; 2. Accountability—the ownership of normative responsibility for activity, through the ‘affective’; 3. Decisionality—the capacity for efficacious judgements; 4. Attunement—the discriminatory confidence that a group’s decisionality can ‘hit the target’; 5. Justificatory expertise—the capacity a group has to assemble authoritative reasons for decisions and actions; 6. Communicability—the capacity to disseminate well-justified decisions.

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We refrain from analysing each of these in what follows. Complexity thinking, as this book sets it out, is non-reductive (or minimally so) and nonlinear, so we want to maintain the co-present group experience as the unit of analysis. Granted, this list can be ‘read’ as a linear and temporal sequence from 1 to 6 of the features above: when a group gets together on a project (that counts as the ‘socio-material’ startup, or 1), which they know they have to grapple with, it can be, then, a sequence of ‘storming, norming, performing and adjourning’ (as the management textbooks sloganise), broadly following 2–6. And when there is a budget, and time is money, this linearity, or sequencing, is important. For our purposes, these six constitutive features of group agency will be regarded as ‘disentangleable’—so we can see what they each mean—but the group’s experience is not ‘disaggregateable’. Perhaps the main challenge is to move beyond the traditional philosophical focus on rationality (alone) as the driver of features 3, 4, 5 and 6, above. Are there, as PauerStuder argues, ‘principles of practical reasoning’ that apply equally to groups, as they do to individuals? And a reminder: this book starts from, and stays with, the ontoepistemological significance of groups, not from the assumption that a group basis for practical reasoning (or any other aspect of groups’ functionality) is parasitic upon a traditional individualistic account. Rather, as the book has unfolded, groups have become co-present groups (with the features outlined in Chap. 6). So, Part III, and especially this chapter, is exploring what we call an ‘onto-epistemology’ of co-present groups. Aspects of existence and knowledge are held together at a less reductive level of analysis by the agency we now ascribe to co-present groups, which, we claim, constitute such groups, through their sense-making activities. Sections 9.7 and 9.8 will show how this sense-making is apparent in groups’ ‘holistic practical reasoning’, which are decisional (that is, deliberative or determinant) learning phenomena. Thus, we argue across this chapter that agency and learning are co-constituted. To get to that, we argue that human sense-making experience in such groups is better conceptualised more holistically. The affect and decisional rationality are coimplicated in socio-materially normative sites of practice (in the list as 1, 2 and 3), where making a difference is effective, justifiable and communicable (in the list as 4, 5 and 6). Such co-implication of the affect with rationality is central to the functioning of a co-present group and constitutes its agency. Fortunately, the Western world already has a robust account of this co-implication. We now retrieve Spinoza’s account of rationality which is driven through willpower, that is, through ‘wilful’ human desiring, and we put it to work to advance holistic group agency. How do the intelligent actions of a group engage all the six features of our ‘constitutive group agency’? A deeper appreciation of the way Spinoza approaches acting, reasoning and willing (or the ‘affect’, or desiring) will show a holistic conceptualisation of human experience which he also began to see in the experiences of groups of humans. Spinoza disagreed with Descartes’ belief that the will is an entity that is part of our cogito (our thinking capacity), and therefore, a mentalistic substance, or entity,

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in contrast to an embodied substance or entity. This was Descartes’ famous ‘mind— body’ dualism—an ontological dualism that has gripped education throughout modern Western times (e.g. High versus Technical School), as articulated in Chaps. 2 and 5 of this book. The anti-Cartesian conception of the will that Spinoza developed in the Ethics provides, states Derry (2004), a ‘first step’ towards considering self-determination as ‘a specifically human process of coming to be in the world’ (2004: 119), with implications for specific learning through practices, such as those in professional work life around operating tables and in courtrooms and classrooms. ‘Coming to be’ human, or becoming a better human, is, for Spinoza, an emergent experience, where reasoning is willful and wilfully manifest in actions. We act out our desires for intelligibility of experience; we strive for betterment through forming desires as well as simultaneously reasoning towards their realisation. Daily workplace experiences, if trawled through, via ‘experience-based’ training, mentoring and coaching programmes, can be educatively powerful because they capitalise on the primal human need to make better sense of our surroundings. Our doings shape our knowings. New knowings change the knowers. This is significantly the case for humans who are fundamentally social creatures; it is through co-present groups that we most powerfully ‘see’ our Selves differently. Notions of the Self, especially as these revolve around self-efficacy, selfdetermination and self-belief, are often problematised by the nature of socio-material practices. In short, whilst these practices are individually agentive (‘How can I better myself?’), they imply and invoke identity construction and reconstruction, not merely via the individual’s efforts, but also, we claim, through co-present groups. Groups are agentive in their own right: they function as identity markers, as well as knowledge-makers. They both mark out and make manifest human experience in the holistic way Spinoza first articulated in his analysis of what we can call ‘wilful rationality expressed in actions’. This is important onto-epistemological work. What turns staff-as-a-group, into staff-as-a-team? In organisational development, corporate training and professional formation, there is a multitude of practices and techniques to bring this about, along with just as many ‘facilitators’ of the changes deemed desirable. Spinoza’s approach may seem a long way from such philosophical and pedagogical interests, but let us recall and refine the six features of our outline of group agency (listed 1–6 above). We can encapsulate them in a Spinozan refinement of the earlier single definitional statement in this way: A group is agentive to the extent that it maintains the holistic nature of experience (the sociomaterial, affective and cognitive all apparent), in the co-construction of practical judgements, which emerge within wilful (that is, desirably normative) activities.

This approach to agency takes seriously the relational and decisional characteristics of human life. It supplants the traditional, ‘thin’ approach, which assumes both a Cartesian mentalism, and within that, a will which is exercised without constraint. This ‘thin’ approach assumes ‘I’ am the author of ‘me’, and that I know this, ineluctably, and that ‘my’ willpower reigns supreme (and only in ‘my’ interests).

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Spinoza tackles these Cartesian assumptions head-on: Part IV of his Ethics is memorably titled ‘Of Human Bondage; or of the Strength of the Emotions’. A consideration of the main parts of the Ethics, in the light of the definition above, will show that Spinoza 1. 2. 3. 4.

takes experience holistically, including its materiality (embodiment); embeds judgements in strivings (or volitions); takes subjectivity as only partly ‘my’ construction; requires that reasoning contribute in the construction of self-hood (and that reasoning is a public phenomenon); and 5. expects that coming to understanding something is how free will is exercised. So, a more robust account of group agency will itself emerge if Spinoza’s insights into the holistic nature of wilful rationality and its relationality are explored. We now turn to this detail.

9.4 Spinoza and Onto-epistemology In his Preface to Part V of the Ethics (‘Of the Power of the Intellect; or of Human Freedom’), Spinoza attacks Descartes’ [s]toical opinion … that the soul or mind is united specially to a certain part of the brain called the pineal gland, which the mind by the mere exercise of the will is able to move in different ways. (1675/1949: 252)

The forceful rebuttal of Cartesian dualism by Spinoza centres upon a naturalist, or realist, ontology and a rationalist epistemology: there is one kind of ‘thing’ in the world, and we can know it by reason. How does he derive this curious analysis? Much earlier in the Ethics (Part III: ‘On the Origin and Nature of the Emotions’), Spinoza sets up his own approach: ‘[W]hen men say that this or that action of the body springs from the mind which has command over the body, they do not know what they say’ (1675/1949: 131). He cites several instances where humans are gripped by their emotions: ‘[E]xperience shows over and over again that there is nothing men have less power over than the tongue, and there is nothing they are less able to do than to govern their appetites’ (132). We are deluded when we regard our will as the unconstrained operation of a discrete cogito: Thus the madman, the chatterer, the boy and others of the same kind, all believe that they speak of a free command of the mind, whilst, in truth, they have no power to restrain the impulse that they have to speak, so that experience itself, no less than reason, clearly teaches that men believe themselves to be free simply because they are conscious of their own actions, knowing nothing of the causes by which they are determined; it teaches, too, that the decrees of the mind [the attribute of ‘thinking’] are nothing but the appetites themselves, which differ, therefore, according to the different temper of the body. (133)

Thus, for Spinoza, ontology and epistemology combine:

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All this plainly shows that the decree of the mind, the appetite, and the determination of the body are co-incident in Nature, or rather that they are one and the same thing, which, when it is considered under the attribute of thought and manifested by that, is called a ‘decree’, and when it is considered under the attribute of extension and is deduced from the laws of motion and rest, is called a ‘determination’. (133)

Thinking and extension (embodiment) are some main ways humans manifest themselves in the world. We are embodied, thoughtful creatures, made by God/Nature, and constrained by this. Our purpose is to come to better understandings of Nature and therefore of ourselves. Spinoza appreciates how partial and tentative these understandings are, although where he looks is both socio-material and naturalist, or realist: For what the body can do, no one has hitherto determined, that is to say, experience has taught no one hitherto what the body, without being determined by the mind, can do and what it cannot do from the laws of Nature alone, in so far as Nature is considered merely as corporeal. For no one as yet has understood the structure of the body so accurately as to be able to explain all its functions … Again, nobody knows by what means or by what method the mind moves the body. (Spinoza 1675/1949: 131)

What is required for better understanding here are ‘adequate’, rather than ‘inadequate’, ideas. These ideas are not inert—they are not ‘propositional’ knowledge lying about in, or filling up the empty vessel of, our brains. On the contrary, they are dynamic—they are ‘knowings’—and in the actions of thinking, we seek ‘adequacy’ in causal explanations which ‘clearly and distinctly perceive’ effects (128). Inadequate (‘mutilated’ and ‘confused’) ideas are partial because their ‘effect[s] cannot be understood by means of the cause alone’ (128). We are subject to ‘passions’ which get in the way of clarity—processes of thinking things through—and therefore of ‘adequate ideas’, those we reasonably hold. We are players in our own games of sense-making. These ‘adequate ideas’ are not to be regarded as states of the mind, but rather as these various processes of thinking of something—enactments of sense-making. The mind is the locus of the thinking we do but the experience of thinking is intentional. This means we do not normally catch ourselves having an idea (a state); instead, we normally just go about thinking (a process). We just do it. We are agentive creatures, as shown in our thinking, which shows what we strive for: our desires emerge through our willing of, and for, intelligibility of experiences, and for betterment in our situations. As Steinberg puts it, ideas for Spinoza are, by nature or essentially, representative of, or “about” something, or have content. … In seventeenth century terms, ideas have “objective reality”, in modern terms, “intentionality”. (2000: 35)

But the arrow of intention is towards intelligibility of experience. The kind of thinking process, or intentionality, which Spinoza is keen to advance in pursuit of ‘adequacy’ or truth (and the avoidance of ‘inadequacy’ or falsity), is striving after clarity—does the world seem more ‘sensible’ than before? In Part II: Nature and Origin of the Mind in Ethics, Spinoza states it this way:

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[F]alsity consists solely in the privation which mutilated and confused ideas involve. … [W]hen we say that a man assents to what is false and does not doubt it, we do not say that he is certain, but merely that he does not doubt, that is to say, he assents to what is false because there are no causes sufficient to make his imagination waver. (1675/1949: 120)

Spinoza expects humans to be truth-seekers by keeping open the possibility of ‘falsity’ (error), so that acts of truth-seeking are what mark the emergence of understanding. This probabilism is what makes his analysis appealing for many postCartesian, broadly constructivist educators today. His rationality and his naturalism come together most fully here, and they do so dynamically, almost, dare we say, phenomenologically. He positions this convergence against not only a Cartesian dualism, but also against what we have later come to know as a Lockean empiricism. He is, in our terms, and like Sellars (quoted in DeVries and Triplett 2000), an anti-Givenist; the world is not Given, although our experience of it is. Spinoza puts rationality to work in enacting thinking, not in uncovering images of what is either ‘out there’ or ‘in us:’ Those that think that ideas consist of images which are formed in us by meeting with external bodies persuade themselves that those ideas of things of which we can form no similar image are not ideas, but mere fancies constructed by the free power of the will. They look upon ideas, therefore, as dumb pictures on a tablet, and, being prepossessed with this prejudice, they do not see that an idea, in so far as it is an idea, involves affirmation or negation. Again, those who confound words with the idea or with the affirmation itself which the idea involves, think that they can will contrary to their perception because they affirm or deny something in words alone contrary to their perception. It will be easy for us, however, to divest ourselves of these prejudices if we attend to the nature of thought, which in no way involves the conception of extension, and by doing this we clearly see that an idea, since it is a mode of thought, is not an image of anything, nor does it consist of words. (1675/1949: 121, emphasis added)

Whilst it is undeniable that experiences are, indeed, ‘given’ to us, their perceptual intensity—their ability to incite ‘passions’—is, for Spinoza, only part of what it is to be human. They are the part that holds us in ‘human bondage’. Perceptions are mediated by what draws out the humanity of these experiences, by what liberates us from such ‘bondage’. And what liberates us is what constrains us—our rationality, that is to say, our activities as thinkers, or our psychological intentionality. This constraint, or mediation, consists in the rational work—not the sensual, passionate work—which experiences perform. He draws attention to the mindfulness of experiences whilst acknowledging their corporeality. Our ‘thinking things through’ stays with the ‘thingness’ of all experience (its holism) but represents it through a naturalistic striving for better understandings—for an emergent intelligibility. The clearer and more distinct these understandings are, the more ‘adequate’ they are; that is, the better they explain, or ‘make sense’ in the world, and therefore our experiences of it. The ‘affirmation or negation’ of an idea is, then, Spinoza’s way of capturing the phenomenal force our thinking possesses. We do not normally stand in propositional relationships to our thinking, yet Western education has calibrated achievement in precisely those terms: ‘knowing that x …’ is high-status learning; ‘knowing how to x …’ is low-status learning, as we have noted in Chaps. 2 and 5.

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We do not often ‘have thoughts’ (propositions); we almost always ‘find ourselves thinking’ (activity), and such thinking has a stance to whatever it is we are thinking about (the ‘aboutness’ factor, or intentionality). We find ourselves in favour of, and against, thoughts we are actually having, whilst we are having them. We are, thus, players in the construction of our own rationality, or ‘reasonability’. We weigh up our situation, and judge our actions accordingly. Where there is willpower, there are reasons. Where there is a will, there are (rational) ways. This is SPINOZAN holism at work: we ‘do’ what we reasonably want (will or desire). Spinoza develops this ‘will we, or won’t we?’ psychology and makes the serious and central claim that ‘[t]he will and the intellect are nothing but the individual volitions and ideas themselves … the will and the intellect are one and the same’ (‘Proposition’ XLIX). Thus, ‘[i]n the mind there exists … no absolute faculty of willing or not willing. Only individual volitions exist, that is to say, this and that affirmation and this and that negation’ (Spinoza 1675/1949: 120). So, for Spinoza, where there is a will, there is reasonability and vice versa. How does the unity of the will and the intellect manifest itself? Simply, in self-preserving action, which encompasses the entire individual experience: This effort, when it is related to the mind alone, is called “will”, but when it is related at the same time to both the mind and body, is called “appetite”, which is therefore nothing but the essence of man, from the nature of which necessarily follow those things which promote his preservation, and thus he is determined to do those things. (‘Proposition’ IX: 136)

His naturalism is then expressed in this famous passage: From what has been said it is plain, therefore, that we neither strive for, wish, seek, nor desire anything because we think it to be good, but, on the contrary, we adjudge a thing to be good because we strive for, wish, seek or desire it. (136–137, emphasis added)

This striving is definitive of who we are, as virtuous beings, since it integrates ‘acting, living, and preserving our being (these three things have the same meaning) as reason directs, from the ground of seeking our own profit’ (‘Proposition’ XXIV: 205, emphasis added). How is this self-preservation productive for we ‘virtuous beings’, as a group, rather than just for the individual? At first, it seems Spinoza is committed to an atomist, asocial world, with a Hobbesian contract the only way to ‘seek our own profit’. We all share the same nature, so two heads—in fact, many heads—are better than one: There are many things, therefore, outside ourselves which are useful to us, and which, therefore, are to be sought. Of all these, none more excellent can be discovered than those which exactly agree with our nature … Nothing, therefore, is more useful to man than man. Men can desire, I say, nothing more excellent for the preservation of their being than … that all should together endeavour as much as possible to preserve their being, and that all should together seek the common good of all. (‘Proposition’ XVII Note: 203)

Self-preservation is, then, best pursued collectively. In our (social) actions, we show our (individual) pursuit of preservation. We should, on this analysis, expect to find our individual understandings of experience—where to ‘understand’ is to have

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‘adequate ideas’, as revealed in our thinking processes centred on willing reasoning, and shaped partly by the social world. This shaping starts within us, as Spinoza has shown in the unity of the will and reasoning, but seeks ‘external’ causalities. What we know first is not what we know best: we seek what science, for example, can supply, here. As we are fundamentally truth-seekers, he accordingly urges humans to be open-minded and even-handed, in fact, to be quite virtuously ‘reason’able: [T]o hate no one, to despise no one, to mock no one, to be angry with no one, and to envy no one … to be content with his own, and to be helpful to his own neighbour, not from any womanish pity, from partiality, or superstition, but by the guidance of reason alone … (124)

9.5 Groups’ Agency and Holism This Spinozan analysis of ‘wilful rationality’ began with five features of a richer conception of agency, drawn from his Ethics, which, we argue, supplants the traditional ‘thin’ model, in favour of a robust notion of group agency. These five features show the onto-epistemological scope of our enquiry in this book: how we experience the world, and who we are, or become, coalesce in the quest for intelligibility. Those five Spinozan features emphasise self-hood as embedded in the material, socially located and decisional nature of human experience. So, a holistic ontoepistemological claim is made, because it includes the emergent nature of intelligibility or sense-making. Spinoza’s (moral) psychology has been used in this chapter to advance this richer ‘constitutive’ conception of agency, in favour of the power co-present groups have, not just to function (that is, to achieve what is expected of them, by others and within themselves), but also to function normatively—to ‘will-towards’ something—to enact intentions through practical reasoning which co-implicates deliberations about the good, the true and the ethical. The link between the richer conception of agency presented here and workplace learning is ‘freedom’ in Spinoza’s terms or ‘free will’, as Vygotsky (trans. 1997) referred to it. The key is to accept the possibility that will is ‘inextricably linked to intellect’ (Derry 2004: 115) and that, as she continues, [t]o be educated is also a process of which becoming free is intrinsically a part, for to be educated is not to ‘know’ a range of propositions or perspectives but to understand the reason for holding particular beliefs and rejecting others. (Derry 2004: 115, emphasis added)

Every practitioner should be able to articulate and justify the relevant work-related distinctions required by routine and non-routine experiences, and be free to move between the two, and to justify this movement. We develop this main feature of our co-constitutive account of agency and learning in Sect. 9.6, and further in Sect. 9.8, where we claim that this is equally true of groups; in fact, it is a main onto-epistemological feature of a co-present group. Its functions are holistic in that a group generates entry into the ‘space of reasons’—an emergent

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activity impelled by normativity—attractors, a telos and so on—which shape desiring or willing to do better. Sellars puts this authoritatively for us: The essential point is that in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says. (Sellars 1956: §36)

As Derry (2004: 114) suggests, this conception of freedom or free will is important yet difficult to understand as it is somewhat counterintuitive to common sense beliefs. But understanding this requirement to justify (from within ‘the space of reasons’) is critical, since ‘[t]o be guided by adequate rather than inadequate knowledge is to be free from external determinations’ (Derry 2004: 117). The determinations, or judgements, we make in co-present groups, arise in less reductive (that is, in complex) thinking, even when we utilise external experiences. It is this ‘adequate’ knowing that workers need to make sound professional judgements and to be confident in making them. This adequate knowledge is not propositional, but, rather, is experiential, and it is centred (cf. Sellars) in ‘reason-giving:’ ‘knowing’ is found in the ‘space of reasons’, and a co-present group is impelled into that space. Moreover, it is the decisional nature of these experiences to which Spinoza draws attention, by recasting thought as thinking, and constructing a holistic—materially, phenomenally rich—account of human action. This is akin to Aristotelian phronesis and redolent of the Rylean tradition of respect for ‘knowing how’. By contrast, propositional knowledge, or ‘knowing that’, is not knowledge manifest in the ability to determine actions, nor in being consciously aware of the reasons pertinent to making the decisions that led to those actions, nor in providing insight into what would make a worker genuinely competent. However, these requirements of a robust epistemological approach, arising as they do in the world of adults’ work, are satisfied by the Spinozan analysis we have set out above. Furthermore, we have made an ontological claim. This self-determination is about coming to be in the world. In its intentional decisionality, it generates and regenerates groups’ and their members’ self-hoods or identities. Understanding this connection, which runs from the epistemological to the ontological, or from practices to identities, marks the transformation a group or a member goes through in undertaking workplace learning of the deeply reflective and broadly experiential kind and provides insights into how to encourage it. For groups and for individuals, both the integration of the will with rationality and the significance of self-determination or preservation, establish group agency on a more robust conceptual basis, across the nonlinear, less reductive terrain of complexity thinking.

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9.6 Groups’ Agency and Judgements How do judgements fit with this holistic group agency? For Guile, the contextuality of particular groups and the way they progress their activities is apparent through judgements: ‘[f]rom this perspective, human judgement is the primary unit of knowledge’ (2014: 82). Guile follows Brandom (2000) in his suggestion that ‘we develop the capability [to manifest understanding to others] … as we learn to participate in the social practice of giving and asking for reasons’ (Guile 2014: 82). In our terms, these social practices are both holistic and normative—they involve contentious and purposeful activities—and, as Guile claims, ‘we inhabit a mediated environment where we engage in intellectual or political debates, social events or work processes, that are, in many instances, characterised by the commingling of the theoretical and everyday …’ (2014: 80). By way of an example, he claims that what doctors do is commingle knowledge in practical judgements, which are normative because these judgements are all too often implicit or tacit in nature: they occur in the flux of working in a hospital or in general practice without explicit verbalisation. This does not mean, however, that a doctor is unable, if pressed, to articulate reasons for their diagnosis and subsequent course of action. (Guile 2014: 81)

And, in support of the analysis in this chapter, paying attention (‘attuning’) to the particular ‘seeings’ in a situation, viewed holistically, is a mark of an emergent professional capacity, especially since one’s peers require an individual practitioner to justify her judgements. Guile elaborates on this point: [T]he challenge for aspiring professionals is to develop the capability to use disciplinary knowledge, in conjunction with professional experience, as a resource in a specific context to pick out the salient features of that situation or event, and to then infer what follows and how to act. Moreover, it is this mediated relationship … that constitutes the basis of professional reasoning. (Guile 2014: 82, emphasis added)

Normative and holistic judgements thus contribute to ‘constitutive group agency’, which itself marks the authority a co-present group has, to drive practice in a particular field. At work, we value the innovative—we want creative, holistic practitioners who can work with others to come up with unique and efficacious responses and solutions. Working with peers involves Guile’s ‘mediated relationships’. The notion of the ‘mediation’ of these relationships assumes greater prominence in Sects. 9.8 and 9.9, because, as we develop shortly in this chapter, holistic practical reasonings or judgements are how we ‘infer what follows’ and ‘how to act’. These co-constituted phenomena (the acting and the inferring) drive a group’s activities forward. We argue (in Sect. 9.9) that this analysis supplants the currently fashionable ‘entanglement’ as a metaphor for the activities of co-present groups. What we and Guile call ‘mediation’ is similar to current explorations by philosophers into distributed or extended cognition, where ‘we start from the version of extended cognition known as cognitive integration … [in which] external resources are integrated into an extended cognitive system by way of a process of coordination’ (Menary and Kirchhoff 2016: 49), thus ‘we need to study expertise in action’ (51).

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Using empirical examples, such as playing cricket, and the growth in mathematical capacities in an Amazonian tribe, and a Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986) analysis of expertise, Menary and Kirchhoff conclude that ‘cognitive practices, understood as cultural practices, extend expertise by transforming, and thereby extending, our cognitive abilities’ (Menary and Kirchhoff 2016: 58). Other sites of extended cognition can be found in sports teams (Williamson and Cox 2016), yoga (McIlwain and Sutton 2016) and music performance (Geeves et al. 2016). Indeed, for Geeves et al., ‘integration’, or, in our terms, mediation, is apparent when musicians ‘chunk … pre-existing or on-the-fly concepts according to a variety of variables’ (2016: 125) as they perform: Freed from being stuck within or between a particular level of chunking, expert musicians are able to allocate attention – in line with an individual and/or emergent group “chunking” style and/or their interaction – to recall encoded material in a way that best meets the varying demands with which they are presented in any given performance moment. (2016: 125)

Here, we see that mediation, or ‘integrating’, is a meaning-making phenomenon, in that the relationality that is manifest in the ‘doing’ (the playing, calculating and performing) generates meaningfulness through ‘cultural practices’. Cultural practices are groups-at-work. Group agency emerges from what is originally messy: unpredictable, irreducible and inexplicable—and seemingly entrenched in the traditional individualistic agency located in the sole practitioner. But that is a misconception. We have shown that, on the contrary, individualistic agency is embedded in, and contributes to, the agency of co-present groups at and through work. Our ‘constitutive’ account of group agency acknowledges that excellence is shown in and through holistic practical reasoning (phronesis) in less reductive contexts such as typical workplaces occupied by co-present groups. This is because of the following points: • Both the functional and the normative (cf. Pauer-Studer) are apparent in the ‘practical rationality’ of group decisionality. • Emergent wants and desires (the telos-inflected aspects of Spinoza’s wilful rationality, mainly the affective) are core features of groups’ dynamics. • Deliberation over, and determination of, ways ahead, amidst grappling with perhaps hitherto unknown situations, can generate responses which can be innovative. • This ‘innovative expertise’ is a virtue because such high-level skilfulness ‘shares the intellectual structure’ of a skill, namely practical reasoning. • And, the decisionality is normative: the shared ‘giving of accounts’ encapsulates and evokes the aspiration to learn what to do next, and what to do better, a virtue that is also obviously normative.

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9.7 The Co-constitution of Agency and Learning In Sect. 9.1, our ‘general argument’ for this part of our book made the claim that ‘[a]gency and learning are closely connected fundamental concepts because moving around within and adapting to the environment are constitutive features of ongoing human existence’. Accordingly, we now explore the ‘learning’ implications of the ‘constitutive group agency’ established so far in this chapter. But, as will be obvious, we do so by maintaining and extending these three main features of the book’s complexity-driven analysis: a focus on co-present groups, the emergence of their holistic understandings and their formation of judgements in knowing how to go on. Thus, ‘moving around within and adapting to the environment’ is fundamentally relational with implications for both agency and learning. We see these as two sides of the same coin—the coin of relationality. We have already prepared the way for this co-constitution of agency and learning. In Chap. 5, on Learning, we identified four fresh insights from sociocultural theorisations of learning (Sect. 5.4); what follows here endorses and adds depth to each of those insights. In particular, we noted that holism (humans’ socio-material, affective, and cognitive senses of self-hood) is, for many current scholars, effectively distributed amongst group members: [C]ontemporary work in sociomaterialist analyses takes the embodied nature of holistic experiences (especially the under-recognised role of the affective) very seriously, and constitutes this sociomaterialism relationally, that is, amongst individuals in groups, not within a single individual. (Sect. 5.4.3)

Our book takes this relationality further: ‘general complexity’ thinking takes the group as the basis of this distributionality. In Sect. 5.6, we discussed three key trends in emerging accounts of learning: the primary of processes, the relevance of more dynamic metaphors and myriad levels of explanation of and for learning. In particular, in Sect. 5.6.3, we argued there is no single, that is, unitary, account of ‘learning’. Learnings will diversely arise agentively group-by-group. In what follows, we develop these several insights from Chap. 5. Our approach is congruent with the work of prominent others. Agency and learning are regarded as ‘identical’ in and through the work of several co-published researchers (summarised by Eteläpelto 2017: 199). In using this term, Eteläpelto (in Chap. 10) is summarising the theoretical approach of important recent work in the area of agency and learning (Goller and Paloniemi 2017). She sets up that claim out of the notion of workplace learning, which is the ‘experience-based development of professional expertise, taking place through social interaction and individual reflection on work practices’, through the ‘shared, innovative development of work practices, as well as through employer competences’ (199). This, Eteläpelto maintains, ‘implies that learning and the practice of agency overlap’, concluding that ‘we arrive at what can be described as an agentic perspective on learning, or, put simply, agentic learning’ (Goller and Paloniemi 2017: 199). Within Goller and Paloniemi’s edited collection (2017), Karen Evans’s chapter is especially relevant to our approach. Drawing on her well-established notion of

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‘bounded agency’ (2007) and advocating for interdisciplinary perspectives on this ‘agentic learning’, she maintains that, whilst agency is grounded in individuals’ decisions and actions, these are, nonetheless, not merely embedded in specific contexts (of practice, such as nursing novices, and film and TV freelancers), but are mediated through three aspects of contexts: structures, externalities and transformative scope. In other words, individuals can work their ‘boundaries’ to make differences in their lives. They learn in and through doing this, and these processes always involve others. Evans puts it like this: The development that takes place through the exercise of human agency is not that of the self-propelled autonomous individual but, rather, relational and profoundly social in nature. What binds us also contains affordances that enable us to think, feel and act … in a new dialogic endeavor between communities of thought. (2017: 17, emphasis added)

Here, the contrast between our book’s approach, and the approach of Goller and Paloniemi (2017), is apparent. Rather than start with individuals, however much their relationality is ‘afforded’ or is ‘dialogic’ (Evans, Chapter Two), or ‘through social interaction’ (Eteläpelto, Chapter Ten), we start with ‘co-present’ groups. With holistic relations within and between such groups, and with judgement-based outcomes of such groups’ functioning, all three implicate individuals. Therefore, for us, agency and learning are co-constituted, rather than ‘identical’. Group agency generates learning; learning ‘how to go on’ is found in agentive practices (such as surgery, or the music quartet performance). Part II of this book has shown how a theorisation named ‘general complexity’ can open up relationality as the ontological basis of claims on both agency and learning. This theorisation begins with relations, not with the individual. In fact, Part I of this book has detailed the substantial limitations of what we call ‘traditional’ understandings of agency and learning, the first of which are their individualist assumptions. Chapter 9 has established a rich notion of ‘group agency’. Drawing from Spinoza’s ‘wilful rationality’ (Sect. 9.4), we showed how co-present group experiences ‘are holistic in that a group’s coming into the “space of reasons” is an emergent activity impelled by normativity—attractors, a telos and so on—which shape desiring or willing to do better’ (Sect. 9.5). Coming into the ‘space of reasons’ arises from a co-present group’s impulsion. Through complex transacting, outcomes are produced beyond the capacity of any one individual, or single complex system, alone. In Sect. 9.1, our ‘general argument’ emphasised the significance and inevitability of reduction, to serve particular normative practical expectations and purposes. In Sect. 9.6, we outlined the significance of practical wisdom and the virtue of ‘innovative expertise’ as central functional norms for a co-present group. Group agency is a driver of this reductive activity, co-constituted through group learning. In fact (following Lodge et al. 2017 on ‘big data’ as an example), it is only when groups’ agency generates judgements that what counts as ‘learning’ is apparent to them. This is one side of the relationality ‘coin’. Read from the other side of that coin, learning, under our theorisation of general complexity, establishes what is included as helpfully emergent for, or developmental of, a (perhaps professional)

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practice, where agentic energy drives, or impels, the normativity of the co-present group. The ‘currency’ of this relational coin is found in the occurrent emergent ‘fit’ of (a) agentic energy, which impels the learning, alongside (b) the ‘learning/what to do next?’ need of the co-present group to sort out a Spinozan ‘wilfully rational’ way ahead. How is this coin cashed in practice? That ‘fit’ (or the perception of a lack of it) informs, or constitutes, a co-present group’s inevitably reductive judgements about what is included in, and what is excluded from, its decisions about what to do next. These are built up as determinants of what is conducive to the co-present group’s normativity, or telos: for example, health (from the surgical team), justice (from the jury), maturity (from the mother–baby dyad), artistry (from the quartet) and education (from the sub-school staff). Overall, context by context, what counts as agency, and what counts as learning, are co-constituted in the ‘generally complex’ activities of the particular co-present group (cf. Chap. 8). So, for us, learning will always be a reduction from the immense topography and temporality of human experience. Reduction invites ambivalence. On one hand, the world is presented more simply, and readily sensible; on the other hand, the richness of the world may be compromised. In Chap. 10, we outline some common examples of current debates which are reductive. For example, national and international tests of school children’s literacy and numeracy are often criticised for their effects on pedagogical practices: teachers ‘teach to the test’. This is reductive as it trades an educational telos for mere measurement. Yet (applying our ‘levels’ criterion) there are national budgetary implications for poor test results. At national level, do these result in fewer teachers, or shrinking curricula, rather than better teaching? However these debates pan out, such testing is often labelled ‘high-stakes’, thus displaying its normativity—importantly, it opens up a criticism about its reductive effects. As this book makes plain from the outset, by starting, and staying with, ubiquitous co-present groups, the multiplicities of these human agentive and learning experiences, and their unwieldy structuring through complex systems of complex systems, are reduced through the holistic judgements of co-present practitioners who have an end-in-view, or a telos. Thus, reduction is inevitable and desirable. But the effects of it should be exposed and held up against the normativity of the practices through which those experiences are made intelligible, and indeed, accessible. Interestingly, our co-constitution of agency and learning finds much similarity with some general features of the work of Barad (2007), though of course our conceptual framework is somewhat different. From her analyses in philosophy of science, where there is much that is contested (as Rovelli 2014, 2016, shows), and, in particular, her empirical research in physics, she claims, [T]here aren’t little things wandering aimlessly in the void that possess the complete set of properties that Newtonian physics assumes (e.g., position and momentum); rather, there is something fundamental about the nature of measurement interactions such that, given a particular measuring apparatus, certain properties become determinate, whilst others are specifically excluded. (2007: 19, emphasis in original)

Our co-present groups are a socially scientific and humanistic ‘measuring apparatus:’ when practices are weighed up by groups as the way forward, it is a determination

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of what will henceforth contribute to the dynamic shaping of that practice. There is a fluidity about the holistic judgements made in favour of the co-present group’s telos, which will exclude other actions and learnings from what could have been, or could be again, and include other actions and learnings, codified over time as ‘practices’, ‘curricula’, ‘precedents’, ‘cases’ and ‘performances’ worth retaining and modifying and justifying, all in the ‘space of reasons’. In a wide-ranging review of Barad’s immensely influential contribution to the social sciences, Hollin et al. note, For [the ‘philosophy-physics’ of Neils] Bohr and Barad, therefore, it is following specific intra-actions, such as attempts at measurement, that objects like particles take on the properties they do. Particles do not pre-exist interactions, but instead emerge from them, taking on particular properties (like position) while other properties (like momentum) are excluded. Position and momentum, in other words are complementary states. (2017: 12–13)

The emergence of this complementary determinacy is sourced from Barad (2007) again in her words below: Relata [e.g. things] do not preexist relations; rather, relata-within-phenomena emerge through specific intra-actions. Crucially, then, intra-actions enact agential separability – the condition of exteriority-within-phenomena. (Barad quoted in Hollin et al. 2017: 13, emphasis in original)

Hollin et al. conclude that ‘separations between words, things and knowers are real enough but these separations are effects of particular engagements with the world’ (138). This is the crux of Barad’s ‘agential realism’ (13).

9.8 Beyond Entanglements: ‘Going with the Flow’ of Agency and Learning Barad’s agential realism resonates with the significance of purposeful reasoning in co-present groups. Co-present groups exist for ‘particular engagements with the world’ (as Hollin et al. put it), but they engage in three distinctive ways, as Chap. 6 has established, and which this chapter has summarised (Sect. 9.1): the group is the ontological focus; the relations within and between groups are holistic; and the outcomes of such relations are found in judgements of what to do next, or how to go on, which are normative (purposes such as a telos). Agential realism gives proper attention to ‘specific intra-actions’ from which ‘relata-within-phenomena emerge’ (Barad 2007: 140). A co-present group works on phenomena to sort ‘out’ from ‘in’. The group ‘enacts agential separability’ through its purposeful reasoning; it ‘sorts out’, which implies it ‘sorts in’, how to go on. Particular phenomena emerge as sorted-out; simultaneously, this implies that other phenomena emerge as sorted-in. Having separated ‘out’ (from ‘in’), the sorted-in is what the co-present group persists with; thus, what emerges is a ‘determination’ of how to go on.

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Whilst for Barad, this ‘agential separability’ is expressed as ‘entanglement’, we have, earlier in this book, found the term unsatisfactory. In Chap. 2, when problematising the notion of agency, we addressed (in Sect. 2.6) the work of Anne Edwards on ‘relational agency’ because it goes some way to resolving traditional problems of agency, and expertise. Edwards puts forward one significantly cogent engagement with less reductive agency and expertise, using empirical and theoretical analyses together under the term ‘relational agency’. She investigates the relational turn in expertise as professionals work in and between work settings and interact with other practitioners and clients to negotiate interpretations of tasks and ways of accomplishing them. The central argument is that the resources that others bring to problems can enhance understandings and can enrich responses. However, working in this way makes demands on practitioners. At the very least, it calls for an additional form of expertise … based on confident engagement with the knowledge that underpins one’s practice as a social worker or nurse, as well as the capacity to recognise and respond to what others might offer. (2010: 13, emphasis added)

We concluded Chap. 2 claiming that Edwards’s ‘relational agency’ (2010, and similar accounts of groups’ agency by Tollefsen 2015, and Gallagher 2016), fail to move beyond the ‘entanglements’ of individuals in groups. Thus, the ontological assumption of such accounts is individualistic: a group is the aggregation of individual participants’ interactions. Relations are the efflux of these. This we called (in Sect. 2.8) a black-box account of group relationality, because what goes on inside the group is elusively entangled. On the contrary, we believe this is the ‘space of reasons’, because it is the space for reasons. Yet Edwards and Barad almost move their respective analyses into the ‘space of reasons’ (this space called ‘purposeful reasoning’) Chap. 2 (Sect. 2.7) or, as it is now, through the notion of the co-present group, ‘holistic practical reasoning (Sect. 9.7). Edwards acknowledges what we called ‘ontological messiness’ (Sect. 2.8), when she emphasises the importance of normativity, or values, which are ‘woven through the common knowledge that mediates fluid and purposeful responses and are recognised as crucial to how professionals interpret problems in practice’ (2010: 69, as cited above). For the world of the social sciences and humanities, which this book inhabits, Barad’s agential ‘separability’ seems to require similarly interpretative ‘intraactions’—‘sorting-out’ implicates ‘sorting-in’. Edwards’s identification of fluidity and purposefulness are indeed at the heart of co-present group activities, ‘mediating’ knowledge-making: knowing how to go on. This is the reasoning of practice, enacted in practising (‘we do this, rather than that …’). In Barad’s terms, it is ‘agential separability’—the group makes determinations that emerge as sortings-out, and sortings-in. This is holistic practical reasoning, and it marks out what is constitutive of learning in co-present groups. Learning, conceptualised beyond the limitation of relationality as ‘entanglement’ or black-boxing, is, we claim, co-constituted through the agency of co-present groups (which we established in Sect. 9.6), with the learning undergone by co-present groups at the group and individual levels, as they fluidly and purposefully judge (decide or determine) how to go on. They make their learning through enacting decisional experiences which are (in terms of general complexity) relationally holistic.

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Co-present groups’ enactive fluidity is a manifestation of the close proximity of the relations that constitute the group and the complex systems of complex systems (some of which are individuals) that comprise the group. This is unlike mainstream physics, where ‘entanglements’ arise from fluidity amongst, say, subatomic particles, that merely collide, or run into each other, due to proximity. Our co-present groups are normative through and through, as we have insisted throughout this book. Unlike the subatomic world (where Barad’s ontology originates), proximity for groups of humans is not only ubiquitous, it is ‘purpose-productive’. A purpose, such as a telos (e.g. the health of the patient), and the affective ownership of this (e.g. by those around the operating table), attracts and constitutes a group (as we argued in Chap. 6) because an agreed purpose shapes the enactment of ‘what to do next’. Holistic practical reasoning carries this purpose along. How does it do this? The fluidity of this reasoning occupies the ‘space of reasons’ as a wave. Proximity (utterly holistic, with the affective as the attractor, but also with the socially and materially proximal) and its fluidity are dynamic aspects of holistic practical reasoning. A co-present group ‘goes with the flow’, stretched over time—yet this is not a rudderless, mindless acquiescence, as the metaphor usually means. It is not whitewater rafting down the river. On the contrary, by this we mean (a) that the co-present group’s agency mediates what the ‘flow’ is, and how it progresses agreed purposes over time; (b) that the co-present group’s learning emerges from holistic practical reasoning; and (c) that ‘knowing how to go on’ is shown in the simultaneous enactment of both (a) and (b). General complexity, as we have explained in Chap. 8, and reiterated since, focuses on, and maintains, the ontological priority of the group. Relationality that is less reductive enables what we have called co-present groups to focus on, and maintain, the epistemological priority of ‘knowing how to go on’. Within such a general, holistic account of relationality, real practical situations provoke what in this chapter we have called a co-constituted account of both agency and learning. This account has the metaphorical form of a coin with two sides. One side is agential, where a group gets on with something important to them. The other side is how they learn to determine (or decide, or judge) that ‘this’ (‘sorting-in’) is preferable to ‘that’ (‘sorting-out’), in getting on with something. Co-constitution of agency and learning means that the ‘space of reasons’ is not static, nor inert, but is better regarded as wave-like, where fluidity and close proximity complement each other: they do not ‘entangle’ so much as ‘dis-entangle’, by concentrating affective attention on the phenomena in hand. ‘Disentangling’ will often, and sensibly, require reductive practical reasoning. To progress problems in surgery, or a court case, or a school classroom, or in a parental relationship, some disaggregation to components will often be essential. Our main point is that there will be context-specific outcomes and enactments which do indeed seek more granulated analyses of complex phenomena. For example, as we will argue in the final chapter, practices, skills, expertise and competencies can benefit from granulation. But we insist that whatever reductive moves are made, they

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‘flow’ from holistic accounts of relationality which have already affectively engaged the purposes of a co-present group. The specific purposes of such reductions would cascade from such overall purposes and would return to and ideally enhance those holistic purposes. For example, a profession’s practices will evolve as specific workplaces and the co-present groups in them present different challenges, (‘ways to go on’) and these will percolate up to the profession’s purposes and modify these. But this will be a manifestation of challenges that have already reductively appeared, perhaps in some local practical dissonance, which confronts the co-present professionals: for example, ‘what to do when a haemorrhage occurs in routine surgery?’ Is there eventually a pattern of non-routine events such as this? Then, a systemic response is locally formulated from the determinations (or decisions or judgements). Learnings are codified, and the profession’s practice—and how it is ‘taught’—is re-calibrated. Textbooks and courses are changed, as propositional knowledge catches up with experiential ‘holistic practical reasoning’. This would be how complex systems of complex systems include relations with individual practitioners, ‘local’ groups of such practitioners, and then with national and international systems. Throughout, relationality attracts co-present groups to purposes which are shared and interrelated. These relationships interpolate all levels in varying ways, and their practical effects will also be diversely apparent. This is not a one-size-fits-all account of practices, but a more sensitive account of how there can be many ‘goings-with-the-flow’. So for us, levels of granularity, where reductions can flow from the holistic, are justifiable. But overall, our claim in this chapter is that copresent groups enact essential human experiences in both an agentive and a learning capacity, which rightly resist granularity since these groups are both ubiquitous and ontologically prior to their epistemological claims on ‘knowing how to go on’.

9.9 Conclusion We turn now to Chap. 10 for novel accounts of the remaining problematic concepts that were discussed in Part I. In each case, armed with our co-constitutive account of agency and learning, we argue that considerations derived from complexity thinking and the co-present group concept provide fresh understandings that circumvent the various difficulties that we identified in the received, or ‘traditional’, accounts of these concepts.

References Annas, J. (2011). Intelligent virtue. New York: Oxford University Press. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Beckett, D. (2010). Adult learning: Philosophical issues. In P. Peterson, E. Baker, & B. McGaw (Eds.), International encyclopedia of education (pp. 114–120). Oxford: Elsevier. Beckett, D. (2012). Of maestros and muscles: Expertise and practices at work. In D. Aspin & J. Chapman (Eds.), Second international handbook of lifelong learning (pp. 113–127). Dordrecht: Springer. Brandom, R. (2000). Articulating reasons: An introduction to inferentialism. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Derry, J. (2004). The unity of intellect and will: Vygotsky and Spinoza. Educational Review, 56(2), 113–120. https://doi.org/10.1080/0031910410001693209. DeVries, W., & Triplett, T. (2000). Knowledge, mind, and the given: Reading Wilfred Sellars’s “Empiricism and the philosophy of mind” (contains full text of “EPM”). Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company Inc. Dreyfus, H. L., & Dreyfus, S. E. (1986). Mind over machine: The power of human intuition and expertise in the age of the computer. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Edwards, A. (2010). Being an expert professional practitioner: The relational turn in expertise. The Netherlands: Springer. Eteläpelto, A. (2017). Emerging conceptualisations on professional agency and learning. In M. Goller & S. Paloniemi (Eds.), Agency at work. Professional and practice-based learning (Vol. 20, pp. 183–201). Cham, Switzerland: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60943-0_10. Evans, K. (2007). Concepts of bounded agency in education, work and the personal lives of young adults. International Journal of Psychology, 42(2), 85–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00207590600991237. Evans, K. (2017). Bounded agency in professional lives. In M. Goller & S. Paloniemi (Eds.), Agency at work. Professional and practice-based learning (pp. 17–36). Cham, Switzerland: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60943-0_2. Gallagher, S. (2016). An education in narratives. In D. Simpson & D. Beckett (Eds.), Expertise, pedagogy and practice (pp. 37–46). Abingdon, Oxford: Routledge. Geeves, A., McIlwain, D., Sutton, J., & Christensen, W. (2016). To think or not to think: The apparent paradox of expert skill in music performance. In D. Simpson & D. Beckett (Eds.), Expertise, pedagogy and practice (pp. 111–128). Abingdon, Oxford: Routledge. Goller, M. & Paloniemi, S. (Eds.) (2017). Agency at work. Professional and practice-based learning (Vol. 20). Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Guile, D. (2014). Professional knowledge and professional practice as continuous recontextualisation: A social practice perspective. In M. Young & J. Muller (Eds.), Knowledge, expertise and the professions (pp. 78–92). London: Routledge. Hollin, G., Forsyth, I., Giraud, E., & Potts, T. (2017). (Dis)entangling Barad: Materialisms and ethics. Social Studies of Science, 47(6), 918–941. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312717728344. Lodge, J. M., Alhadad, S. S. J., Lewis, M. J., & Gaševi´c, D. (2017). Inferring learning from big data: The importance of a transdisciplinary and multidimensional approach. Technology, Knowledge and Learning, 22(3), 385–400. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10758-017-9330-3. List, C., & Pettit, P. (2011). Group agency: The possibility, design and status of corporate agents. New York: Oxford University Press. McIlwain, D., & Sutton, J. (2016). Yoga from the mat up: How words alight on bodies. In D. Simpson & D. Beckett (Eds.), Expertise, pedagogy and practice (pp. 92–110). Abingdon, Oxford: Routledge. Menary, R., & Kirchhoff, M. (2016). Cognitive transformations and extended expertise. In D. Simpson & D. Beckett (Eds.), Expertise, pedagogy and practice (pp. 47–60). Abingdon, Oxford: Routledge. Pauer-Studer, H. (2014). A constitutive account of group agency. Erkenntnis, 79(S9), 1623–1639. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9632-y. Rovelli, C. (2014). Seven brief lessons on physics. London: Penguin. Rovelli, C. (2016). Reality is not what it seems: The journey to quantum gravity. UK: Allen Lane.

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Sellars, W. (1956). Empiricism and the philosophy of mind. In Science, perception, and reality. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Spinoza, B. (1949). Ethics (J. Gutmann, Ed.). New York: Hafner Library of Classics, Hafner Publishing Company. (Original work published 1675). Steinberg, D. (2000). On Spinoza (Wadsworth Philosophers Series). Belmont California: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning. Tollefsen, D. P. (2015). Groups as agents. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1997). The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky: Vol. 4, The history of the development of higher mental functions (R. W. Rieber, Ed., M. J. Hall, Trans.). New York: Plenum. Williamson, K., & Cox, R. (2016). Distributed cognition in sports teams: Explaining successful and expert performance. In D. Simpson & D. Beckett (Eds.), Expertise, pedagogy and practice (pp. 77–91). Abingdon, Oxford: Routledge.

Chapter 10

Fresh Approaches to Practice, Skills, Competence and Expertise

Throughout this book, we have explored how complexity thinking emerges to shed new light on central human phenomena. ‘Emergence’ itself has been shown as crucial on the way to shedding this new light. In this concluding chapter, we build on the co-constitutive account of agency and learning in Chap. 9, to provide new accounts of practice, skills and competence (and four associated concepts) and expertise. Then, by way of reinforcement, we offer some reflections on the emergent process involved in producing this book and, more widely, on the social science implications of its theoretical perspectives. Part III of this book set out to show how a focus on the co-present group (as ontologically prior to individuals) and its affective decision-making can instantiate a recasting of agency and of learning that captures the power of both—hitherto overlooked (Sect. 9.1). The bulk of Chap. 9 then emphasised the emergence of ‘holistic practical judgements’, within what we called a ‘co-constitutive’ account of group agency and group learning—two sides of the one coin of relationality. This fresh take on traditional accounts of agency and learning, in addressing their limitations, drew upon a Spinozan fusion of practical rationality and normativity (in Sects. 9.3–9.5). In particular, we used his core concept of wilful rationality, which, as we saw, in his ‘adequate’ ideas, is a quest for intelligibility, or in our terms, sense, or meaning-making. We showed how this core concept works in and for co-present groups (Sect. 9.6), especially in their core activity of making holistic practical judgements (Sect. 9.7), and that this is as much a learning activity as it is agentive (Sect. 9.8). These deliberative activities ‘flow’ rather than ‘entangle’—they require close proximity over time, as relational features of the life of co-present groups. Because we are dealing with human phenomena, these features are (unlike sub-atomic particles, or sand dunes). Accordingly, they are utterly normative—they are impelled by wilfully rational commitments to (say) the telos of the group and to its practical purposes (‘what do we do now/next?’). The shape of this chapter, in progressing this analysis, is as follows. We will claim these affectively impelled ‘holistic practical judgements’, embedded in the co-present group, provide novel accounts of practices (Sect. 10.1), and of skills and competence (and similar concepts) (Sect. 10.2). Whilst we acknowledge that © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 P. Hager and D. Beckett, The Emergence of Complexity, Perspectives on Rethinking and Reforming Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31839-0_10

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reductive or atomised analyses of these are popular and sometimes helpful, we dispute the utility of many outcomes of these: does the reductive fragmentation of workplace or professional phenomena (such as skilfulness) tend to obliterate the integrity of the very performance which is valued, in the first place? We believe this is often and regrettably true. Finally, because we regard all these phenomena as normative activities, we provide a novel account of expertise—highly skilled, highly competent practice, manifesting intellectual and other virtues (Sect. 10.3). The chapter closes this book with a section on its production and some implications (Sect. 10.4).

10.1 A Novel Account of Practice and Practices As outlined in Chap. 3, over the last twenty years, practice theory has become a prominent contributor to theorising in the social sciences. Its distinctiveness lies in its positing of human practices as the fundamental bearers of understanding, intelligibility and meanings. The major effect of this approach is for theorising to employ concepts associated with human practices (embodied capacities, know-how, skills, tacit understanding and dispositions) in place of the mental entity concepts (beliefs, desires, emotions and purposes) that characterised earlier theorising. The focus on embodiment is one dimension of the holism that is typical of practice theories, and which has been a central focus in this book, particularly as we have emphasised sociocultural theorisations (in Sect. 5.4), all of which are by way of socio-material accounts of what it is to be human. In Chap. 9 (Sect. 9.8), we acknowledged Barad’s (2007) ontological work: for her, and for us, materiality matters. Socio-materialism underpins the holism we claim for co-present groups’ practical judgements. Pace Barad, we take a humanist stance, not a physics stance, on holism. This is so because embodiment implicates the full gamut of human attributes and capacities, whereas earlier theories, influenced by mind/body dualistic assumptions, centred on rationality (underpinned by cognitivism) as the source of explanation. As we have seen, these are unhelpfully reductive of human experience, with serious and unjust hierarchies of learning, such as High Schools vs Technical Schools. In contrast to reductions that rule out embodiment, one of our main ontological assumptions (in Chap. 1) has been that bodies are means (or modes) of meaningful interaction and communication with the world, since ‘our bodies do not simply respond to the world, rather they partly constitute the world, and in “doing” so, literally generate understanding’ (O’Toole and Beckett 2013: 45). In her fine account of the significance of the concept of embodiment for educational thought, O’Loughlin (2006) analyses Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological perspective on the body. For Merleau-Ponty (1945), human bodies are not just other physical objects in the world. Materiality is distributed across us all—it is at once individual-and-social and private-and-communicative. What we ‘do’ generates meaningfulness for us all, over time; we share a temporally stretched ontology. O’Loughlin explains further: ‘Whereas we can grasp the boundaries—the skin—at

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a single moment, on the other hand we can grasp the unity only as something which occurs in a stretch of time’ (2006: 15). Embodiment is not just a matter of individual ontology (the materiality of the ‘skin I am in’). Understandings grow through communicative actions, or ‘doings’, and persist over time, so they have a ‘unity’ in our experience. So, the embodiment also carries crucial onto-epistemological significance. For Merleau-Ponty, embodied human beings constitute ‘being-in-the-world’. Holistic embodiment is our ‘mode of being’. Our body is our primary mode of communication with the world, as well as being the central locus of expression and of meaning-producing acts. Thus, human persons are embodied, holistic, acting, feeling, thinking beings-in-the-world. But embodiment is just one dimension of the holism of practice as will be shown shortly. Chapter 3 also observed that the term ‘practice’ is commonly employed rather ambiguously, with some writers risking trivialising the concept by calling any human activity or action a practice. It was noted that, for the purposes of this book, our focus is on ‘thicker’, less inclusive understandings of practices, characterised as ‘complex holistic activities, ones that integrate … diverse items such as goods and virtues, activity, experience, context, judgement, with such integration often involving a significant temporal dimension’ (Hager 2012: 27). Not surprisingly then, the various examples of co-present groups discussed in Chap. 6 all conform to this characterisation of a practice. Restricting the scope of practices in this way reflects our view that, in conjunction with the co-present group concept and complexity thinking, it enhances our understanding of substantial and complex organised human activities, ranging from juries and string quartets right up to professions and occupations. Thus, we can say that all our examples of co-present groups are engaged in practices of one kind or another.

10.1.1 The Holistic Dimensions of Practice and Practices Our novel account starts by taking the group, in particular the co-present group, as our unit of analysis. As we argued in Sect. 9.2, the co-present group is constituted in and through its own activities—activities that emerge from and make intelligible the group’s practices. This intelligibility emerges through the co-present group’s practical judgements, animated by agency and expertise, and shaped by the contingencies of work and life. Thus, there is no neat linear emergence of meaning-making. The result of these moves is that our holistic account incorporates many dimensions of practice, whilst directing our attention to several key concepts that were not available to previous theorisations. First, it stresses the central importance of affective and other diverse relational processes within the group. Second, it brings to the fore the temporal dimension of these relational processes. In this sense, practices are ‘stretched’. Third, it identifies the crucial role of emergence in shaping changes in the practice over time. Fourth, it brings to the fore the normative dimensions of practice. As co-present groups pursue their telos or purpose, their agency is value-laden through and through. Taken together, these various dimensions of holism provide

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a novel approach to analysing and understanding practices. Together they serve to underline the substantial holism that characterises practices and the ongoing relational processes that continually constitute and reconstitute them. Overlaying all of this is the fact that the resulting analysis and understanding of practices are subject to the implications of recognising the holism and relationality of complex systems, as discussed in the previous chapter. This entails that any attempted comprehensive description of practice will necessarily be incomplete in some respects. One obvious reason for this is that, since practices are entities in process, they are continually exhibiting emergence. Another equally weighty reason is that practices involve tacit components that elude verbal descriptions. And, anyway, in principle, all descriptions of complex systems involve some reduction of the whole. Thus, as we seek to describe and understand practices, we need to develop different types and levels of description according to our different purposes. This in turn points to the inevitability of informed professional judgement being required to identify and to produce descriptions of the appropriate types and levels. Practices, as very complex systems, are clearly not reducible to routine protocols or algorithms. Key points in our novel account of practices can be illustrated with examples of co-present groups that already have featured prominently in this book. The central importance of affective processes in the relationality of a co-present group is particularly evident in the case of a professional string quartet. As noted in Chap. 6 (Sect. 6.1.4), the string quartet members need to interact and interrelate as a welldisciplined team so as to perform as a single, finely tuned instrument. There are many facets to the affective processes that underpin a high-quality string quartet performance. Many dimensions of the affective domain, both conscious and unconscious, were described in Chap. 6 (Sect. 6.3.2). As well as affect-as-emotion, there is also bodily engagement with the world and the motivations that drive such engagement. In the case of a string quartet, such bodily engagement primarily involves the coordination of the musician’s playing of their own instrument, their reading of the score and the bodily engagements of the other three in the quartet to produce a seamless whole. In all of this, yet another dimension of the affective is vital—that of tacit, qualitative, psycho-emotional experiences. These include such things as encountering and overcoming discord, judging that something feels right, experiencing novelty and recognising similarities between current and earlier experiences. All of these are clearly relevant to the complex interplay of the quartet members from which emerges a group affective outcome. However, in a successful concert, the affective relating is not confined to the members of the string quartet. There is also the important matter of engagement with the audience to be considered. As C.P.E. Bach influentially maintained, explained by Botstein, the … performer should throw his entire body and personality into the act of performance so that he can carry his listener out of the role of passive spectator. The purpose of the open and vulnerable display of feeling and movement by the performer was to break the separation between audience and performer. (Botstein 1999: 484)

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Thus, musical performance serves to underline the crucial role of embodiment in communicating the affective. Also, these considerations well illustrate the key claim that no description of a string quartet’s performance can ever capture the whole. Instead, different descriptions will be appropriate for different purposes. In the case of a jury, affective relational processes are central in the to-and-fro discussions that prepare the way for reaching an agreed decision. As this temporal process unfolds, there is reduction from the complex whole as the jurors identify and define those aspects of the courtroom proceedings that are judged to be vital for reaching a sound verdict. This process of reaching a verdict also reflects the balance of autonomy and normativity, described in Chap. 8 (Sect. 8.2.2), which characterises co-present group functioning. The jury process is accountable for specific guidelines and rules. Yet, whilst interpreting these constraints, the jurors are required to initiate a unique group process. This is a process which is sometimes quite lengthy, from whose affective and other relational functioning will emerge a defensible verdict (or, sometimes, an inability to agree on a verdict). The example of the surgical team serves to highlight the point that no single account of practice will be complete in all respects. Rather, we come to understand complex practices by producing different types and levels of description for different specific purposes. Surgery itself can be regarded as a practice, but this wide understanding is of limited use. Apart from the various different types of surgery within the field of medicine, there are also dental surgeons, tree surgeons and the like. Within the medical practice of surgery, there are major professional bodies that represent all types of surgery, such as the Royal College of Surgeons. But there are also professional associations that cater to sub-groupings such as plastic surgeons or orthopaedic surgeons. Thus, an in-depth understanding of the practice of surgery will require descriptions of varying types at different levels. This illustrates points made in Chap. 8 (Sect. 8.3.3) whereby typical professional bodies rely on a large array of constructively interrelating co-present groups to produce the numerous professional judgements that serve to maintain and remake the profession.

10.1.2 How Our Novel Account Solves the Major Difficulties for Practice Theories Identified in Part I As was argued in Chap. 3, there are three major difficulties common to received accounts of the topics expounded in this book. Practice theory, given it consists in theorisations of what is done, that is, practised, clearly avoids over-reliance on cognitive aspects to explain embodied human performances. This reflects its primary commitment to the explanatory primacy of embodiment. However, it was also concluded that, for current accounts of practice and practices, the other two major difficulties remained as unresolved issues. That is, current accounts of practice and practices commonly

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• assume that the individual agent is the appropriate unit of analysis for understanding human performances; and • downplay the significance of relations by black-boxing them. The first of these difficulties arises from assuming that the individual embodied practitioner is the most appropriate unit of analysis for theorising human practices. The practice theories of Schatzki and Antonacopoulou (outlined in Chap. 3 at Sect. 3.2.3) are clear examples. This unquestioning focus on the individual practitioner by so many practice theorists reflects long-standing philosophical and sociological traditions. However, it is still somewhat surprising given the origins of practice theory. One of its founding principles is that the intelligibility and meaning of human activities and performances arise from humans’ interactions and engagements with the world. This principle opposed earlier assumptions that the intelligibility and meaning of human activities and performances lay in understanding the cognition that accompanied them. Given this more holistic, integrative flavour of humans’ interactions and engagements with the world, one might have expected that more practice theorists would have investigated interaction and engagement with the world by groups of humans rather than by individuals. Our novel account shifts the focus from individual practitioners to the analysis of group relational processes that occur within the practice. Vital aspects of these group relational processes include affective and other dimensions that are overlooked when the focus is on individual practitioners. From these, group relational processes emerge the distinctive outcomes that act to shape and reshape the practice over time. Not only does this strategy of investigating the group aspects of practice offer new insights on practice itself, it also provides new resources for illuminating the contributions of individual practitioners to practices, as well as insight into what they gain personally from the experience. We have seen that the traditional focus on individuals is misguided, at least in the crucial case of co-present groups. But, as previous chapters have argued, social relations are often crucial even for understanding performances by seemingly lone individuals. Indeed, as Part III of this book maintains, it turns out to be more fruitful to regard group or team instances of agency, expertise, practice, skills and related concepts as the typical norm, with performances by seemingly lone individuals being but limiting cases. The second major difficulty for previous practice theories is the tendency to specify a practice by identifying each of its various discrete components, thereby effectively black-boxing the relations that underpin the whole. This atomisation strategy for demarcating a practice typically identifies and describes a very mixed range of entities, including norms, affects and values, practitioner characteristics, beliefs and intentions and so on. As an afterthought, once a suitable number of components have been identified, it is usually stated that, when appropriately interconnected or related, these components constitute the practice. Here, ‘appropriately interconnected or related’ is simply a black-box, reflecting the common nominalist assumption that relations in themselves are ontologically inert or innocuous.

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Our novel account of practices argues that the traditional atomistic approach seeks understanding in the wrong place. By far the major feature of human performances is their holism. As already noted, embodiment is one dimension of this holism. But complexity thinking suggests that embodiment is but part of the story. Holism is largely constituted by the relations between the parts, in particular the processes of their relational functioning over time. Seeking understanding of the whole by atomising into discrete parts is thereby futile as it dismisses the very features of the practices that point the way to explanation. Of course, atomisation may be useful in some cases, for example, for identifying the main causes of poor performance, but it is not helpful for understanding the whole. As we saw in Chap. 8, complexity thinking proposes that the greater the degree of reduction, the less the explanatory power. Atomisation into component parts is a severe form of reduction that effectively eliminates from discussion the very features that underpin the original holism. This reductive loss of explanatory power is particularly significant where human beings are components of the whole, as in co-present groups. Overall, our novel account of practices highlights the defects of these two prevailing assumptions concerning practices and offers alternative understandings. Actually, there are clear parallels in the ways that our account of practices responds to the defects of these two prevailing assumptions. Our account argues for the primacy of co-present groups as against the traditional focus on individual practitioners. We propose a new focus on group relational processes, including their vital affective dimensions, from which emerge the group’s outcomes. This focus includes attention to relational processes within groups. Hence, our remedies for the two defects are basically the same—we pay close attention to the relational processing of groups together with the emergents from these processes. This reflects the ironic situation that the second common difficulty for practice theories—the prevalent tendency to attempt to understand practices by atomising them into their component parts—is mirrored by the first common difficulty—a prevalent tendency to atomise group performances into individual performances.

10.1.3 Our Novel Account Strengthens the Advantages of Practice Theories In Chap. 3 (Sect. 3.3), we reviewed some commonly claimed advantages of practice theories and questioned the extent to which received theories actually exemplified these supposed advantages. We can usefully return to these in the light of our novel account of practice: • Practices are carriers of meanings/understandings: they are ‘distributed sensemaking’. Thus, meaning emerges from the sociality of practices. The previous focus on the individual practitioner as the unit of analysis meant that this was thought of in terms of individual practitioners interacting with the practice.

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This provides a limited mechanism for distributed sense-making. Our account of sense-making, emerging both from the relational functioning of co-present groups and the interactions of co-present groups with one another, provides a much more powerful source of new meaning and understanding. • The relationality of practices is supposed to be a defining feature of practice theory. Certainly, most of the practice theorists refer to it. The problem here was that the black-boxing of relations meant that there was no real consideration of the nature of the relevant relations, nor of their explanatory potential. This ensured severely limited understandings of practice. Of the various practice theories surveyed in Chap. 3 (Sect. 3.2.3), MacIntyre’s theory came closest to recognising that the nature of the relations involved was the key to understanding practice. His account of internal and external goods and the relations between them is one step in this direction. Another is his stressing of the importance of the relations between the individual practitioner and the practice itself. However, our account is more specific and encompassing. It highlights the crucial role of the relational processing within complex systems, such as practices, and stresses the important role of transactional relations, as against interactional relations, within such systems. As was noted in Part II of this book, there is a tendency in the current literature on complexity to assume that emergent relations are simple interactional ones, such as the spatial relations of flocking birds, or those determining sand dune formation. However, following writers such as Byrne and Callaghan (2014) and Lancaster (2012, 2013), we maintain that for social situations, where actions are the product of human choices and intentionality, transactional relations are crucial and more relevant. In transactional relations, the related entities are themselves altered by the relation, whereas mere interactional relations leave the related entities basically unaltered. It would be difficult to overstate the vital contribution of complexity thinking to our novel account of practice. First, there is its crucial focus on the relations between entities, rather than on the entities themselves. Second, it provides the distinctive idea that novel qualities, entities or patterns can emerge from the ongoing processes of the interrelationships between the entities within a complex system. Emergence requires the prior presence of relational processes (the ‘micro-level’), from which emerges ‘entities’ exhibiting irreducibly different relations (the ‘macro-level’). These complex systems, such as practices, are constituted and renovated by the emerging patterns of the relations that characterise their processes (Cilliers 1998, 2000). In short, unlike previous black-box accounts, complexity thinking provides significant understandings of the vital roles of relations within practices. • Practice theory accounts better for the holistic facets of practice than did its predecessors. Our novel account both of the natures, and of the roles, of relations within practices, provides a detailed explication of why they are holistic. Via complexity thinking, it also enables us to understand the limitations of proposed descriptions of the wholes

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that constitute practices. As stressed already, rather than aiming for a single comprehensive description, we need to develop different types and levels of description according to our different purposes. This chimes well with Kemmis’s claim (Chap. 3, Sect. 3.2.3) that very different forms of reasoning are employed within practices for diverse purposes. For instance, the purpose of attaining knowledge (or truth) is best served by a theoretical perspective; the purpose of producing some entity is best served by a technical perspective; and the making of wise and prudent judgements and actions is best served by a practical perspective. That is, the processes of practice over time give rise to diverse kinds of emergents. • Practice theory accounts somewhat for the changing nature of practices over time and the indeterminacy of those changes. We saw in Chap. 3 (Sect. 3.2.4) that Antonacopoulou (2008) proposed a dynamic account of practices as being self-organising and emergent. She suggested the concept of ‘tensions’ to underpin these two key features of practices. Complexity thinking and the concept of emergence provides a much richer understanding of how practices evolve and of the indeterminacy of the emergence within co-present groups that drives these processes. For us, human social systems, including practices, can be thought of as complex systems with various sub-groupings within the practice constituting complex systems within the larger complex system. The attractor concept offers insight into the persistence or otherwise of the overall aims or purposes of the particular social practice, as it is affected by the sometimes shifting aims or purposes of particular sub-groupings within the practice. As complex systems, human practices can function autopoetically. That is, they can be both open to information and other resources from their environment, but also operationally closed, in that they can set their own boundaries and monitor their environment so as to adjust their internal arrangements in the service of their own purposes/needs. Presumably, these types of considerations are behind Kemmis’s assertion (identified in Chap. 3, Sect. 3.2.3) that ‘practices that are pre-formed … have their own particular “shapes”’. Reflecting our claim that all descriptions of practice are necessarily reductions from the whole, Kemmis (2010) adds that these pre-figured shapes will be experienced differently by different kinds of participants in the practice. Not only will the clients of the practice have a different experience than the practitioners themselves, but even practitioners within the same practice will experience it somewhat differently. Hence, our novel account of practice significantly strengthens received accounts.

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10.2 Novel Accounts of Skills and Competence (and Similar Concepts) 10.2.1 A Novel Account of Skills Chapter 4 identified two major unresolved issues surrounding our understandings of skills: 1. how to account for their holism and relationality; 2. the need to look beyond the almost exclusive focus on individuals as the locus of skills. We begin our novel account by considering the holism and relationality of skills. Chapter 4 characterised and discussed two senses of skill—the countable and uncountable senses. The uncountable sense was argued to be crucial for any adequate understanding of the concept of skill. In contrast, the countable sense, by itself, was less useful. Though it chimed well with the crude ‘common sense’ idea that skilled performance requires merely the possession of a set of discrete entities called ‘skills’, this view was shown to be deficient. It created the by now familiar atomisation problem in that the sum of the discrete skills was but a thin representation of the richness of skilled performance. It passed over the important holistic dimensions of skilled performance that characterised the uncountable sense of skills. These dimensions included the interrelating and interacting of the various countable skills, together with their seamless integration with other higher order aspects of skilled performance, such as its sensitivity to context and its exemplification of finely tuned judgement. What was needed was a more holistically relational account of skilled performance, one that recognises that (say) skilled motor vehicle driving is holistic rather than atomistic. This holism reflects an essential relationality of skills. That is, skilled performance presupposes not just that the performer has the right countable skills, but crucially that these be integrated via relations appropriate to the given context. How can the co-present group notion and complexity thinking contribute to the development of such a holistically relational account? How can they take us beyond the almost exclusive focus on individuals as the locus of skills? Consider first the case of a highly skilled performer, such as a concert cellist. Complexity thinking asserts that relations are more central to an understanding of skilled performance than are the entities that they relate. This entails that any satisfactory understanding of the holism of skills will require a developed relational understanding of this holism and its interconnections with crucial related concepts, such as contextuality and professional judgement within the space of reasons. This will involve some kind of relational realism, one that takes proper account of relations by recognising that they are distinctively different kinds of entities to substances or particulars. In the hope of furthering our understanding of these various matters, this book offers an account centred on transactional relations and their interconnections, drawing upon complexity thinking.

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This prime focus on relations is the key to elucidating the holism that is such a striking feature of skilled performance. Complexity thinking portrays the individual skilled performer as a complex system whose skills emerge via ongoing transactions with relevant environments in which the skills are applied. Environmental changes stimulate appropriate adaptations in skill requirements. As we have demonstrated, affective and other diverse, non-cognitive relational processes are crucial to the emergence over time of the highly skilled performer. These diverse relational processes would include interactions with teachers, fellow musicians and audiences. Some particularly significant interactions would have occurred in the context of a co-present group, as characterised in Chap. 6. Thus, our concert cellist is a complex system from which a given recital performance emerges from many and varied complex relations between (amongst other things) the cellist’s countable skills, the musical score, the performer’s significant teachers, the influence of previous performers and the context (venue, audience, etc.). Thus, each performance by the cellist will be a unique emergent. So, our major claim is that skilled performance is to be thought of as an ongoing process, one that ideally extends and refines the practitioner’s level of skill. Thus, we can fruitfully view a practitioner’s skill set as an evolving work-in-progress, rather than as a stable, enduring ‘tool kit’. The emergence of high levels of skill over time from ongoing relational processes signals the characteristic holism of professional performance. For complexity thinking, skills, in common with all emergents from relational transactions within complex systems, exhibit a holism that is inevitably reduced somewhat when we attempt to codify or precisely specify their nature. Experientially, this holism presents as the seamless know-how that characterises highly skilled performances. This is why ‘common sense’ accounts of skills that focus on listing their psychomotor and/or cognitive aspects are unavoidably impoverished. It is not just that many other significant aspects of skills, such as their affective and volitional aspects, are absent from such accounts. Their most damning limitation is their failure to recognise that skills are not clusters of discrete components. Rather, they are holistic phenomena that emerge from the relational transactions between the various components within complex systems. But, as we have seen, our novel account of skills also has a built-in limitation in that it will necessarily be incomplete in some respects. It is not just that skills are complex entities in process of continual emergence; nor that they involve tacit components that elude verbal descriptions. Rather, in principle, all descriptions of complex systems involve some reduction of the whole. This means that our attempts to describe and understand skills will require different types and levels of description according to our particular purposes. Informed professional judgement within the space of reasons will be necessary to formulate descriptions of the appropriate types and levels. This is why skills, as complex systems, are not amenable to reduction to lists of discrete human behaviours. The holism of skills, that renders partial all attempts to codify or specify them, is not exactly a new discovery. It has long been recognised that skilled performance involves more than the performer can say. Experts are capable of more than they can tell. Polanyi (1966) famously drew attention to such tacit knowledge. But tacit

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knowledge is not confined to experts. For instance, we have practical knowledge of how to deploy our bodies intelligently so as to perform complex movements quickly, autonomously, and automatically, with little awareness of why or how we can do so. Such tacit knowledge constitutes a unique form of knowledge. As Chap. 4 argued, it has significance for learning across all of life because it is ‘an aspect of know-how which is beyond articulation, although some transfer might be possible through exemplification, imitation and practice’ (Addis and Winch 2017: 561). It is an integral part of the well-known Dreyfus model of skill acquisition discussed in previous chapters (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1986; Dreyfus 2001). The later stages of the Dreyfus model maintain that all vocations require new entrants to develop a range of skills that are largely tacit and that can only be learnt from accomplished practitioners (for further detailed discussion, see Hager and Halliday 2006: 221–227). These ideas cohere well with the famous Merleau-Ponty thesis in The Phenomenology of Perception (1945/1962) that motility (our capacity for motion) is not a handmaid of consciousness. Complexity thinking adds a new dimension by tracing the severe limitations of trying to codify skilled performance or expertise into exact verbal descriptions to the inevitable reduction of complexity involved in such attempts. Tacit and other aspects of practice, such as its affective dimensions, can be thought of as forms of practical knowledge. Because educational thought has traditionally been reluctant to regard any kind of non-theoretical knowledge as educationally significant, practical knowledge has been widely misunderstood. We can further our understanding of practical knowledge by considering Franklin’s (1981) bivalent account of knowing how. Franklin’s contribution was stimulated by Ryle’s (1949) account of knowing how and the subsequent literature that resulted from it, in particular the claim that knowing how is actually just a type of knowing that. Franklin concluded that knowing how is ambiguous between a weak form of knowing how and a strong form. The weak form involves merely knowing the procedure or technique for a way of doing X. This is indeed a kind of knowing that. However, the strong form involves something more—actually doing X proficiently. The strong form is not just a kind of knowing that, since it requires, in addition to knowing the procedure or technique, various physical abilities such as being able to read and react judiciously to the exigencies of the particular contextual situation in which X is done. These physical abilities constitute a distinctive kind of practical knowledge, one that is very different from having a theoretical grasp of the procedure or technique (for a more detailed account of these matters, see Winch 2017). These physical abilities, that constitute a distinctive kind of practical knowledge, always involve tacit dimensions, dimensions that cannot be verbally articulated or explained. A typical difficulty for attempts to articulate or describe holistic situations lies in the reductive tendencies of language. This is why, as we have maintained repeatedly in this book, the understanding of skilled human performances of all kinds requires them to be viewed holistically. Reductive approaches fail to do justice to practical knowledge. In turn, this is why we badly need an alternative understanding of education, one that accommodates both theoretical and practical knowledge. However, even this account of skilled performance, based on complexity thinking, is still too simplistic in one important respect. The analysis centres too much

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on the performer as an individual. We need to bolster this account of skilled performance with insights offered by the co-present group concept in order to arrive at a richer understanding of skilled performance. After all, as we have just seen, even the performances of a skilled individual are marked by participation in various copresent groups and other group influences. Chapter 4 argued for the importance of group- or team-based skills, illustrating its claims using examples such as navigation and orchestral performance. Let us now consider how the co-present group concept extends and reinforces the complexity thinking account of skilled performance. The reader is urged to entertain the possibility that group skills might even provide the mainstream account of skills, with individual skills performances being but a limiting case. Chapter 4 discussed Hutchins’s finding that the social organisation of specially designated, highly skilled navigation teams frequently produces ‘group properties that differ considerably from the properties of individuals’ (Hutchins 1995: 175). Hutchins concluded further that the ‘social distribution’ of navigation is such that the knowledge required to carry out the coordinating actions is not discretely contained within the various individuals. Rather, much of the knowledge is intersubjectively shared among the members of the navigation team. (1995: 219)

It is clear that the accounts of complexity thinking and of co-present groups in Part II offer strong theoretical support for Hutchins’s conclusions. The emergents from co-present group processes are equivalent to group properties that differ considerably from the properties of individual group members. Likewise, the complexity thinking principle that any individual co-present group member will have but a partial understanding of the group’s emergent outcomes sits well with Hutchins’s view that the requisite navigational knowledge is ‘not discretely contained’ within individual group members. Rather, such knowledge is ‘intersubjectively shared’ amongst the group members. Hutchins’s description of the navigational team as a ‘malleable and adaptable coordinating tissue’ (219) is a suggestive characterisation of co-present groups with their capacity to achieve outcomes that lie beyond the capability of any individual group member. However, Hutchins’s emphasis is on ‘group properties’ and ‘group knowledge’. Our account of group relational processes over time, encompassing the affective and other dimensions, both cognitive and non-cognitive, from which emerge novel outcomes that exceed the resources of individual group members, serves to add depth to Hutchins’s somewhat vague notions of intersubjective sharing and malleable and adaptable coordinating tissue. For us, the navigational team, a co-present group, is constituted in and through its own activities. These activities emerge from and constitute the group’s practice of navigation. The intelligibility of their practice emerges from their practical judgements, which are shaped by the normativities and contingencies of their ongoing navigational work. Similar considerations apply when our concert cellist joins other cellists to form the cello section of an orchestra. Then we have a co-present group that is a complex system of complex systems. Equally, other sub-groupings in the orchestra, such as violas or horns, constitute further co-present groups that are complex systems of

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complex systems. Thus, as was suggested in Chap. 8 (Sect. 8.2.2), an orchestra can be thought of as a complex system of complex systems of complex systems. In playing a given work, a unique performance will emerge from each sub-grouping in the orchestra. In turn, these unique performances interact to create the emergent whole that constitutes the unique performance of the work by the orchestra as a unit. This unique performance of the work has emerged from ongoing group relational processes that encompass both the affective and many other dimensions, both cognitive and non-cognitive. Of course, not every unique performance is a good, or even an acceptable, one. There are unique performances the like of which we hope to avoid in future. However unacceptable, performances can be very fruitful learning opportunities. This is one reason why orchestras spend significant time in rehearsal. Hence, learning and performing are closely related but are not the same things. The example of the orchestra extends our thinking to highly skilled group performance or practice. In summary, complexity thinking provides cogent reasons for recognising the importance of group skills, which are not themselves reducible to the sum of the skills of the individual group members. As we explained in Chap. 8 (Sect. 8.1), ‘from a complexity perspective, the co-present group’s agency centres on pursuing the attractor, a cooperative process driven by the group’s affective and other functioning’. It is noteworthy that crucial group or team skills will not be easily specifiable or transparent because they reside more in the relations between group or team members than in the individual members that comprise the group or team. This makes them less than amenable to ready identification and demonstration to others. As complexity thinking reminds us, a complete grasp of the whole eludes even co-present group members themselves, let alone outsiders. Like individual performances, group performances are emergent and are characterised by inherently tacit dimensions. However, whilst group skills and agency are clearly distinguishable from individual skills and agency, the two are still closely related. As was stressed in Sect. 8.1, the complex systems that constitute each of the individual group members are ‘mutually implicated’ with the complex system that is the group as a whole. These two distinct kinds of complex system serve to mutually create one another, as we stated in Sect. 8.1: In short, in a co-present group the individual and the social transactionally interrelate with one another so that both are changed continually by the transactional experience, accompanied by the emergence of novel entities.

We conclude that consideration of group skills, along with individual skills, is an essential component of any adequate account of skills. As we have seen, even accounting for an individual skilled performance involves socially shaped influences such as interaction with clients and peers. Thus, seeking to explain skills by focusing merely on individual performances commits the mistake of presenting a limiting case as the mainstream case. The lens of complexity thinking, together with our account of co-present groups, provides the theoretical basis for group skills being an essential part of any adequate account of skills.

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Let us provide additional insights into the nature of group- or team-based skills through the lens of the holism of skills. The first defining feature of a co-present group is its affective functioning, which ‘is essentially a group or social phenomenon’ (Chap. 6: Sects. 6.3.2 and 6.4.1). Chapter 6 demonstrated that affect, besides emotions, encompasses many other significant aspects of human bodily engagement with the world, including its relational dimensions generally, our motivations for choosing some engagement possibilities over others and our sense of belonging in a particular place. We summarised co-present groups as being characterised by ‘the sharing of relationally holistic and social activities, particularly affective functioning, in distinctive places’ (Chap. 6: Sect. 6.7). As was shown in Chap. 4, skills include normative and moral dimensions, which are important aspects of human engagement with the world. Thus, for a co-present group, the normative and moral dimensions of its outcomes are emergent from the group’s affective functioning. They are manifest in group- or team-based skills, as distinct from the skills of a particular group member. The second defining feature of a co-present group is its sense of a place-in-time. This sense of a place-in-time, which belongs to a given co-present group alone, is constituted by the process of its relational functioning. The place-in-time is a ‘stretched’ place since it includes the past (retrospection, e.g. memories, habits), the present (e.g. judging how to move on) and the future (anticipative of possible experiences to achieve its prospective purpose). Hence, a co-present group’s ‘stretched place’ transcends geography. A co-present group’s place is that of an ongoing dialogical community engaged in shared meaning-making over time. In this holistic way, co-present groups affectively construct the emergence of appropriate group- or team-based skills. As was argued in Chap. 6 (Sect. 6.4.2), a co-present group’s unique place-intime reflects its singularity. The heterogeneity of its members means that the copresent group’s identity is always in the making and that each co-present group has its own unique singularity. As group members leave and new members take their place, the group’s identity continues to evolve. Likewise, though diverse marine navigation teams may be equally successful at carrying out their work, each team will have its own singular identity. Though the respective members of each team will have identical detailed job descriptions, we saw in Chap. 4 (Sect. 4.1.4) that job descriptions alone were not sufficient to enable a newly formed team to carry out navigation successfully. Rather, successful navigation requires the team to have developed suitable intersubjective knowledge. This socially distributed navigational know-how will reflect the team’s unique identity arising from its heterogeneous membership and their experiences of navigation. The intersubjective knowledge is likely to be always a work-in-progress. It will be affected, for example, when a new member replaces someone in an existing experienced team. As new team members become participants in their team’s intersubjective knowledge, there may well be some alteration or expansion of the intersubjective knowledge itself. Though each co-present group has its own unique place-in-time and, thus, its own distinctive singularity, in most instances a co-present group is also striving to achieve outcomes that are part of something more general. Each unique navigation

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team aims for the same particular outcome, that is, safe navigation. Likewise, though the group skills exhibited by the surgical team or the string quartet may in each case be somewhat distinctive, their nature and the outcomes that they achieve often have wider significance. This brings us to the third defining feature of a co-present group—its particularity and accountability. The manifestation of a co-present group’s emergent group skills is an event in the relevant wider community, for example, other navigators, musicians and so on. As discussed previously, in an important sense, closely related skilled performances are accountable to one another as they seek to advance significant social goods, such as justice, learning and restoration of health. The other three defining features of a co-present group (presented in Chap. 6, Sects. 6.4.4–6.4.6) remind us of the group’s capacity to achieve emergent outcomes that greatly surpass anything that group members acting individually could have achieved. The participation and nonlinearity features point to the distributed leadership that arises through the contingencies of the case. The distributed participation feature recognises that membership of co-present groups can extend beyond geographical co-location; it also facilitates the timely rise of suitable leadership to cater to the twists and turns of the ongoing case. The deliberation feature underlines the crucial point that emergent group skills arise from shared practical judgements on how best to proceed in the given unfolding situation. Skills themselves can involve various kinds of know-how, but these practical judgements are holistic in the strong sense that they constitute the capacity to ‘put it all together’ seamlessly to produce an efficacious skilled performance that meets the needs of the given circumstances. This phenomenon needs to be considered in its own right. In summary, our novel account has shown how to deal with the unresolved issues surrounding skills that were identified in Chap. 4. Concepts that capture the vital holism and relationality of skilled performance have been advanced and their utility demonstrated. Complexity thinking has served to elaborate the crucial links between key concepts such as holism, normativity, contextuality (or situatedness) and professional judgement. As well, the importance of group skills has been established. Arguably, for understanding skills, group skills should serve as the mainstream case, with individual skills being a more peripheral case. After all, we have shown that group influences are very important in the skill development of individuals. Also, we have found that the processes of skilled performances by the larger complex system, that is, the group as a whole, are mutually implicated with the skill development of the smaller complex systems that are each of the individual group members. The two processes mutually create and reinforce one another. The limitations of the traditional approach, of restricting consideration to individual skills, should by now be very apparent.

10.2.2 A Novel Account of Competence Chapter 4 identified two major unresolved issues surrounding our understanding of competence. These two major unresolved issues were essentially the same as those

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that applied to skills. First, we need a cogent account of the holism and relationality of competence, including the central role of professional judgement within it. Second, we need to move beyond an exclusive focus on individuals as the locus of competence. We begin with the holism and relationality of competence, including the central role of professional judgement. Clearly, the concept of competence has some relevant connections with the concept of skill, as the definitions considered in Chap. 4 (Sect. 4.2.1) indicate: competence as being ‘properly qualified to do a task’ or as the ‘ability or capability that will enable satisfactory completion of some task’. However, competence, as the term is usually employed, is a broader notion than skill. For instance, all holders of a motor vehicle driver’s licence are thereby certified as competent, but they are not all equally skilled. To state that someone is a skilled driver is to suggest that their driving performance is somewhat above the norm. As we saw in Chap. 4 (Sect. 4.1.3), Winch bases his account of skills on the idea that there are degrees of just how skilled a skilled performance might be. As he put it, ‘the concept of a skill seems to be the ability concept which opens up the vista of normative appraisal’ (Winch 2010: 41). Some tasks are not very demanding in the sense that virtually any normal person can accomplish them. This represents one end of a continuum of tasks, the other end of which locates tasks that very few persons have the skills to accomplish. As we move along the continuum towards the end, the scope for normative appraisal increases with the more demanding tasks. For instance, our highly skilled cellist, discussed above, is likely to be a superior performer to someone who is merely a ‘competent cellist’. However, notwithstanding these differences between ‘skill’ and ‘competence’, the main principles set out in the previous section on our novel account of skills will also apply to the concept of competence. Let us begin with a competent motor vehicle driver journeying to a distant location on unfamiliar roads. Complexity thinking asserts that relations are more central to an understanding of competent performance than are the entities that they relate. We need to address the relationality of competence if we are to understand its holism, and how this interconnects with other vital related concepts, such as contextuality and professional judgement. According to complexity thinking, the competent motor vehicle driver undertaking an unfamiliar journey sets off with various driving abilities or capacities that have emerged during the person’s particular driving history. That is, the driver (as a complex system) has interacted transactionally with diverse conditions and situations from which, over time, have emerged their current driving abilities. Undertaking the long, unfamiliar journey may or may not stimulate further adaptations in those driving abilities. However, as we have stressed repeatedly, these driving abilities are constituted by more than just cognitive and psychomotor attributes. Also, crucial to their emergence over time is affective and other diverse, non-cognitive relational processes. These diverse relational processes would include interactions with relevant others, such as other road users, passengers and automotive specialists, such as mechanics. In some cases, these interactions will have occurred in the context of co-present groups, involving, for example, formal driving instructors. As with skilled performance, competence is ideally a continuing journey rather than arrival at a particular destination.

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Again, competence, in common with all emergents from relational transactions within complex systems, exhibits a holism that is inevitably reduced somewhat when we attempt to codify or precisely specify its nature. As we saw in Chaps. 7 and 8, this is an instance of Cilliers’ principle that the models we employ to understand complex systems inevitably and desirably involve some reduction of the complexity of such systems to something immediately meaningful, or useful. Competency standards or statements are a common example of reduction to something immediately meaningful, portable and useful for certain purposes. Experientially, seamless knowhow constitutes the holism that is a mark of competent performances. Competency standards or statements are attempts to describe competent performances in words. The diverse understandings of competence outlined in Chap. 4 (Sects. 4.2.1 and 4.2.2) dictate different reductive choices for representing competent performance. Since some reduction is unavoidable, no codification will fully represent the holism of competent performances, but some codifications are more reductive than others. Consider, first, the tasks/skills approach. It defines competence as the satisfactory completion of a series of discrete, observable tasks. But, more accurately, competence is the set of observable behaviours involved in the completion of these tasks. This approach involves a severe form of reduction since it simply ignores the holism that characterises competent performances. Accepting that different degrees of reduction serve different purposes, are there any useful purposes that the tasks/skills approach might serve? Perhaps this approach might facilitate the identification of areas that need remediation in cases of very poor performance? Otherwise, its degree of reduction appears to be too great to be very useful. Second, there is the generic skills/attributes approach. It conceptualises competence as the proficient and effective deployment of a series of generic attributes or skills. As we saw in Chap. 4 (Sect. 4.2.2), this approach does at least address the less predictable factors relevant to competent performances, such as planning, flexibility, adaptability and contingency management. It thereby incorporates some of the less tangible, holistic aspects of competent performances. However, the evidence shows that generic skills/attributes are not really generic across all diverse contexts. They need to be contextualised to the specific requirements of a given context. By overemphasising the generic aspects of competence, this approach ignores the particular features that identify the performance as belonging to a distinctive kind. The effect of this is to achieve only a ‘thin’ account of the holism of the performance. Third, we considered the integrated approach to competence. Although it too is subject to inevitable reduction, it seeks to limit the extent of reduction by emphasising the essentially relational character of competence. Chap. 4 (Sect. 4.2.2) set out three crucial senses in which the integrated approach operates holistically. The inherently holistic relationality of this approach is evidenced in its focus on relational aspects of competent performance, such as its contextuality (or situatedness) and the central role of professional judgement. The relationality of a practitioner’s professional judgement is evident in the influential social and normative dimensions that significantly shape it. In an important sense, each practitioner’s professional judgement is accountable to that of other competent practitioners in the same field. This becomes clearly evident in cases of group

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or team competence, but applies equally to the work outputs of sole practitioners. Thus, whilst accepting the inevitability of some reduction, the integrated approach can be strongly recommended in all cases where the aim is to attempt to model the holistic richness of competent performance. As noted previously, the benefits of portability encourage the production and widespread use of documents that specify competency standards. Ill-informed usage of such documents can easily overlook the inevitable losses of meaning occasioned by the reduction and de-contextualisation that accompany their production. By emphasising such matters as contextualisation and the necessary employment of informed professional judgement, the integrated approach underlines the inescapable need for situation-specific interpretations when using a competency standards document. This is why it captures more of the holism of performances than do its rival approaches (for more on this see Hager 2017; Winch 2017). We turn now to the second major unresolved issues surrounding our understanding of competence. This is the pressing need to go beyond an exclusive focus on individuals as the locus of competence. For the literature on competence, this assertion is much more novel and far-reaching than anything else discussed so far in this section. This is so because the existing literature on competence has almost universally assumed that the concept of competence applies exclusively to individuals. The notion of group competence remains largely unexplored. An obvious reason for this is that the main way in which the competence concept has been influential is in designing and delivering competency-based training for entry into largely manual occupations. Like formal educational arrangements generally, formal training provision has focused almost exclusively on the training of individual learners and the assessing of the discrete skills that they acquire. Any notions of group competence are typically absent from entry-level training. However, it is also true that some professions and emerging technical occupations, influenced by the integrated understanding of competence, have sought to build into their competence frameworks the crucial interpersonal and social dynamics involved in competent performance of the particular occupation. These person-to-person competencies seek to cover such matters as effective two-way communication with clients and their carers and working productively with peers and other professionals to enhance client service. However, thus far, in such cases the focus is always on how well the individual practitioner communicates with them or works satisfactorily with them. There is little or no sense of novel solutions or recommendations emerging from these joint interactions. This situation reflects the near universal assumption that individual practitioners are the sole focus of the deployment of competency standards. Complexity thinking and the co-present group concept highlight the narrowness of this assumption. They point to the important conclusion that much more satisfactory accounts of competence may be achieved by taking into account the effects of emergence from the processes of group functioning that form part of the overall practice of the occupation. A well-known example of the pitfalls of relying exclusively on individual competence assessment is the process of filling vacancies in orchestras or other smaller musical ensembles. Reliance on individual competence assessment can lead to the

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appointment of the an obvious virtuoso. However, capacity for high-quality individual playing is only one essential characteristic of successful orchestral or ensemble musicians. Equally crucial are capacities to perform sensitively and harmoniously with the orchestra or ensemble as a whole. The most virtuosic candidates are not necessarily satisfactory team players (for more on this, see Hager and Johnsson 2009; Johnsson and Hager 2008). The need to avoid poor recruitment decisions is precisely why orchestras and other musical ensembles trial possible appointees in a series of actual concerts before confirming their appointment. Obviously, this process is even more thorough and demanding when filling vacant leadership positions. None of this is surprising given our account of co-present groups and complexity thinking. As we have stressed, group competence and the competence of individual group members mutually transact and reinforce one another.

10.2.3 A Novel Account of Abilities, Capabilities, Dispositions and Capacities Chapter 4 (Sect. 4.3.4) noted that abilities, capabilities, dispositions and capacities belong to the same family of concepts as skills and competence. As well, the close links between these four concepts were outlined. Ability and capacity are near synonyms, whilst disposition is often employed interchangeably with capacity. Very similar to these three is capability, though perhaps it has overtones of a broader, more summative, uncountable sense of ability or capacity. In addition, it was argued, following Winch, that skills are but a sub-class of abilities or capacities, typically ones that are subject to normative appraisal. Chapter 4 also suggested that whilst some instances of these human capacities are, arguably, innate, others can be learnt from experience. Yet other instances might develop from a suitable mix of nature and nurture, that is, as a part of normal growth and development within favourable circumstances. Hence, given the close links between these four concepts and their close affinities to skills and competence, it is unsurprising that the main unresolved issues that need to be addressed in order to advance our understanding of them are by now very familiar. First, we need to better conceptualise the characteristic relationality and holism of abilities, capabilities, dispositions and capacities. Second, given the emerging importance of group or team skills and competence, similar considerations need to be brought to bear on our understandings of abilities, capabilities, dispositions and capacities in relation to group activities. With respect to relationality and holism, consider first the abilities, capabilities, dispositions and capacities of an individual. Each person is a complex system whose abilities, capabilities, dispositions and capacities emerge via ongoing transactions with relevant environments in which these attributes are applied. As they are applied in different environments, adaptations are stimulated, thereby effecting changes in the person’s abilities, capabilities, dispositions and capacities. Crucial to these changes

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are affective and other diverse, non-cognitive relational processes that occur within the complex system that is the person interacting with its environment. These diverse relational processes would include interactions with other persons, some of which would have occurred in the context of a co-present group, as characterised in Chap. 6. For us, exercising one’s abilities, capabilities, dispositions and capacities is a continuing journey rather than an arrival at a particular destination. Particularly relevant here is Passmore’s distinction between open and closed capacities (Chapter 4, Sect. 4.3.3). Like uncountable skills, open capacities can always be improved by practice. Indeed, if open capacities are not exercised regularly, the level of proficiency will likely decline. As in the cases of skills and competence, our novel account has, in principle, limitations, since all descriptions of complex systems involve some reduction of the complex whole. Our attempts to describe and understand abilities, capabilities, dispositions and capacities will require different types and levels of description according to our particular purposes. Informed professional judgement will be necessary to formulate descriptions that are of the appropriate types and levels. There is a further, by now familiar, limitation of the discussion thus far—it has centred on the abilities, capabilities, dispositions and capacities of an individual person. But, as just stressed, part of the journey of the individual developing and appreciating their abilities, capabilities, dispositions and capacities involves interactions with other persons, including within co-present groups. Our novel account requires us to recognise and appreciate the significance of the emergence of group or team abilities, capacities, dispositions and capabilities from the functioning processes of groups over time. The positing of group abilities, capabilities, dispositions and capacities supplies us with several insights: • The group abilities, capabilities, dispositions and capacities developed through copresent group processes can achieve more than can the efforts of any individuals within the group. Novel outcomes that could not be predicted from what went before can emerge from the co-present group processes. • Nor is this emergence of novelty from group processes fully specifiable either before or after the event. This suggests that group abilities, capabilities, dispositions and capacities are uncountable rather than countable, that is, they are inherently holistic and significantly tacit. In many cases, they will be, in Passmore’s (1980) sense, open. • Participation in co-present group processes can serve to change individuals’ identities and capacities, that is, they can learn. Individual participants may come to recognise that they have abilities, capabilities, dispositions and capacities that they have never previously used or even been aware of possessing. Thus, as argued previously, the complex systems that constitute each of the individual group members are ‘mutually implicated’ with the complex system that is the co-present group as a whole. These two distinct kinds of complex systems serve to mutually create one another.

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The significance of these points is only enhanced by the growing occurrence of coproduction and inter-professional teamwork in workplaces. Again, the six defining features of co-present groups serve to deepen our understanding here. Just as in the case of group skills, these defining features of co-present groups serve to amplify what the concepts of group abilities, group capabilities, group dispositions and group capacities might entail. As we have seen, co-present group affective functioning is a group phenomenon from which can emerge outcomes that are beyond the capacities of the individual group members and that could not have been predicted in advance. Thus, holistic, group-specific abilities, capabilities, dispositions and capacities can emerge from the group’s functioning. This process of the group’s relational functioning creates for the group members a sense of its place-in-time, a ‘stretched’ place that encompasses the group’s past, present and future meaning-making activities. These meaning-making activities serve to expand the group’s range of group abilities, group capabilities, group dispositions and group capacities. In short, the group’s socially distributed know-how is expanded. At the same time, as has been stressed repeatedly, individual group members can also develop enhanced personal abilities, capabilities, dispositions or capacities. Thus, the group’s identity is always in the making, as are the identities of the individual group members. The group’s evolving identity, its unique, stretched place-in-time, constitutes its singularity. At the same time, the accountabilities of its performances to those of other groups having the same or similar purposes constitute its particularity. The distributed leadership of such groups, which arises in response to the contingencies that characterise each particular situation that the group encounters, underpins the singularity of each co-present group. Each group’s abilities, capabilities, dispositions or capacities will be reflected in the shared practical judgements that the group formulates in the space of reasons to best achieve its purposes in any given unfolding situation. Earlier, in Chap. 4 (Sect. 4.4) we noted Winch’s identification of orders or levels within abilities. At first sight, this fits well with the complexity and holism that this chapter has argued are crucial features that need to figure in any satisfactory account of skills, competence, ability and related terms. Perhaps uncountable skills can be regarded usefully as a higher level or order than countable skills? As we have seen, this matter of levels is one for which the co-present group concept and complexity thinking provide useful tools for further exploration and elucidation.

10.3 A Novel Account of Expertise Early in Chap. 9, we established (in Sect. 9.2) that groups’ agency is value-laden through and through. What a co-present group takes on is inevitably normative; there is a telos (a purpose) which embeds the dynamics of the striving to bring it about (this is how intelligibility – making sense – is manifest).

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Under the constitutive account of group agency, which Chap. 9 went on to establish, through this ‘normative striving’, something new and important emerges— innovative expertise—which we claim is best regarded as a virtue, in the Aristotelian sense. Innovative expertise is a manifestation of the broader pursuit of human excellence. Russell (2009) picks out the individualistic nature of this normativity when he states that the relevant virtues in this context [of their unity in any single workplace] must be excellences of persons considered as rational, practical agents. … [I]t also seems clear … that any theory of the virtues must take such virtues as its central cases. … [E]xcellences – [are] traits in virtue of which one fulfills one’s nature as a rational and emotional creature that chooses and acts. (338–339)

Here, we read that virtues themselves are centrally practical excellences: we admire and wish to inculcate the exercise of traits which one chooses in fulfilment of one’s nature. These include trustworthiness, courage, temperance, humility and so on (There can be any number of virtues: see The Virtues Project (website in the references list), where there are dozens listed.).

10.3.1 Innovative Expertise as a Form of Excellence We build on the above claim (Russell 2009) that excellences are ‘traits in virtue of which one fulfils one’s nature as a rational and emotional creature that chooses and acts’, but, for us, the site of the virtue or excellence of ‘innovative expertise’ is the co-present group, not the individual. Our disagreement with traditional accounts of agency and expertise in this regard is set out in Chap. 2 (Sect. 2.5). By contrast, our account in Chap. 9 of group agency has Spinozan ‘wilful rationality’ at the heart of the functioning and telos of a co-present group (its ‘normative striving’), and thus, we now set out a novel approach to expertise, emphasising the virtue of such expertise within group contexts. Expertise that is innovative and enacted (Sect. 2.4) represents, in particular workplace contexts, a ‘confident engagement’ (cf. Sect. 2.6: Edwards’s ‘relational agency’) with practice-originated knowledge. Our theorisation of ‘general complexity’ (Chap. 8) does not begin with the display and exercise of excellence in individuals, but rather, in a group’s relational excellence: the exercise of traits that are centrally practical but only apparent in what we claim is the ‘general complexity’ of the group (e.g. in the surgery, the courtroom, the arts production, the building construction and so on). This normativity is a less reductive set of relationships: the group and the participants share a telos (e.g. justice, if it is a jury). Complex systems of complex systems are what make groups function. The less reductive account, that is, the ‘level’ of general complexity we advocate in this book, reveals and preserves (without atomising) all participants’ normative striving to do well—to excel, as a group or team. We claim that this as a virtue of co-present groups’ agency. By this, we mean that co-present

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groups want to excel by ‘virtue’ of the holistic practical reasoning (Sect. 9.8) they give and receive amongst their participants amidst daily work and life. In what sites or contexts of practice do we find these? Where it is agreed that ‘the excellence of such creatures as we are must be a kind of intelligent success in action and practical reasoning’ (Russell 2009: 343), our novel claim for expertise is that excelling by, and in, the virtue of ‘innovative expertise’ is a feature, not only of individuals, but also of co-present groups.

10.3.2 Innovative Expertise Within Co-present Groups In Chap. 9, we have claimed that holistic practical judgements or deliberations— decisions that require the giving and receiving of reasons or explanations—are as equally important in the richer relations of the co-present group as they are between a couple of individuals (Sect. 9.9). The individualistic view on this is well put by Annas (2011) in her work on intelligent virtues: With skills of any complexity, what is conveyed from the expert to the learner will require the giving of reasons. The learner electrician and plumber need to know not just that you do the wiring or pipe-laying such and such a way, but why … [so,] [r]easons enter in here as a medium of explanation … The explanation enables the learner to go ahead in different situations and contexts … The ability both to teach and to learn a skill thus depends on the ability to convey an explanation by giving and receiving reasons. It thus requires some degree of articulacy. (20)

What is going on here, and in co-present groups, which also expect and seek reasons for actions? Annas (2011) emphasises two features: We find the important similarity of virtue to skills where two things are united: the need to learn and the drive to aspire. … Aristotle famously notes an important similarity between virtue and skill: both are practical, and so can be learned by practice, by actually doing what needs to be done. Moreover, both involve learning … “… for example, we become builders by building, and lyre-players by playing the lyre. So too we become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions and courageous by courageous actions” [Nicomachean Ethics, (1941)Section 1103a, lines 34–35]. (Annas 2011: 16–17)

The electrician, the plumber, the surgeon, the lawyer and so on have in common the need to learn (what to do next—the emergence of expertise being the shared intention) and the aspiration (to improve, when the next situation presents itself— as an opportunity for innovation). These two features of skilled actions point us to expertise as a virtue because they have a common concept, the pursuit of excellence: Virtue … shares the intellectual structure of a skill where we find not only the need to learn but the drive to aspire, and hence the need to “give an account”, the need for articulate conveying of reasons why what is done is done. The learner in virtue, like the learner in a practical skill, needs to understand what she is doing, to achieve the ability to do it for herself, and to do it in a way that improves as she meets challenges, rather than coming out with predictable repetition. This comes about when the virtue is conveyed by the giving and

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receiving of reasons, in contrast with the non-rational picking up of a knack. (Annas 2011: 20)

To ‘give an account’ is to participate in justificatory activity, but our claim is bolder. Occupying the ‘space of reasons’ (see Chap. 9) is no less a feature of a copresent group than of any individuals within them. There are, as we have argued in the previous chapter, levels of justification and inference, based on the extent of reductivity appropriate to the group’s functioning. Lodge et al. (2017: 387) reminded us (9.1) that ‘[d]ata-driven inference … does not appear to be sufficient to provide a clear picture of psychological and social phenomena such as learning’. Yet, data (both ‘big’ and atomistic) can and should contribute to the appropriate ‘level’ of judgement emerging from a co-present group’s processes. These will underpin claims of success in practices and in learning—and, we claim, in establishing skilful performances and expertise (as when ‘they raised it to a whole new level’). Expertise, excellence and innovation are closely related, and ‘general complexity’ helps us to see why. Groups working on projects, cases and in complexity generally, often seek innovative expertise, which for us is the relational excellence of the group playing out in finding unique and efficacious responses and solutions. This is not to demean or subjugate our (individual) senses of selfhood or agency. The agentive Self (my sense of Me) is not the mere epiphenomenon of purposeful working experiences. Rather, it is an onto-epistemological achievement—a nodal, or high-water, or milestone marker in the daily swamp of working life. These can accumulate as careers unfold, and the jigsaw puzzle of successes and failures takes shape. But, throughout, the relational excellence of the group invokes mediated responses, where the give-and-take of the practitioners amongst their innovative activities shapes not only their purposes, but also themselves (collaboratively), and, their Selves (respectively). Innovative expertise as a manifestation of co-present groups’ excellence is ontologically distinctive because, at and through work, it melds emergent ‘practitioner’ purposes with socially intelligent action. It does this by acknowledging, as central to this relationality, the interests that co-present practitioners have in making their normativity apparent both to themselves (their group) and to others, as actions unfold towards a telos.

10.4 Perspiration and Aspiration 10.4.1 This Book as the Outcome of a Co-present Group in Action Over Time Throughout the writing of this book, the authors have operated as an ongoing twomember co-present group, which laboured over several years to produce it. As input to the ongoing task of writing draft chapters, on some occasions we worked jointly in the one location. More frequently, over the years of writing, we have engaged in

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regular teleconferences in which we discussed the evolving shape of the book and critically commented on one another’s draft materials. At the same time, across the years, our authorial co-present group has benefitted frequently from us, sometimes singly, sometimes jointly, participating in other co-present groups in which topics relevant to our work were discussed. On occasions, these wider co-present groups were processing input from yet other co-present groups. Further, on other occasions, our authorial two-person co-present group was expanded as invited guest participants offered specialised input on some of the book’s topics or chapters. Less formally, our book has also benefitted from critical engagements with colleagues at conferences, lectures and so on, which has resulted in further suggestive input into the writing process. As well, in the latter stages of the process, our editor’s pointed questions also helped to evolve certain aspects of the book. Clearly, then, the final version of the book has emerged from an extended complex process. The whole that is the final version is greater than either of us writing alone, or even the two of us writing as an isolated pair, could have produced. For the reasons given in detail in the book, each of us has our own distinctive understandings of the book’s contents and significance. Whilst we are confident that there is a major overlap between these two distinctive sets of understandings, we are certain that they are not identical since they both necessarily involve a certain amount of reduction. Indeed, our final published text is necessarily a reduction of the many emergents from the extended functioning processes of the multiple co-present groups that contributed to this writing project. We earlier (9.1) stressed the ‘inescapable need for shrewd judgements when choosing what kinds of system descriptions to work with for particular purposes’. We can only hope that our own judgements in choosing how best to structure this book and to present the sequence of its arguments prove to have been wise ones. Overall, the contents of this book taken together with the ideas generated by readers, and the co-present groups in which they participate, will doubtless encompass much more than either of us authors can fully comprehend at this or any given time. The inherent nature of co-present groups will ensure that this is the case. Truly, this book is but part of a process in which the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts.

10.4.2 This Book as a Model for Employing Complexity Thinking in the Social Sciences Chapter 7 distinguished between restricted complexity and general complexity. It was argued that restricted complexity’s relevance for the social sciences is limited to situations in which persons are treated as statistical variables, such as in the modelling of traffic flows or dealing with a pandemic. However, we maintain that for all situations in which persons are treated as unique individual actors, general complexity, involving weak emergence from transactional relational processes, is required for

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sound theorising. Our concept of co-present groups, with each group’s membership consisting of sets of unique individual actors, provides a focus for wider applications of general complexity thinking within the social sciences. The crucial role of reduction within complexity thinking has been prominent in this book. We have maintained that for understanding or describing the emergents from the functioning of a co-present group, some degree of reduction is necessary and unavoidable. Typically, for the kinds of human activities that we have analysed via the co-present group concept, the inevitability and value of reduction are normally taken for granted. Thus, for example, a co-present group set-up for a particular purpose, such as to explore alternative ways of dealing with a pressing problem situation, is required to produce a clear, well-argued set of recommendations. Necessarily, its report will be a reduction of the complex processes of co-present group functioning that led up to the production of the report. However, because this kind of reduction is normal, it may go unnoticed that some degrees of reduction are more efficacious than are others. We have maintained that wise judgement is crucial when deciding how much reduction is best applicable to a given situation. Indeed, when wise judgement is absent, we expect that the limitations of reduction will lead to sub-optimal outcomes. That reduction is so widespread in human practices as to largely escape notice becomes apparent when we consider the diversity of reasons for its occurrence. Let us consider some examples to illustrate the diversity of reasons for employing reduction. Rather common is what we will call pragmatic reduction. This occurs for activities where the full-blown version would involve excessive costs in either money or time. For example, as was noted earlier (in Sect. 7.1), the early rehearsals for professional productions of musicals and operas are normally carried out to the accompaniment of a solo piano. Initially, this involves diverse co-present groups, such as the main singers or the chorus working on their respective vocal numbers with vocal and language coaches and solo piano accompaniment. Eventually, the outcomes of these multiple small co-present groups are merged into whole scenes and acts. Only around the time that the full-dress rehearsals are beginning is it viable to include the full orchestra, which, in the meantime, has itself been practising the score in isolation from the singers. Having the full performance forces working together from the start of rehearsals would quite simply be extravagantly cost-ineffective and timewasting. Similarly, small amateur companies even today present musicals and operas where the solo piano is the only musical accompaniment. Clearly having orchestral accompaniment would be ideal, but living within one’s means and resources by presenting a reduced version is preferable to foregoing any chance of performing live musicals and operas. Similar reduction considerations apply when theatre and opera companies omit some roles and/or musical numbers from their productions, whether it be for reasons of cost-savings or to make the length of the production more manageable. A related example of pragmatic reduction dates from the days before the invention of the gramophone. In that era, piano reductions of great orchestral music became enormously popular. Those who either resided some distance from the nearest concert hall or who could not afford the price of concert tickets, could become familiar with orchestral pieces, albeit in a far-from-ideal, reduced form. Other instances of

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pragmatic reduction centre on saving time. An example is simplified recipes for favourite dishes. Though the culinary results are usually inferior to those obtained by following the original detailed recipe, the time saved can be attractive to persons wishing to prepare quickly an adequate meal after a long working day. A different type of reduction, which we will call developmental reduction, occurs when human practices or activities are modified (that is, reduced) to enable the participation of persons with developmental delays or deficiencies. Easily played reductions of favourite songs from musicals, operettas and so on, for beginners or amateur players, are a typical example. Another example is creating simpler versions of adult sports or games to enable young children to participate effectively. These reductions cater to the limited skill capacities of small bodies, whilst simultaneously encouraging the development of skills that will be applicable to later, fuller versions of the sports or games. Yet, another common type of reduction, which we call commercially motivated reduction, involves creating and marketing products to consumers on the promise of taking the hard work out of satisfactorily completing some challenging or expensive activity. An obvious example here is the marketing of student study guides that are designed to take the hard work out of study. For instance, instead of reading and attempting to appreciate a classic novel, students can swot a much shorter study guide that summarises the plot, describes each of the characters, outlines main themes and issues and provides model answers to likely examination questions. Another example is provided by the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books series (which later became Reader’s Digest Select Editions). These provided readers with shortened versions of four or five then-current best sellers all within a single book. It enabled readers to have some acquaintance with a large number of contemporary books without the need to actually read the complete books or to even purchase them. Another example is what we can call systemic reduction, which involves taking large-scale, complicated human phenomena and granulating them ever more finely to somehow make these phenomena more accessible to socio-political decision-making. The following are two ubiquitous manifestations of systemic reduction. The first example is international (and congruent national) testing of core curricula in schooling. Since 1997, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has attracted criticism for the potential influence it may have on educational policies, skewing resources and pedagogical practices towards what it actually tested (literacy, numeracy, etc.). The Wikipedia site for PISA summarises such criticism: Recent decades have witnessed an expansion in the uses to which PISA and similar assessments are put, from assessing students’ learning, to connecting “the educational realm (their traditional remit) with the political realm” [Breakspear 2012]. This raises the question whether PISA data are sufficiently robust to bear the weight of the major policy decisions that are being based upon them, for, according to Breakspear, PISA data have “come to increasingly shape, define and evaluate the key goals of the national/federal education system”. This implies that those who set the PISA tests – e.g. in choosing the content to be assessed and not assessed – are in a position of considerable power to set the terms of the education debate, and to orient educational reform in many countries around the globe. (‘Programme for International Student Assessment’ n.d.)

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A second example is a growth in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in workforce recruitment, as The Guardian has reported: The automation revolution has hit recruitment, with everything from facial expressions to vocal tone now analysed by algorithms and artificial intelligence. But what’s the cost to workforce diversity – and workers themselves?

After compiling myriad amounts of tiny data, [t]he [software] program turns this data into a score, which is then compared against one the program has already “learned” from top-performing employees. The idea is that a good prospective employee looks a lot like a good current employee, just not in any way a human interviewer would notice. (Buranyi 2018)

Readers will have come across similar examples in this book. One such is the reductive attempts to capture ‘competence’ by persistent atomisation of work roles and behavioural outcomes (discussed in Sect. 10.2.2). Another is the unclear contribution that ‘big data’, presented misleadingly as ‘learning analytics’, makes to questions of a university course and study design, together with the inferences drawn from such data about pedagogical practices (discussed in Sect. 5.5.2). The range of examples above demonstrates that there are various different types of reduction. In all cases, they can be said to offer advantages from some perspectives. Yet, as was intimated in several of the examples, from other perspectives it is typical that reduction also comes at a cost. For instance, the student study guides are successful from a commercial perspective, but much less so from an educational perspective. PISA results will have various political significances, but may shrink the scope for creative teaching. And a reliance on AI at the point of recruitment may make the Human Resources professional’s work easier but produce ‘cloned’ staffing decisions. So, reductions are often made simply because they are possible, convenient or lucrative for some, but with too little attention being paid to their resultant deleterious effects. As well, this book has emphasised that different degrees of reduction serve different purposes. For instance, there is little doubt that some study guides for a given novel are so reductive as to be of little educational value, even to students who have actually read the novel. But there would be other study guides for the same novel whose scholarly approach is such that they are invaluable sources of insight to serious readers of the novel. As always, the net worth or otherwise of a particular reduction varies with the perspectives of those making the judgements. A helpful set of perspectives around complexity, reductions and the politics of education is available in Osberg and Biesta (2010). What complexity thinking does is to alert us to be far more sensitive to the degrees of reduction that we work with for particular purposes, and that these purposes are usually level-specific: at a national or organisational or institutional level, resources may be allocated which mediate the telos of the groups which are represented in those structures. To use a metaphor: trees (the immediate organic entity) may be thriving, but the forests of which they are a part, may be felled, or at least, thinned out—reduced to wastelands.

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Importantly, general complexity also exhibits some non-reductive, holistic tendencies in that it supports an interdisciplinary agenda for the social sciences. In fact, inter-disciplinarity exemplifies relationality. An example is work by Lodge et al. (2017) on higher education (discussed in Sects. 9.1 and 9.8) that draws upon a range of disciplines, not just education. The moral is that there is more than one way of doing social science. What social science needs is many more interdisciplinary co-present groups. Working with several disciplines serves to overcome the reductive tendencies of any one of them. It also enhances the idea of different levels of explanation. Such interdisciplinary work is as much about working boundaries as it is about pushing them. The main topics of this book point to many instances where we in the social sciences need to be constantly reflective amongst tensions between the telos, or purpose, of human activities in groups, and the appropriate degree of reduction required to practically pursue the telos, without compromising it. But this book moves beyond reflection, taking an Aristotelian epistemology seriously—practical judgement (or phronesis). Holistic practical judgements (or decisions, or deliberation), which we set out in Sect. 9.9, provide a way to progress the functions of co-present groups such that what emerges in their relational activities is both unexpected and novel. This book advocates emergence with these characteristics (straight from complexity thinking) as central to innovation across human experiences—and especially as these are apparent in the fluid human life of groups.

10.5 Finding the Flow We have written a book which explores and advances how living and working together can be better undertaken. Complexity theory, originating in the physical sciences, has been systematically examined through central phenomena in the social sciences: agency, learning, practices, skills and competence, each of which are manifestations of living and working together—each show that humans expect to make differences to, and in, the world, day by day. Meanings are made and remade as experiences unfold, and this is inevitably messy and fluid. Adjacent to the social sciences, the physical sciences are also puzzled about relations between living things and their fluidity, since ‘each affect the flow of each other and the overall result is impossible to predict’ (Ravilious 2017: 33), and ‘[i]n reality, cells often move in swarms, and it’s their collective motion that affects the overall flow’ (34). Also adjacent to the social sciences, the humanities are puzzled by much the same relationality, since, as one prominent philosopher claims, ‘morality exists in part because it enables us to live on negotiated terms with others. We can do this because we act for reasons and respond to reasons too’ (Scruton 2017: 98). Further, people come to depend on each other in many ways, and from the point of view of morality, it is often the noncontractual forms of dependence that are most significant – family relations, warfare, duties of charity, and justice towards strangers. (2017: 99)

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Finding the flow amongst human meaning-making is less messy if general complexity thinking is taken seriously. It shows how ubiquitous co-present groups naturally draw us closer to each other, and harness our normativity by enabling negotiability and reason-giving. The ‘flow’ of better living and working together is, we believe, best found in humans’ natural propensity to swarm, with collective affect. Our book has set out how and why the social sciences have much to learn from both the physical sciences and the humanities if we take this propensity seriously.

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