“Saavy surfing” of knowledge regimes

Blog post by Kent Glenzer

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Kent Glenzer

Let me kick things off with my own reflection on some of these questions. I have three assumptions that need to be surfaced. First is that good development gets at root causes of problems in a substantial – not superficial, or merely discursive – way. I don’t consider anything as “good development” if root causes are largely unaffected.

My second assumption is that when dealing with complex problems related to structural inequality, intergenerational injustice, or denial of basic human rights (the kinds of problems I’m most interested in), contestation over what are root causes is inevitable. It is inevitable for political, disciplinary, ideological, philosophical, and epistemological reasons. And the contestation is neither trivial nor merely academic: the contestation is constitutive of the problem system.

Professional surfer Marco Polo at Waimea, Oahu, Hawaii

Professional surfer Marco Polo at Waimea, Oahu, Hawaii

My third assumption is that development largely occurs through and by organizations – increasingly groups/networks of organizations – and organizations are messy, inconsistent, boundedly rational, subject to frequent changes due to change of leaders (all of whom want to make their mark, not pursue previous strategies), and driven importantly by Boards of Directors that pursue largely survivalist aims (perpetuate the organization) and, increasingly in the 21st century, demand simple, quantitative performance measures.

What, within the frame of these three assumptions, are crucial competencies of a good development practitioner? One I’d call, “Savviness to surf across knowledge regimes.” They have to be able to navigate across a wide variety of fissures and fractures that divide actors in ways that actors themselves do not necessarily grasp fully, and those actors are also development practitioners in many cases. This competency means that practitioners can speak in many different discursive registers, can strategize how to bring opposing views together, and are adept at finding legitimate and powerful points of convergence. A second competency is what I’d call critical historical systems analysis. The beef I have with a lot of systems thinking is that it is a snapshot merely of what is now; superficial day-long workshops that “get the whole system in the room” usually accentuate the problem. What’s left out is the work of the historian, the critical theory analyst, the political economist. A third competency is inventing new good practice. My classes – like many others – spend much of their time on exposing students to known, good or best practice. We don’t of course want our students to reinvent the wheel, or make the same mistakes we made when we were in our twenties and thirties. However, there is a substantial difference in the ability to deploy or replicate best practice and invent new good or best practice, in a particular context.

In my nearly three decades as a development practitioner, I found that we need groups of people in organizations to deploy the above competencies. Too often, one person – a loner, a maverick, the critical ombudsman – carries the entire weight of these competencies. That person – depending on their personality and organizational savvy – can be either a kind of organizational hero (she says or names things that others do not, and is admired for it) or a pariah. In both cases, the organization itself tends to remain unchanged. The need for groups of like-abled and like-minded turns this into a leadership challenge: leaders must actively recruit such people, and actively put them into work spaces together.

If my outline of competencies limns the borders of an “ideal” development practitioner – I naively do believe that this is the kind of practitioner I’m trying to educate in my Masters level classes – then at the level of individual agency it is important that this genre of development practitioner is tactical, choosy about where to push and where to concede, and realistic about how deeply entrenched systems of power and privilege are nudged. Such a practitioner considers themselves a long-distance runner, not a sprinter. A decathlete, not a specialist. An entrepreneur, not a revolutionary.

KENT’S RESEARCH AND CONSULTING FOCUSES ON THE INTERSECTION OF POWER IN AND BETWEEN DEVELOPMENT ORGANIZATIONS, KNOWLEDGE CLAIMS, AND STRATEGIC AND PROGRAMMATIC PLANNING, DECISION-MAKING.  HE HAS A KEEN INTEREST IN LONG-TERM INQUIRY SYSTEMS WITHIN AND AMONG SOCIAL CHANGE ORGANIZATIONS, SYSTEMS THAT CANPERMIT MANAGERS AND ACTIVISTS TO UNDERSTAND AND FOSTER CHANGETHAT IS STRUCTURAL AND MAY TAKE MANY YEARS.  KENT SPENT MUCH OF THE 1980S AND 1990S WORKING WITH INTERNATIONAL NONGOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA, AND OBTAINED HIS PH.D. FROM EMORY UNIVERSITY’S INSTITUTE OF THE LIBERAL ARTS (ILA) IN 2005, WHERE HE FOCUSED ON THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF DEVELOPMENT, POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY, AND NEOINSTITUTIONAL ORGANIZATIONAL SOCIOLOGY IN AN INVESTIGATION OF DEMOCRATIC DECENTRALIZATION IN MALI.  HIS PUBLICATIONS INVESTIGATE DEVELOPMENT AS DISCOURSE, DEVELOPMENT ORGANIZATIONS AS SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONS, AND THE NATURE OF LONG-TERM LEARNING SYSTEMS THEMSELVES.  KENT IS ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR AND DEVELOPMENT AT THE MONTEREY INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES, WHERE HE HAS A JOINT APPOINTMENT BETWEEN THE MBA AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION DEPARTMENTS.
Dusty Columbia Embury
Latest posts by Dusty Columbia Embury (see all)

Share this post:

Share on LinkedIn Share on WhatsApp
←Previous post Next post→