Volume 9(1): 151171 Copyright 2002 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)

Mind the Gap? A Processual Reconsideration of Organizational Knowledge

Martin Wood
University of Exeter, UK

Bergson

Abstract. On Henri Bergsons view, the ux of time is reality itself and the things we study are the things that ow. Unfortunately, popular literatures on organizational knowledge are accustomed to seeing the moving by means of the immobile. They perceive knowledge as an already organized state that can be transferred between spatially distinct points. Drawing on Bergsons theory of continual movement (Duration) and Deleuzes concept of transversal communication, I challenge the ontological concern for knowledge production and use between the discrete parts of an organized system. Instead of seeing knowledge as the integration of derived points or positions, I advocate a threefold method of creative involution in which production and use are considered as a living interpenetration of foldings and movements that connect all things at all places and times. Key words. creativity; involution; knowledge; process; time

The creation and management of knowledge has undoubtedly emerged as a signicant focus in academic and business practice in recent years (see, for example, IKON, 2000, 2001). Enthusiasm for the eld is clearly identiable by the sheer number of approaches and techniques available, ranging from individual cognition, organizational learning and creativity, to information management, data retrieval and intelligent systems, to name but a few. Whether these current frameworks are at all adequate for better apprehending organizational knowledge is, however, a matter for conjecture.
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Organization 9(1) Bergson and Organization Theory While popular knowledge management literatures continue to discuss simple, techno-x solutions to the creation, dissemination, acquisition, access and application of organizational knowledge (see, for example, Davenport and Prusak, 1998), recent UK economic and social research policy has dened knowledge as a more complex mixture of experience, values, contextual information and expertise, embodied and embedded in language, organizational processes and behaviour norms (Economic and Social Research Council, 2000). Evidently, knowledge is not only a set of codied statements, but also includes performative elements of savoir-faire or know how (Lyotard, 1984). Although mainstream strategic thinking suggests that the most successful organizations are those that are best placed to utilize their explicit and tacit knowledge assets (Boisot, 1998, Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995), it is the creation of explicit organizational knowledge that is emphasized as the key competitive advantage in the global economy (Nonaka, 1994). Similarly, in information systems, it is the meaning and relevance of information for the system that is underlined (Ciborra, 1998). Information is seen as a commodity with functional value (Cooper, 1987). Its value is in its additive quantitythe extent to which a piece of information adds something to a previous stock of information (Eco, 1989). Such a production bias is also evident in the way social science research generation is still delineated from its instrumental exploitation (Ferlie et al., 1998). The literature on the diffusion of innovations (see, for example, Brown, 1981; Rogers, 1983) is replete with accounts of the processes by which knowledge, ideas, or research ndings are implemented into practice. Despite this increased attention, current frameworks continue to be misled by the idea that a knowledge productionuse gap exists and that there is a need for linking these two separate domainsa problem of putting theory into practice in the hackneyed sense of the phrase. The deciency lies in the focus on so-called information creation, classication, communication and use, ahead of any analysis of the nature of knowledge itself. This tendency is illustrated in a recent Academy of Management Journal call for papers in which it is noted how both sides lose when knowledge is not transferred across academic and practitioner lines. In strategic management research, the need to develop a better understanding of the relationship between strategy and change in order to achieve a close integration of the two is pointed out (Bettis and Hitt, 1995). In corporate nance, Trahan and Gitman (1995) advocate better communication and articulation of the research needs of practitioners, whilst in organizational learning it is argued that practice-centred views, emphasizing the tricky interpolations between abstracted accounts and situated demands, can lead to improvements (Brown and Duguid, 1991; Lave and Wenger, 1991). In sociology, Bryant (1996) discusses the deciencies of several models in favour of examples promoting interactive applications. In health care, where evidence-based practice models aim to democratize access to data, the management of this knowledge

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Mind the Gap? Martin Wood into practice continues to be a problem (Haines and Donald, 1998; Sackett et al., 1996; Sheldon et al., 1998; Straus and Sackett, 1998). The frustration in all of these examples is with the need to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the interaction between the production and use of organizational knowledge. All of the examples share a conceptual concern for communication, dissemination, acquisition, accessibility and application between discrete things in a world thought to be fundamentally static and immobile. One result has been the habitual conception of movement as a succession of start and nish points and instants along a spatialized trajectory. What knowledge is has been treated as the ow of messages in, at best, a two-way dialogue or, more typically, a simple input/output matrix. Moreover, the nature of knowledge has become ever more objectiedviewed instrumentally for its exchange or use valueand increasingly embedded in relations of economic production and consumptionjudged in terms of short-term performance and as property. Overall, knowledge in the form of an informational commodity (Lyotard, 1984) has become valorized as the principle force of production in the global markets of the information society (Munro, forthcoming). Its conception as a continuous and unnished process that goes beyond the simple determination and application of the criterion of truth (Lyotard, 1984: 18) appears completely forgotten. It is the purpose of this paper to offer a radical underscoring of Lyotards view by discussing knowledge as an open-ended, ambivalent and foundationless process. The paper will argue that knowledge is not a commodity existing out there, nor is its movement a question of the starting or nishing of use or production. Rather it is the elusive subject of what happens in-between. The paper opens by reecting on the apparent certainties in contemporary approaches to organizational knowledge. It will then contrast two different ways of thinking about knowledge production and use. The rst conceives of production and use as preestablished forms in space and treats knowledge as if it were fundamentally static and immobile (Gibbons et al., 1994). The second draws on post-structural ideas of process, complexity and de-differentiation to suggest that production and use are simply labels we derive to arrest, locate, regularize and stabilizein other words managethe intrinsically uxing and transforming tendencies of knowledge (Chia, 1999). Subsequently, the paper illustrates a threefold method for apprehending organizational knowledge in its living reality as a continuous, changing process (Bergson, 1912).

Contemporary Understandings of Organizational Knowledge Production and Use

Although there have been many theoretical approaches and practical tools developed for apprehending knowledge in organizations, all remain circumscribed by the opposing epistemological traditions of rationalism

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Organization 9(1) Bergson and Organization Theory and empiricism. Rationalists have a tendency to explain knowledge as a universalized resource or commodity that is disembodied and externalized from particular end users. In contrast, empiricists allude to a more practical understanding of knowledge as situational and shaped by the social context of a particular community. In both cases, there is an assumed need for a more complete integration of knowledge production and its use than is the case at present. For rationalists, knowledge production is scientic: essentially factual, lawlike and systematic with no doubts being expressed about its range of application (Whitley, 1984b). This basic belief arose from attempts by 19th-century science to provide rigorous criteria for validation and justication. Deriving from the inductive methods of logical positivism, this universal system of theories held the denotative statements of science to be identical with the inference of universal hypotheses or theories (Popper, 1989). Altman (1987) argues that contemporary society shows a tolerance for the continuing division of the eld of knowledge according to scientic theories. Of particular note is his assertion that practical reasoning and problem solving are presumed inferior to the cumulative body of knowledge generated by academe. Gibbons et al. (1994) label this model as Mode 1 research, in which knowledge production occurs largely as a result of the academic agenda, is categorized by disciplines and guarded by elite gatekeepers. Distribution occurs downstream of production, often with scant attention to appropriation by users. According to Whitley (1984a), one explanation for the sustained hegemony of Mode 1 knowledge production is the need for academics to build scholarly repute so as to access a distinct labour market and compete for permanent jobs in the major schools. Increasingly, this reputational system is mediated by academic journalsconsider, for example, how the UK universities Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) measures, evaluates and ranks publications. But, as Whitley points out, top-rated journals, which determine international reputations and norms of scientic status, cater for knowledge producers (academics) rather than users (practitioners). In Mode 1 knowledge production, there is a high degree of internal governance and mutual dependence, and a correspondingly low need for approval from lay audiences. Claims for the continued legitimacy of the scientic method have been seriously challenged for over 25 years. Studies in the UK, for example, have been concerned to show that scientic knowledge production was not as disinterested, communicable and universal as Merton (1973) had rst argued, but was determined more by the political commitments, structural arrangements and institutional interests of social practice. These classic studies were exemplied by the strong programme (Bloor, 1976) in the sociology of scientic knowledge associated with the Edinburgh School (Barnes, 1977). These and other works (see, for example, Collins, 1985; Mulkay, 1972) proposed a reversal in the traditional relationship between science and nature towards a view of their social

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Mind the Gap? Martin Wood and historical construction. They point out how ideologies of rationalism and scientic truth are increasingly seen as bad guides to how scientic knowledge is actually made. More recently, Gibbons et al. (1994) claim that science policy and university research are now characterized by a radically different Mode 2 model of knowledge production. In contrast to the production of scientic knowledge by scientists, knowledge is now produced more collaboratively and based on looser patterns of transdisciplinarity (Huff, 2000). The implication of this move for organizational knowledge is that production should occupy a nexus position (Traneld and Starkey, 1998) between practice and contributing disciplines. Following Gibbons et al., Traneld and Starkey characterize Mode 2 as a more socially distributed form of production, where knowledge is validated in use. Brown and Duguid (1991) recognize this when they point out how knowledge is never limited to the incorporeal, for this would give only a thin account. Knowledge is also constituted in the far thicker intricacies of the day-to-day activities and behaviour of practitioners themselves. Dougherty (1992), in a study of organizational renewal through product innovation, shows how articulating visceral knowledge is a practical skill that calls for new roles and responsibilities from researchers and a fundamentally new contract between research and practice beyond the current instrumental view. On her model, if theories are to be useful they have to speak to everyday realities. Similarly, for Hoshmand and Polkinghorne (1992: 58), the test of knowledge is not whether it corresponds exactly to an external reality (such a direct correspondence being impossible to ascertain) but whether it serves to guide purposive human action in an interactive system of inquiry:
Practice is no longer the mere application of scientic ndings, but the locale for knowledge development through practical reasoning processes and for the pragmatic test of knowledge claims.

In other words, on the traditional rationalist model of knowledge the material, cultural, or historical conditions of production are lacking (Jacques, 1992). There are two problems with Mode 2 knowledge production, however. The rst is epistemic and contains two interrelated aspects. To begin with, commentators advocating a new contract between production and use tend to overlook the possibility that knowledge production, and not simply validation, may well take place beyond the boundaries of the academy. Despite the reported shift from Mode 1 to Mode 2, universities are still the main centres for broad and advanced knowledge production (Hemlin, 2000). Anne Sigismund Huff shares this observation in her presidential address to the 1999 Academy of Management. Her belief is that, inuenced by the strength of the Mode 1 infrastructure, universities

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Organization 9(1) Bergson and Organization Theory will make few gestures towards Mode 2, even though they will increasingly have to prove their ability to convey the importance of the work they do (Huff, 2000). This leads to a further aspect and the implicit legitimation provided by Gibbons et al. (1994) that a more socially accountable mode of knowledge production would somehow produce more relevant knowledge. What Mode 2 commentators fail to recognize is the differential power of those involved to shape what counts as knowledge and particularly the enduring power of knowledge producers to act as legislators (Bauman, 1987). In his critique of the role of intellectuals and the state, Bauman argues how, historically, the increasing legislative role of intellectuals has to be seen as an extension of state power. This does not lead to a noble dream of bringing the light of wisdom to the confused and oppressed, but inexorably towards the creation of an entirely new, and consciously designed, social mechanism of disciplining action aimed at regulating and regularizing the socially relevant lives of the subjects of the teaching and managing state (Bauman, 1987: 80). The recent enthusiasm for knowledge management and knowledge engineering are two cases in point. In Huffs view (2000: 292):
Few of the productivity gains rst promised appear to have been realized. An amazing number of companies followed prescriptions based on compelling stories. The human, and organizational, costs appear to be large in comparison to achievement.

The second problem is metaphysical and concerns the individualistic conception of a one-to-one relation between production and use. Like Mode 1, Mode 2 still treats production and use as ontologically discrete, atomistic and isolatable points. It is here that Huffs (2000) pragmatic suggestion of Mode 1.5 knowledge production, aimed at integrating and synthesizing the rigour of Mode 1 with the relevance of Mode 2, also falls short. Such one-to-one relationships are inadequate because we cannot say once and for all that each point or part exists in parallel to the other, or that one is like or not like the other. Moreover, for things to need integrating or synthesizing, they must be different; they must be at least two things. According to the process philosopher Henri Bergson (1911/ 1983), such a being ontology introduces a counterfeit movement in which terms like theory, production, goods, individuals, practice and use are only snapshots extracted from the heterogeneous continuity of real movement. They are simply labels we derive for differing contexts and communities of practice, in order to describe a complex relationship that is transformative and involving a living interpenetration that connects all things at all places and times, rather than a derived side-by-sideness. On this view, theory is not added to or put into practice, nor can practitioners overlay or reect on theory (cf. Schon, 1995), as the two were not separate in the rst place. By locating theory outside (and over) practice, the scientic Mode 1 approach prevented us from seeing

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Mind the Gap? Martin Wood the extent to which production and use already enjoy an interpenetrative otherness. Similarly, however, in Mode 2, practitioners reections in the midst of action are simply experience translated into languagean intellectual convention, a certain notation, an already ordered code or symbolic representation of that experience, and not actually the lived experience itself. Following Bergson and his contemporary successor Gilles Deleuze, the paper now pursues an alternative becoming ontology, in which theory becomes part of practice at the same time as practice becomes part of theory. There is a practice-becoming of theory and a theory-becoming of practice, a double capture since what each becomes changes no less than that which becomes (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987). The production use relationship is therefore not one of integration between extrinsically distinct entities, but one of internal difference with a focus on differentiation and division.

The Integration and Differentiation of Production and Use

This section discusses the supposition that organizational knowledge is dependent upon the integration of the abstracted terms production and use. It then goes on to present a temporal critique in which the central question for organizational knowledge is one of division and differentiation.

Minding the Gap: The Correspondence Model

Dominant conceptualizations of organizational knowledge premise a representational epistemology in which production is separate from use in the same way that science is understood as separate from nature. Scientic knowledge is taken as an explicit, precise and coherent representation of the natural or social world. The isolate terms production and use are seen as prior to any relationship. Furthermore, the individual-to-individual, production-to-use relationship is seen as natural: culture mediates to press home its necessity, whilst science mediates to press home its true nature (Strathern, 1995). The challenge for the creators and managers of organizational knowledge working with these premises is to stem the apparent degradation suffered in moving productive information along the knowledge chain to the consumptive contexts of the market. Stated differently, the aim is to maintain the accuracy of the correspondence of theory to practice, thus allowing the dominant productiveconsumptive relationship between the two to be established. This is the ideology of communicational transparency, which goes hand in hand with the commercialization of knowledge already outlined by Lyotard (1984: 5). The antecedents to this fundamentally individualistic position can be traced over the centuries of western philosophy. The cosmology of Parmenides taught that the world was an undivided whole, without

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Organization 9(1) Bergson and Organization Theory parts, homogeneous and motionless (Popper, 1989: 145). Platos hierarchical relationship, between the true forms of intelligence and their potentially fallible appearances pregured the hierarchical Enlightenment split between the doctrines of natural and intellectual truth. For the later atomists, reality came to be seen as an aggregate of circumscribed entities described by Chia (1999) as a metaphysics of presence. In Parmenidean-inspired classical and quantum mechanics, for example, the ultimate constituents of the universe are atomized moments, points or parts; fundamental and indivisible building blocks (Bohm, 1980: 9), whose relative motion and relation to one another is governed by universal and predictable laws. One of the better examples of the correspondence approach can be found in the recent literature on the application of evidence-based health care (EBHC) to the UK National Health Service (NHS). This is an active area of research that has impacted to at least a limited degree on practice, given the strong focus on clinical effectiveness through the introduction of new evidence-based national service frameworks, now apparent in UK health policy (Department of Health, 1997). Over the past decade in particular, EBHC has pursued the implementation of scientic research evidence into clinical practice (Sackett et al., 1996; Wood et al., 1998a). In 1991, following a House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology report, an NHS R&D national strategy was launched with the aim of assisting in the systematic transfer of reliable and relevant information for health policy, clinical practice and service management decisions (Central Research and Development Committee, 1995; Department of Health, 1995). It is evident from this that the integration of research and practice is seen as a continuing problem (Haines and Donald, 1998; Sheldon et al., 1998; Straus and Sackett, 1998). Why does this situation persist? Western health care systems continue to be driven by a being ontology and instrumental epistemology of research production as separate from research use (see, for example, Whitehead, 1998), one in which the stops research and practice are seen as prior to any relationship. The prevalence of this kind of spatialized thinking is such that health care policy and clinical decision-making inevitably start from the position that stasis is the natural order of things, that change is viewed as troublesome and that movement is believed to need some inertia applied. Informed by this stasis, commentators routinely draw attention to the problematic integration of clinical practice and the ndings of research (Haines and Donald, 1998; Sheldon et al., 1998; Straus and Sackett, 1998). Haines and Donald (1998), for example, rightly point out that passive diffusion models are doomed to failure, yet they retain an ontological commitment to (mis)understanding change as, an often irksome, transitory phase between the two separate domains. From a wider social science point of view, such arguments can be seen as overly functionalist and mechanistic (Burrell and Morgan, 1979; Wood et al.,

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Mind the Gap? Martin Wood 1998b): a linearized technology transfer model which assumes a hierarchical inputprocessoutput relationship between the research base and practical change.

Dissolving the Gap: Creative Involution

By aiming at the outcome of activity, the correspondence model condenses organizational knowledge into a series of space-states that simply maintain the gap between the various points and instants along an idealized trajectory. A fundamental criticism, however, is that the structure of this knowledge should not be taken as a collection of full and discrete things in space. Instead, it becomes necessary to think of knowledge non-spatially; as the continual becoming of things, having to be seized from the continuing experience of movement, as a succession of qualitative changes, which melt into and permeate one another (Bergson, 1910: 104). This counter-view can be traced back to the pre-Socratic stories of Heraclitus. Unlike Parmenidean-based theories of an unchanging reality, in the Heraclitean-inspired world everything is in ux, and nothing is at rest (Popper, 1989: 144). The apparent stability of things is replaced by the realization that we are living in a world of change whose processes are imperceptible: there is change but there are no things that change. We can take from this that what is stable, paradoxically, is movementbut not just any movement. According to process thinkers such as Bergson and Whitehead (1926: 72), the simple location of things has led to a fallacy of misplaced concreteness (Whitehead, 1926: 85), wherein abstract constructions are incorrectly taken as a given world of settled, distinct states pre-existing in space. For Bergson (1911/1983), the supposition that reality can only be analysed in terms of such spatialized and localized end-states is protested to be illusory. On his view, information and communication do not merely convey representational contents that bridge the various stages of an evolutionary process but also contribute to the fabrication of new assemblages of movement, ows, stimulation and connections that cannot be simply located (Taylor, 1995). Practitioners, more than theorists, are, of course, predisposed to seek a (presumably desirable) change in their theories, debates, teaching and language, and this is why they like to emphasize knowledges better, quicker, easier to access and increasingly electronic transmission. The management of organizational knowledge, however, should not be seen as a trajectory of stepwise change proceeding along a Darwinian evolutionary lineage. Deleuze and Guattari (1988) argue, for example, that there is no such transmission through a homogenous, unilinear series. For them, the complex ligatures that span across different entities and species can neither be slackened far enough to facilitate a unilinear evolutionism nor reduced sufciently to produce a convenient resemblance or simple correspondence. Deleuze and Guattari introduce the notion of creative involution to express a relaxation of natural, obvious

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Organization 9(1) Bergson and Organization Theory and reied forms, and the creation instead of heterogeneous combinations and novel alliances, which cut across and beneath any such assignable relations. Creative involution places emphasis on modes of transversal communication or side communication that scramble simple, genealogical lineages and allow heterogeneous assemblages to develop and break out across closed thresholds and species. An assemblage is a rhizomic web of continual, transversal communication that involves unnatural combinations, mergers, incorporations and associations. Such aggregations do not resemble what Talcott Parsons originally labelled as a special marriage between two different points. This is because, strictly speaking, the points are not real positions (Bergson, 1912). More accurately, they are a non-localizable line of becoming, a middle, an in-between that recognizes the continual participation of points within each other, even though in reality one does not become the other, or achieve any necessary correspondence with it:
A line of becoming is not dened by points that it connects, or by points that compose it; on the contrary, it passes between points . . . a line of becoming has neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin nor destination . . . A line of becoming is only a middle. The middle is not an average; it is fast motion, it is the absolute speed of movement. A becoming is always in the middle; one can only get at it from the middle; it is the inbetween, the border . . . no mans land, a nonlocalisable relation sweeping up the two distant or contiguous points, carrying one into the proximity of the other. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 293)

Why is involution creative? Because the conception of transversal movement has to do with communications that cut across distinct lineages, so giving rise to an unending ow of forms that have a tendency to break out of xed or stable determinations. As such involution proceeds without end, its inventions do not exist in advance but involve rhizomic modes of becoming. Its creative processes are bound up with invention, the creation of forms . . . [and] the continual elaboration of the absolutely new (Bergson, 1911/1983: 259). We can now see production and use as abstractions from an idealized space foreign to real movement. This, as Chia (1999) reminds us, is the confusion between lived time (continuing experience) and clock time (computed trajectory). Examples of clock time abound if we glance around the hurry-up world (Huff, 2000) of popular literature. Indeed, how we cope with, divide, buy, value and beat time seems to have replaced the self-help relationship book as the latest publishing moneyspinner (Raymond, 1999). Terms like linear-time, exi-time, fulcrumtime and time-windows have entered general conversation. The onset of a worldwide web that never sleeps and the interconnectedness offered by phones that permit us to take calls whilst sending a fax all have a profound effect on how we plough-, work- commodify-time (Raymond, 1999).

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Mind the Gap? Martin Wood Despite these current fascinations, Bergson (1911/1983) makes it clear that the ux of lived time is reality itself and the things we study are the things that ow. It follows, therefore, that there is more to organizational knowledge than a succession of idealized moments and points. Experience in creative involution is a case of transition, a becoming; an enduring change that is substance itself (Deleuze, 1988). The physicist/ philosopher David Bohm (1980: 48) captures the point thus:
Not only is everything changing, but all is ux. That is to say what is is the process of becoming itself, while all objects, events, entities, structures, etc., are forms that can be abstracted from this process.

On this view, the stops production and use cant be seen as atomized moments, points or parts in space. The maxim all is ux rules out the presupposition that the ultimate constituents of reality can ever fully become. As Bohm (1980) insists, what it is is ux. Its substance does not consist of isolable units, determinate things and self-identical objects; these impositions simply reect the need to impose a uniform and regular order upon the ux of becoming (Ansell Pearson, 1999). Real knowledge involves movement, it is movement, an indivisible continuity involving indeterminate relations and processes that arent the property of things but which belong to knowledge and through which it continually transforms and creates itself.

A Method of Creative Involution

By illustrating a method for creative involution, emphasis is put on relations as things in their own right, rather than on the separate objectivity of individuals considered as isolate units. What this means is that we do not move from one actual term to another actual term along a single line, but from a virtual term to the heterogeneous terms that actualize it along lines of divergence. Bergson describes this process in terms of a fully developed method he calls intuition. The method of intuition is not one of addition or association but of division: the cutting up of a given virtuality according to lines of different natures. From the perspective of Bergsons creative evolution, intuition proceeds according to three methodological rules.

ProblematizationThe Labyrinth
For Bergson, true invention lies in raising questions and creating the terms in which they are stated. In other words, our attention should be on problem setting as opposed to problem solving. This is because, according to Bergson, there is limited freedom in only seeking solutions to problems that already exist (we may expend energy and effort on the wrong problem). Munro (forthcoming) offers a useful distinction between the acceptance of already existing problems and the restless discovery of new problems when he conceives of the model and the labyrinth. A model is a symbolic representation of reality, but can also be seen as part

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Organization 9(1) Bergson and Organization Theory of a wider political struggle, in the sense that representing, naming and xing have always been the prerogative of the powerful. By contrast, the labyrinth is not a representational or a regulative model of movement, instead it is movement, ow, stimulation and connection that ceaselessly resists and undermines such regulative modes. Umberto Eco (1998) superbly illustrates this contrast in his neo-classic novel The Name of the Rose. The novel describes a late medieval Benedictine abbey where, after several bizarre deaths amongst the monks, a learned Franciscan, William of Baskerville, is sent to solve the mystery. The abbeys ageing blind librarian, Jorges of Burgos, has, for 40 years, been using a secret labyrinth within the abbeys library to keep Aristotles heretic second treatise of the Poetics concealed. Towards the end of the story, William confronts the venerable Jorges in the hidden nis Africae. The old monk superciliously explains how he had wanted to censor that book above all others because the philosopher wrote it. Here Eco employs a physical labyrinth to subsume a literary one. Aristotle had sought to undermine the Divine orthodoxy that Christianity had accumulated over the centuries with comedy. Whereas the Christian model generated an ideological structure from which to exert ecclesiastical power, the labyrinthine Poetics, through its witty riddles, unexpected metaphors and keen syllogisms, threatened a closer examination of its self-proclaimed divinity. The labyrinth is clearly a way of talking about creative involution as a polycentric and contemporaneous structure, the events of which branch out in every direction, continually intersecting and diverging. This is how Calvino (1997: 163) describes movement in the verse Orlando Furioso: a poem that refuses to begin and refuses to end. It refuses to begin because it is presented as the continuation of another poem and it refuses to end because the author never stopped working on it. The poems construction enables it to leave one character or situation and pass on to another. Sometimes this is done without breaking the continuity of the narrative and at other times by means of a clear break that interrupts the action right in the middle of a stanza. While these breaks are placed in the middle of the stanzas, the end of each promises that the story will continue to the next one. This process of expanding from the inside, making episodes proliferate from other episodes, creating new symmetries and new contrasts, seems to capture the assembly of a labyrinth rather well. However, popular organizational knowledge literature continues to be misled by ideas expressing a model path. On the one hand, organizational knowledge proceeds via predictability and control through the production and use of mechanisms for reporting, external scrutiny and information collection: a place for everything and everything in its place. Here, the model evolves into a system of general rules with centralized control and coordination. Knowledge codication, information ows and strategic planning are concentrated within discrete specialities and meth-

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Mind the Gap? Martin Wood odologies. The measurement of quality output and separation of knowledge production from its use are all done from above. On the other hand, organizational knowledge presents a highly complex labyrinth of political direction, managerial authority, professional power and consumer demand. Individual managers, professionalized workers and consumers all experience knowledge as a continuous and unnished process whose intrinsic nature resists the regulative model. Its self-organizing, nonlinear and multi-stranded. It grows from the bottom up and not from top down (Cooper, 1998: 143, authors original emphasis). It follows that organizational knowledge does not possess any stable equilibrium, within which no transformation is possible. Rather, what knowledge is is the ceaseless transformation or becoming of being. The question is not one of distinguishing where production and use start and nish, nor is it the relation between them. It is the transversal communication that runs parallel to both as it extends itself outwards in various directions from its centre.

DifferentiationThinking Beyond the Human Condition

Human experience is one of composites. This leads us to think in terms of subjectobject dualities and the separation of knower and known. This is not the real problem, however. The key issue is that we have forgotten how to look beyond that experience to where there is nothing but movement or lines of force, which brings us back to the virtual relations of universal change and becomings that are actualized according to divergent lines that differ in kind. We must treat all composites and dualities as transient abstractions, differentiations, or divisions of that experience. There is always a virtuality being actualized, a simplicity in the process of differentiating, a totality in the process of dividing up: Proceeding by dissociation and division, by dichotomy, is the essence of life (Deleuze, 1988: 94). On Bergsons view, the true problem is to discover the divergent processes through which organizational knowledge is actualized, differentiated and divided, and not how the terms of any originary composite or dualism are associated, integrated or otherwise made coterminous. This is as much as to say that although we give ourselves knowledge that is ready-made, pre-formed, pre-existent, in which everything is already completely given, this is a false notion. In Bergsonism, thinking beyond the dualistic human condition is not an originary state nor the nal word, but part of the movement of thought, as a means of posing problems. As an example of this view, the human condition is necessarily bound up with an originary technicity (Ansell Pearson, 1997; Clark, 1997; Deleuze and Guattari, 1988). Putting brain, body and world together again is the sub-title to a recent book on cognitive science in articial intelligence by Clark (1997). In it, he reviews the classic perception of a disembodied mind, independent of its physical world, which sets itself up as the central planner (CPU) of an information system. Such images,

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Organization 9(1) Bergson and Organization Theory he tells us, are dominated by the methodological vision of development as a linear, stage-like progression through a sequence driven by a grand plan. According to Clark (1997), however, information processing accounts that identify inner states or processes as having legislative roles may be illusory. Such systems, he argues, concentrate on the search for features whose inner representational states reect deeper, more agentindependent properties that oppose thought and action. He contends that this is an inappropriate model of the knowledge we actually use, on-line, real-time. In its place, he proposes a view of embodied cognition, in which complex phenomena only make sense as an assemblage of brain, body and world, wherein the brain is as much in the world as it is in the head. In his words, the mind is a leaky organ that is forever escaping its natural connes and intermingling with body and world. The explicit philosophical antecedents of Clarks non-representational approach are Heideggers (1962) phenomenological understanding of being and the organismbodyworld synergy of Merleau-Ponty (1962). Heidegger argues that the separation of body and world denies the fundamental mode of being-in-the-world (dasein). He points out that being-in-the-world should not be interpreted as the relationship between two independent, present-at-hand entities: there can be no side-bysideness of neutral or detached subject called dasein and an object called world. Rather, the being of dasein is always grounded in being-with; its I is always a relational being-with another. In this way, the constitution of being-in-the-world can be understood as a middle in which mind, body and world are immanently situated. If we place ourselves in this midst, we are unable to dene an individual human being simply by the form it takes, the organs it contains or the functions they perform. Human being is no longer localized in the body but is treated as a complex arrangement of transversal connections and relations that cut across and beneath individuals. On this model, there is no centre formally controlling behaviour, no topdown subject or originating agent, only a complex assemblage of brains, bodies and worlds held together in-tension to constitute a particular individual. Thus, in creative involution, form is replaced by in-formation (Cooper, 1987). Not that of signals, supports or vehicles of information constructed by the communication sciences, but a labyrinthine movement of engagement, intervention and intersection, in which the boundaries of individuals, artifacts and machines are constantly being formed and deformed. Creative involution is thus the practice of disassembly and reassembly in which the body is now nothing more than a set of valves, locks, oodgates, bowls, or communicating vessels (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 153). Simondon (1992) continues this line of thought in the essay Genesis of the Individual. For Simondon, what is required is a complete change in mental habit, one in which the rhizomic process of individuation is considered primordial. As he puts it: [to] grasp rmly the nature of

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Mind the Gap? Martin Wood individuation, we must consider the being not as a substance, or matter, or form, but as a tautly extended and supersaturated system (Simondon, 1992: 301). Despite this, the problem of individuation, according to Simondon, continues to be formulated in either substantialist terms of the already constituted individual, or, the hylomorphic operation of individuation. Both views assume we can discover a principle of individuation that would explain the individual. The rst posits the principle of individuation as an eternal and elementary fact: each individual is already given in nature. The second considers that which individuation requires before it can exist and so merely puts the principle into effect. Simondon argues, however, that, in both cases, the tendency is to understand the process of individuation by means of the individual, rather than the need to understand the individual from the perspective of the process of individuation. It is this point that commentaries on organizational knowledge often miss. They typically see production and use as substances, because both appear to enjoy what amounts to an independent existence, so that the relation between them is a connection, before any questions about their individuation have been asked.

TemporalizationLiving in Duration
Bergson denes actual and virtual multiplicities as dividing elements that differ in kind and, as these elements or parts only exist insofar as the division is carried out, it is clear that there is only a single time that endlessly subdivides into two parts: one that is always denite the other eternally innite (Deleuze, 1990). The fact that the division is subject to actually being carried out implies that both parts must be lived, or capable of being lived, and that this is only possible in the interval of a single overarching temporality (Bergson, 1999). This sort of internal resonance of determinations, magnitudes and directions is the continual invention of newness and novelty characteristic of duration. In contrast to the spatialized and homogenous moments of clock time, duration has two fundamental characteristics: continuity and heterogeneity. Its continuity denotes an unceasing capacity for processes and movement, whilst its heterogeneity expresses the tendency of these movements to break out of any xed determinations. This leads Deleuze (1986) to conclude that duration is the whole of immanent relations that change and dont stop changing, sweeping one and other up and into one another. Dened in this way duration is a virtual multiplicity of relations beyond rational experience. Such experience always gives us an exteriority without succession (Deleuze, 1988). That is it juxtaposes extrinsically distinct entities which are homogenous (self-identical) and discontinuous, and between which regular and orderly relations can be imposed. Duration, on the other hand, gives succession that is purely internal and is both heterogeneous and continual. Whilst we insist on supplanting the instantaneous entities of space, we decompose the internal difference of

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Organization 9(1) Bergson and Organization Theory duration into a series of external points and align them in homogenous time. The important point is that duration involves continual living interpenetrations whose complex ligatures can neither be slackened far enough to produce multiple entities, nor reduced sufciently to produce a singular unity (Deleuze, 1988). How then does the virtual whole of duration actualize? When the virtuality is actualized, differentiated, when it develops its parts into the familiar forms we come to know so well, it does so according to lines of ux that are divergent, absolutely different in kind, but which relate, in some particular degree, to the virtual whole from which each emanated and in which each ultimately coexisted in the virtual. Development thus takes place from the virtual to the actual and not in terms of the possible that is realized. This mistake is due to the way in which we construe a negative as containing less than its positive counterpart, such as is found in the pairs possiblereal, nothing something, disorderorder (Ansell Pearson, 1999). The principle is maintained that, apart from something that is actual, manifest and ordered, there is nothing. The possible is opposed to the real as something abstracted. Equally, nothingness is experienced as a pure lack, just as disorder denotes an absence of order. It is the realization of the real that is sufcient to separate it from a closed list of possibilities. Conversely, however, in duration, virtuality differs from the possible in that the virtual and the actual are both real, the one being the ideality of the other but both are real and therefore are not in opposition (Carrier, 1998). According to Carrier, possibility is realized in the real, it is the image of the real. Realization is the process of coming to resemble the possible, through a selection from the possible closed list of options. In contrast, virtuality is not possibility but potentiality. Virtuality of a being, he notes, is in its potentiality to posses the actual affections that constitute the being. Unlike possibility, potentiality does not predetermine the actual; it is not a closed range of possibilities. The actual does not resemble the virtual, because the latter comes to be at the same time as the actual comes to be actual. Both are real, but the virtual does not exist (remains virtual) until it is actualized: it exists in the way that it is actualized. Duration is thus a zone of indiscernibility (Ansell Pearson, 1999) in which units, things and objects are grasped according to the immanent relations they enter into. A zone of indiscernibility is a territory of indetermination or uncertainty, a hesitation of things (Ansell Pearson, 1999) in which the localized forms they possess can no longer dene the parts or the independent functions they full. Instead, they are distinguished solely by the composition of the relations into which they enter. Duration, therefore, actualizes by differentiation, through divergent lines that create divisions and never by way of an associative relationship between extrinsically distinct entities.

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Concluding Remarks
Organizational knowledge is always a mixture. Its apparent homogeneity, as something created, disseminated, acquired and applied, is always a composite of results, evidence, systems, skills and interests. This point is now recognized. What is more often missed, however, is that, in order to be known, such mixtures must always be divided. Di-vision is the process of making the invisible visible (Cooper, 1989). Knowledge is expressed on the one hand by the totality of elements of different natures but also in the interval that is established along a particular line whose terms are only different by degrees (e.g. of more or less). This is duration: the zone of indetermination. In duration, things, products and results do not differ from something else external to themselves. Duration is dened as what differs from itself. Internal difference must, therefore, be distinguished from relations of association (theory is put into practice) and negation (production is not use). There is no longer a relation between two things, rather the relation must be something in its own right: the relation itself is grasped as a thing. In this way, creative involution is seen as a method of division, of cutting out. When organizational knowledge is divided, when it is said to evolve, it does so polyphonically. In creative involution, production can no longer impact on use because this would need some solidity and inertia in which the concern is with the ends of the intervals and not with the intervals themselves (Bergson, 1911/1983: 9). Drawing on Jorge Louis Borges (1970: 117), we might say that creative involution is the most complex labyrinth consisting of a single line which is invisible and unceasing. It is the open system par excellence.

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Martin Wood lectures on leadership and organization in the Centre for Leadership Studies, at the University of Exeter. Prior to this, he held a research fellowship at Warwick Business School, where he was involved in work on service delivery research and the impact of scientic, organizational and behavioural factors in achieving change in the UK National Health Service. Published in international social science, organization studies and applied health care journals, his research interests focus on the philosophy of organization, particularly the relations between the human, the social and the technical. He is currently working on a post-structural understanding of the production and use of knowledge in health services research. Address: Centre for Leadership Studies, University of Exeter, Crossmead, Barley Lane, Dunsford Hill, Exeter EX4 1TF, UK. [email: M.A.Wood@exeter.ac.uk]

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