Bricolage

One of the delights of higher education is the marvellous words that one finds in scholarly texts.

Joel Barker discovered Paradigm in a 1984 article by Harlan Hahn about Law Enforcement for Disabled Americans and made a movie about the word - not the topic. This was almost twenty years ago and it has now made its way into everyday language. Generally misused, but nevertheless ever-present.

I found Bricolage in a readable, but nevertheless scholarly, article and have adopted it to describe everything I do. While my son guessed it was a green vegetable, my wife suspected it was highly calorific. She suggested that it may be a progression from Irish coffee, which contains only four of the five essential food groups - alcohol, sugar, cholesterol, caffeine and chocolate. That’s what happens when you work with whatever materials are at your disposal.

But the word of the week must be reification. It is an Anglicization of the German term Verdinglichung, which is almost onomatopoeic. I found it in an article by Etienne Wenger, but it is not defined there. As is my wont, I went to the Onelook on line dictionary and discovered two options:

representing a human being as a physical thing deprived of personal qualities or individuality (freedictionary.org).

OR

To regard or treat (an abstraction) as if it had concrete or material existence. (Random House)

The two may seem opposites.  ”Removal of the spirit” - turning humans into objects or materialization - “giving an abstract concept a concrete form”.

But this can be the effect of so many policies and procedures. The humans are required to comply with the written word. The rules are unchallengeable. The humans become robotic and treated as though incapable of thought. The rules, however become living things. The policy is about to descend from its ivory tower and Verdinglichung you into submission.

Like reification, policies have whatever meaning the upholders wish to ascribe.

I am not against written policies. it is just that I believe that any CEO should be able to express them when asked to do so in a social setting. It would be even better if the front-line workforce jumped out of bed in the morning committed to implementing them as a way of making the customer’s experience more pleasant.

But that would require reification.
 

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 at 9:05 pm and is filed under social learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.