Public Administration as a Developing Discipline: Part 2: Organization Development as One of a Future Family of Miniparadigms by Golembiewski

Author:Golembiewski [Golembiewski]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781351552790
Google: _EMrDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 35635884
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

The cyclical process comes to the critical point. In the very act of letting go, the individual exposes self to feedback that could imply rejection or modification of the initial base of experienced and anticipated competence. The process is delicate because of the inevitable differentiation of self and other, as stages seven and eight in Figure 4.1 suggest. To use the feedback of the other, the individual must somehow “bridge the distance” between self and other. Yet the individual must preserve his differentiated self, maintain a gap between self and other, otherwise no real confirmation is possible. Confirmation is not a matter of the self looking in a mirror, as it were; it requires a perceiving non-self, a differentiated other with concern enough to helpfully observe the self. Hence the simultaneous needs to bridge the self/other gap, while differentiating self and other. Martin Buber expresses the point powerfully: “The basic of man’s life is two-fold, and it is one,” he explains. That basic includes “the wish of every man to be confirmed as to what he is, even as what he can become, by men; and the innate capacity in man to confirm his fellow men in this way.10

A number of paradoxical metaphors come to mind. Intimacy requires some distance; to be individual implies association; and to find yourself really means risking the loss of some part of yourself to others. In Benne’s words, the process “involves some of the deepest dilemmas of personal and social life, the dilemma of self and society … of conservation and of apartness partially overcome in an association which, while firm and security-giving, yet enhances and affirms rather than eclipses and derogates individual variation and difference.”11 This is heavy stuff, patently, and the very heart of being human.

Beyond metaphors, some necessary conditions for “bridging the distance” can be specified with substantial certainty. When we expect others to be just like ourselves before we can learn from them, for example, we are assured of learning little. This will preserve our sense of experienced and anticipated competence, but only in a bogus and static sense. Moreover, dealing only with clones also prohibits the test that alone can provide a stable platform for cycling to higher levels of competence. Paradoxically, moreover, we need the other to be differentiated from ourselves if the other is to provide us the essentially human service. Consequently, what we call tolerance plays an important role in bridging the gap between self and other. Yet, the self cannot surrender to the other. Consequently, what we commonly call conformity cannot play a major role in bridging the self/other gap. Commitment to any interpersonal relationship does imply a loss of individual freedom, but the consequent gain is personal development. There are pitfalls aplenty in bringing off this paradoxical exchange, to be sure. But just as surely, there is no alternative to taking the risk, short of arrested development. Montagu sensitively captures the point in his discussion of an individual’s identification with a group:

In this process

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