No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Abstract
Context
The only certain thing about life is that we will eventually die, yet future uncertainty still troubles us. If only we could be more certain about our future, we could at least plan, prepare ourselves, and perhaps even change things to weed out aspects of the future we do not like and select those we do.
Objective
This debate aims to raise the question of facing the future as a realm not of uncertainty but of possibility, noting that life is a process we undergo.
Method
In lifting the curse of uncertainty and in restoring a sense of possibility, this debate highlights the importance of recasting the relation between doing and undergoing. To do so, we must think differently about generations, not as sliced into layers but as wound together in an intergenerational braid.
Results
Life is held in tension between submission and mastery, aspiration and prehension, anticipation and perception, exposure and attunement. It is often supposed that life is lived within generations but does not flow between them. According to this view, what passes between generations, described as a heritage or inheritance, is a legacy of information and resources, which provides the capital from which successor generations can build lives in their turn.
Conclusion
We show instead that the true possibility of life lies in the way each generation leans over the following one, bringing them together in a collaboration marked by both affectivity and care.
Business markets, relationships and networks have been researched for over 40 years, along an alleged dimension from realist to relativist. But whereas some researchers have held steady and been true to their espoused perspective and rarely questioned the historical epistemological and ontological assumptions brought into studies, others have slipped into and out of diverse perspectives (Andersen, Medlin, & Törnroos, 2020b; Möller, 2013; Ojansivu, Hermes, & Laari-Salmela, 2020). To tackle how these issues unfold in the research experience, we introduce the metaphor of parallax, with the intention of creating an academic dialogue in which researchers are attuned to different research perspectives. Parallax is defined simply as “when an object or phenomenon is perceived differently.” Parallax occurs according to alternative perspectives that are held of a phenomenon, by looking from different places and viewing points with reference also to separate or diverse backgrounds (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax). But as Bergson (1913, xxiii) notes, there is a need for caution in “placing side by side in space phenomena which do not occupy space”; rather focus on perspectives.
As a metaphor the parallax releases and generates intriguing alternatives for research. There are: (i) different temporal, spatial and cultural points from which one views a problem, (ii) differences in background assumptions and pre-suppositions (ontological positions) (Medlin, 2022), and (iii) different methods for perceiving and understanding (epistemologies and associated methods along and within a research process) (Ojansivu, Medlin, Andersen, & Kim, 2022). The parallax metaphor focuses our thinking on how pre-suppositions from the place and direction of viewing are taken, often unconsciously, into research (Medlin, 2022) and even into the ontological and epistemological assumptions of the study. The paradigm perspective on business studies has long offered a world view where research traditions are incapable of dialogue between them, since they rest on radically different understandings of what is being seen, how it is seen and why it matters (Burrell & Morgan, 1979). This compartmentalization and juxtaposition of research presuppositions is, however, in itself limiting. There is present in Burrell and Morgan’s (1979) argument a pre-supposition that academic communities are forever caught in cages of their own unchanging perspectives. Thus, the parallax metaphor opens new perspectives - particularly if the assumption of a conceptual dimension or spectrum, that holds the many perspectives from realist to relativist is discarded. Even the matrix metaphor is problematic. Dimensionalities should be suspect if new research angles are sought, because after all, the issues within and surrounding Cartesian thinking are well elaborated (Adam, 1995; Ingold, 1986; Shotter & Lannamann, 2002). In discarding a dimensionality of research perspectives, one might consider that our rendition of parallax is problematic, but that is not the point. The purpose of a metaphor is to open new research directions and allow researchers to “find the door/s” out of the current institutional and cultural logic within which we live.
In a time of mandatory certainty, Tim Ingold opens the debate
on uncertainty in In Analysis’s (2022, in press), proposing a
refreshing, provocative, more gentle way of thinking and living
with uncertainty. Provocative as it challenges the idea of
probability essential to define certainty in scientific discourse,
while at the same time offering a modelto address uncertainty that
is intertwined between the two. By offering a potential way to
address the polarisation and opposition between chance and
determination, possibility, and possibilities, Ingold’s perspective is
an anticipation of a world of plasticity, transversality, and
interdependence (Morin, 1990). With certainty and uncertainty
defined not as opposite sides of a continuum, but as differentlayers
in the tapestry of living, co-existing and nourishing each other, the
possibility of defining a common place between polarised stances,
for a better way of living, gains substance.
By embracing the duality of living in between undergoing and
doing, the author is sharing a gentler way of living with
uncertainty. A mode where we are committed beyond ourselves,
by way of a perception larger than our psyche, through a type of
gentleness that does not have time, but ‘‘it is time itself’’
(Dufourmantelle, 2018), that is a quality of wondering, of waiting
into the world that accompanies us.
Ingold is de-constructing firstly the scientific definition of
uncertainty by restating Bergson’s (1922) idea, that science has
never been omnipotent. It can provide or model results based on
the analysis of pre-existing facts, but does not have the
instruments to address creativity, originality, disruption, or radical
innovation: ‘‘science can only think of possibility on a scale of risk
or probability. On this scale, what cannot be determined is left to
chance. (. . .) It is an opposition, however, that drains life of its
creative impulse, reducing freedom to random variation within a
phase space’’ (Ingold, 2022, in press)
La construction del saber entre los cazadores Cree : metaforas y comprension literal.Hace tiempo que la anthropologia insiste sobre los aspectos magicos y miticos del saber en las sociedades no-occidentales, al que opone la racionalidad, considerada literal y empirica, de la ciencia occidental. Esta oposicion sobrevive, bien que de manera indirecta, en la teoria contemporanea de la cultura. Este articulo analiza el saber cinegetico de los Cree y muestra que tanto el mito como la elaboracion de la forma literal de la experiencia empirica son momentos de una transformacion en la construcccion del saber. Ninguno de esos momentos es privilegiado о independiente ; las premisas de la comunicacion y de la reciprocidad entre humanos y animales crean un saber empiricamente sofisticado.
Educating the gaze is easily understood as becoming conscious about what is ‘really’ happening in the world and becoming aware of the way our gaze is itself bound to a perspective and particular position. However, the paper explores a different idea. It understands educating the gaze not in the sense of ‘educare’ (teaching) but of ‘e-ducere’ as leading out, reaching out. E-ducating the gaze is not about getting at a liberated or critical view, but about liberating or displacing our view. It is not about becoming conscious or aware, but about becoming attentive, about paying attention. E-ducating the gaze, then, is not depending on method, but relying on discipline; it does not require a rich methodology, but asks for a poor pedagogy, i.e. for practices which allow to expose ourselves. One example of such practice is that of walking. Consequently e-ducating the gaze could be about an invitation to go walking. This idea is explored b way of a comment on two quotations, one by Walter Benjamin and one by Michel Foucault.