Friday, 6 May: to the James Martin Institute, Oxford, to hear Jyri speaking about 'The Practice of Innovation: how new technology gets defined as sustaining or disruptive' (pdf flyer here).
Great morning on three counts. First and foremost, to see Jyri again and to catch up a little with his news. Then, his talk, which started with Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma: it is a common assumption that 'new technologies are inherently either sustaining or disruptive to the organisation'. But narratives can be seen to influence commercial decisions about innovation, with materials playing roles in the narratives that ventures tell about themselves. Working with an example of a venture drawn from a particular organisation, Jyri proposed that the 'venture's success in the internal competition for resources depended on its ability to make the materials speak for its potency — in the context of prescriptive frameworks which the management of the company mobilised to make resource allocation decisions.'
In this model, ethnography can have a key role to play in creating 'an alternate framework for conceptualising the relationship between the ventures and the main business' (quotations from seminar handout).
The discussion at the seminar seemed to me polarised between commentary from academic ethnographers and those with another kind of "pure" (!) interest — commerce. As an English teacher, the role of narrative in interpreting innovation struck a deep chord with me. My dime's worth: I think Jyri's pursuing something that's fundamental and important — I don't buy a hard-nosed response that dismisses this talk of narratives and wants instead to talk only a sparer language of organisational structures, etc. It is also true that how we tell a story matters and depends upon the audience — who are we talking to and why? An ethnographer working within, say, a school would have her/his work cut out (schools are commonly conservative) and would have to find excellent language and strategies to re-create the reigning institutional narrative(s). I've seen it done (by that strange incarnation of an ethnographer, the headmaster), but it's not easy.
The third thing that made the morning good was the Institute itself. These seminars are free. They are of a very high standard. An email will put you on the mailing list. The Insitute's mission statement and the Research Seminars page offer compelling reasons to sign up.
After the talk, Jyri and I spoke about how we can try to stay fresh in our thinking, in the narratives we live by. I owe my pupils a great debt — it's simply the best thing in teaching, this constant source of renewal, stimulus and challenge. But I promised Jyri a Coleridge quotation that I think also says much about how we break new ground, albeit (perhaps) in a more introspective and personal way:
The extenders of consciousness – Sorrow, Sickness, Poetry, Religion. The truth is, we stop in the sense of life just where we are not forced to go on — and then adopt a permission of our feelings for a precept of our Reason. (3632; Sep/Nov 1809)
'Extenders of consciousness' or, as we might say in this context, important disruptions.
