Conger Proposal v 1.1 2013-Dec

Dissertation Proposal v.1.1

December 19, 2013

By Joan Conger

For Jeremy Shapiro, Chair

CC: Miguel Guillarte, Milton Lopes, Ruth Kennedy

Changes Made This Version

Date

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Section

Reason for change At behest of

10/21

all all Rewrite for clarity of thesis and to add the implications of this research

Joan

all alledit for final version to be sent as calling card for possible external examiners

committee

p. 5 Page length

Estimate page lengths for each section Jeremy

p. 57 Glossary begin recording entries Milton

all all find alternative to concept: “rationality” Miguel

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Conger - Dissertation Proposal – December 2013 2

Special note:

* In the text of the Proposal, any paragraph marked with an asterisk ( * ) has been added or significantly altered from its Sept 2013 form…

…I don’t believe the intent or general content of this proposal has been altered significantly, however the wording and clarity have been largely re-edited throughout and require another look to see if you are comfortable with the changes.

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Changes made (continued):

Request to Reader: Please respond with particular attention to...

- Creating a version of the Proposal that can be shared outside

seated committee, for example, to scholar contacts and external

committee invitees; and,

- Completing answers to questions of content that were left open

at the time of the Approval: more specifically, what is the “so

what?” There have been two contexts for that question and I have

since found some resolutions:

a) Concerns were raised regarding “rationality” as the

context of: Who is my research question important to? What

parameters of activity will my dissertation limit itself to,

since “leaders trying to act rationally” still feels a bit

broad? Instead of “rationality” I have settled on

“practice,” more specifically a category of inquiry in the

social sciences called the “practice turn” and in critical

theory a concept called “performativity” (which I will take

as complementary though not identical constructs for the

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purposes of rejecting the fallacies surrounding misplaced

concreteness). Specifically, I will argue that the study of

“practice” and of “performativity” underlie presumed

differences between concrete structure and abstract

discourse, individual agency and determining social systems;

these concerns, however, become secondary to the

interactive, relational, non-dualistic movements of

processual thought. To not confront an entire body of work I

will limit myself to process-organizational thinker Chia’s

and science studies theories Barad’s interpretation of said

theorizing, respectively, accompanied by minimal explanatory

excursions to major authors in that particular approach,

just enough to show its relevant outline.

In other words, for example, “presence” treated as a fully

engaged “practice” not, for example, an intellectual stance

(classical “rationality”) nor a defended identity (not a

“role” to be put on nor a “trait” to be expressed innately)

may provide a path away from the fallacies associated with

misplaced concreteness in leadership effectiveness. I will

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be working through my understanding of these arguments more

thoroughly when I write that chapter.

b) What are the implications of my proposed answer beyond

“effectiveness?” Taken all the way to a logical (but not

concretized or reductive) conclusion my argument seemed at

first to point to “choice” as the advantage for judiciously

rejecting the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Yet, this

concept did not seem to have quite the draw necessary to

lure people toward such a radical departure from familiar

ground. Then I noticed that I kept writing “dignity” into

the margins of my texts as I took notes. This concept,

indeed, gives resonance to “choice.” I was trying to include

Whiteheadian conceptualizations of Peace and Patience, but

they describe presence and not why presence is important. I

have memories of Whitehead going on a great length about

dignity (though maybe not in the same terminology). I will

go back to square my intuition with specific places in

Whitehead’s text when I write the actual chapter, to let him

correct my leanings in this direction.

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For example, I would submit that you know you are

practicing presence-based leadership without falling prey to

the fallacy of misplaced concreteness when you experience

greater width of choice AND when you, your interactions,

those around you, your past and future, and your entire

environment take on the flavor of dignity, or at least the

pursuit of dignity in a bifurcated world bent against it.

Changes Made Last Version

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Section Reason for change At behest of

9/19

All EntireProposal

Approved by In-House Committee Committee

Review outcome:

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Committee, not yet including an Outside Examiner, approved the

Proposal with a few provisos, addressed in the list of revisions

above.

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Page number estimates for each section:

Section Title Pgs/Words PgsIntroduction 30/7500

I. Argument

• Ch 1: Whitehead’s Process Metaphysic 30/7500◦ 1.A: Ontology: The Concrescent Moment 15◦ 1.B: Epistemology: Bifurcation &

Fallacies, Peace & Patience15

• Ch 2: Contextual Literature Review: Leadership

30/7500

◦ 2.A: Leadership in a VUCA world 15◦ 2.B: Process Organizational Studies 15

• Ch 3: Conceptual Lit Review: Presence-Based Leadership

30/7500

◦ 3.A-H: Presence-based theories 3-4ea.

• Ch 4: Argument 30/15000

◦ 4.A.: ‘Practice turn’ & ‘performativity’ 15◦ 4.B.: How fallacy of misplaced

concreteness (F.M.C.) rejected15

II. Implications

• Ch 5: Implications and Conclusions 30/7500◦ 5.A: Pragmatic: Effectiveness 15◦ 5.B: Ethic: Dignity 15

III. Further Research

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• Ch 6: Further Research 30/7500• Conclusion 10/2500

Total 220/52000

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[Leadership Presence and Misplaced Concreteness:

Whitehead’s Process Philosophy and the Practice of Leadership

Effectiveness]

By

Joan E. Conger

Abstract

The aim of my proposed research is to clarify and specify,

without too abstractive a closure or prescription, what it would

mean for leadership to adopt a model of effectiveness based on

Alfred North Whitehead’s Process Philosophy, more specifically a

model that understands, acknowledges, and pragmatically avoids

Whitehead’s “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” and attendant

fallacies. Being and becoming an effective leader is difficult,

at best, especially in an undeniably volatile, uncertain, complex

and ambiguous reality. I will "read with Whitehead" (Stengers

2002/2011) into present-day leadership literature to the fallacy

of misplaced concreteness and its attendant errors, along with a

neglect of the Process metaphysic that the fallacy implies. With

this reading I will query presence-based leadership as a possible

"unknotting" of the fallacies if understood through the practice

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turn of social science as read through Robert Chia and Robin

Holt’s Strategy Without Design (2009) and the notion of performativity

in critical theory as read through Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe

Halfway (2007). I will suggest in conclusion that an avoidance of

the fallacy of misplaced concreteness creates effectiveness not

merely by widening choice but also by amplifying dignity.

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DISSERTATION PROPOSAL

Table of Contents

PROPOSAL IN BRIEF....................................................8

ARGUMENT............................................................14

CONCRESCENCE AND WIDTH OF CHOICE: TWO POLES..............................14

WIDTH OF CHOICE: THE FALLACIES AND PEACE & PATIENCE.......................18

PRESENCE-BASED LEADERSHIP: PATIENCE & PEACE..............................22

PRESENCE: PRACTICE OF AND PERFORMATIVITY WITHIN...........................33

IMPLICATIONS OF REJECTION OF THE FALLACY OF MISPLACED CONCRETENESS. .40

EFFECTIVENESS........................................................40

DIGNITY.............................................................41

FURTHER RESEARCH....................................................45

REFERENCES..........................................................46

APPENDIX A: GLOSSARY TERMS..........................................56

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Table of Contents (plain text)

Pg

PROPOSAL IN BRIEF 8

ARGUMENT 14

CONCRESCENCE AND WIDTH OF CHOICE: TWO POLES 14

WIDTH OF CHOICE: THE FALLACIES AND PEACE & PATIENCE 18

PRESENCE-BASED LEADERSHIP: PATIENCE & PEACE 22

PRESENCE: PRACTICE OF AND PERFORMATIVITY WITHIN 33

IMPLICATIONS OF REJECTION OF THE FALLACY OF MISPLACED

CONCRETENESS

40

EFFECTIVENESS 40

DIGNITY 41

FURTHER RESEARCH 45

REFERENCES 46

APPENDIX A: GLOSSARY TERMS 56

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DISSERTATION PROPOSAL

Proposal in Brief

*Being and becoming an effective leader is difficult, at

best. I will "read with Whitehead" (Stengers 2002/2011) into

present-day leadership literature to identify the fallacy of misplaced

concreteness and its attendant errors as the source of much of the

difficulty, along with a neglect of the Process metaphysic that

the fallacy implies. With this reading I will query presence-based

leadership as a possible "unknotting" (Griffin 1998) of the

fallacies if understood through the practice turn of social science

as it appears in Robert Chia’s work (e.g., with Holt, 2009) and

the performativity of critical theory as it appears in Karen Barad’s

work (e.g., 2007), and proffer the conclusion that an avoidance

of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness creates effectiveness

not merely by widening choice but also by amplifying dignity.

*Not falling prey to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness

means a leader experiences the world as it really is, not as a

ready-made-ness but from within its about-ness: not a world made of

separately located, qualitatively substantial things outside a

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separate self but rather a world that is about what is actually

going on in the ongoing real becoming of these “things” in their

status as recurring events of which I am an influential and

influenced part. If this worldview seems viable to a reader then

making an epistemological shift to accept process thinking may

seem merely a “change of mind.” Yet Process thinking concludes

that the universe is not representationally known (except in our

abstractive concepts about it from within ongoing practice) but

that we (all denizens of the universe with any awareness, or

propensity to change) create our awareness from a local but

radically connected felt knowing out of continually and repeatedly engaged

being-in-the-world. Furthermore process thinking reveals the universe

not as a collection of beings but as an almost infinite, intricate

complexity of becomings, not as a reality abstracted by

perception but as an actuality of concrete experience, all the

way down. To become a process thinker, Whitehead assures us,

means to overturn a fallacy of misplaced concreteness that has

not only been inculcated in Western thought (and in those around

the world who have imbibed Western-influenced ideas, educations,

and even reactions against such incursions). The family of

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fallacies that group themselves around misplaced concreteness

reside also in the very fabric of Western being-in-the-world.

Accepting process thinking means a “change of heart,” not just a

shift in thinking but a shift in one’s very quality of presence,

influence and productivity in the world, a quantum leap to a

fundamentally different practice of self and performative

production of world.

This dissertation is concerned about what this leap means

for leaders seeking effectiveness. The relatively new field of

process organizational studies (e.g., (Carlile et al, 2013;

Cooren et al, fourthcoming [2014]; Hernes & Maitlis, 2010;

Schultz et al, 2012) holds, at least, that the practice of

leadership means exercising good judgment in the present moment

out of a settled-but-not-distant past that one would like to turn

into a future-that-is-generatively-potential-here-and-now,

without relying on bootstrapping impossibilities or exhausting

exertions of force against a world in constant flux. If it is

safe to assume that effective leaders are trying to know enough

to decide well and act to influence some sort of progress in

themselves and the world around them, a world that includes other

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people and material resources as well as inherited givens and the

lure of enjoyed aims, then process thinking radically shifts

one’s leadership practice by radically shifting one’s knowledge-

of and being-within this world. One’s understanding of “acting”

shifts from a being to a becoming ontology of practice or

performativity. I hope that this exercise can show that a process

understanding of “deciding” rejects a knowing that is bifurcated

away from directly engaged material being and instead accepts a

knowing that incorporates feeling (in at least three senses, that

of relational responsiveness, intensity of valuation, and of

direct sensation), and show that “effective” begins to reject an

assumed false neutrality limited to observed measure and instead

also accepts valuation by enjoyment, even dignity. The leap made

is over the chasm that separates enjoyment from effectiveness

into a world where maintaining presence within direct experience

is the very source of effective leadership.

Everyone who acts, acts from some understanding of how the

universe works — from some metaphysic, in other words. (Barad,

2007; Chia & Holt, 2009; Griffin, 2008, Stengers, 2002/2011) If

the leader understands the universe as in-process and therefore

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understands leadership as a process-oriented practice within a

radically interconnected universe, then ontology, epistemology

and ethics must be taken together, and no one of these can be

abstracted out and ignored as inconsequential. The first chapters

will engage questions of ontology and epistemology, while the

latter chapters will raise the pragmatic and ethical implications

of rejecting the fallacies surrounding misplaced concreteness as

a first step toward process-thinking.

In short Whitehead’s process metaphysic of felt-thought-

becoming concreteness introduces a felt-sense into matter-that-is-

mattering moment-to-moment around two poles, physical and mental.

In order to think processually, to acknowledge the equal valence

of these two poles of being-knowing in a becoming and value-laden

(and radically interconnected) reality, Whitehead writes that one

must first learn to avoid, or at least acknowledge so as to

broaden one’s choices, one’s commission of the fallacy of

misplaced concreteness. An effective, process-based leader is

present to a leadership experience that is radically connected

(not simply and independently located), event-full (not qualified

by substantive things external to the experiencer), and concrete

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(not abstracted into a mental representation), and from this

emerges the capacity for width of choice appropriate to the

moment and generative of a best possible future for all involved.

*This dissertation seeks to understand, within the practice

of leadership, the implications of this shift away from improper

abstraction toward a proper concreteness. In chapter one, I

present a treatment of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness

using the physical and mental poles of Whitehead’s concrescent

moment, linking his modes of thinking and acting to a repairing

of the Modern separation of mind and body that renders influence

and outcome inexplicable. In the first part of chapter one I will

argue that Whitehead’s (1920, 1925, 1929/1978) ontology of event,

based on the concept of concrescence, opens way for an epistemology

that makes a fallacy out of misplaced concreteness and its

attendant fallacies, the bifurcation of nature, the fallacy of

substance-quality and the fallacy of simple location. In the

second part of chapter one I will argue that Whitehead’s

(1927/1985, 1929b, 1929/1978, 1938) epistemology comes only after

acknowledging assumptions of bifurcation, misplaced concreteness,

substance thinking, and simple location (seeking assistance in

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the Whiteheadian critique of modern Western ontology and

epistemology from philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers

(2002/2011) and process philosopher David Ray Griffin (1998)). I

will use these arguments to reinterpret modern epistemology as a

processual “thinking with Whitehead” (Stengers, 2002/2011) or an

“unsnarling” (Griffin, 2008) of the fallacy of misplaced

concreteness rather than as a reified category of either being or

action. More specifically how does Whitehead’s processual

thinking reject the fallacies that accompany misplaced

concreteness to create width of choice and comes with the potential

capacity for a higher mode of consciousness, which Whitehead

labels patience or peace (1929/1978)?

I will then expand these notions into the present-day field

of leadership studies. In chapter two, I explore within the

leadership literature the current environment for leadership and

what process organization studies has come to say about the role

of process thought for addressing cohesive organizational

environments that support individual effectiveness. In the first

part of chapter two I will argue that width of choice through

rejection of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness becomes

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especially necessary for leadership practiced in what has been

described as an irretrievably volatile, uncertain, complex, and

ambiguous world (a “VUCA” reality; USAWC, 2004), an argument

intimated but not well-developed in Whitehead's turn-of-the-last-

century work on professionalism (e.g., 1933). In the second part

of chapter two I will argue that given this VUCA reality the

relatively new field of process organizational studies makes a

convincing argument for a practice of leadership that accepts an

ontology of process and an epistemology that rejects the fallacy

of misplaced concreteness. This worldview would, for example, see

individuals not as enduring, separate entities but as products of

ongoing systemic interaction and would see effective leadership

not as successful application of external force or observational

control but as successful navigation of internalized and immanent

fields of influence.

In chapter three, I will takes as an example of proper

concreteness Whitehead's concepts width of choice and peace, as I

also use the fallacy of misplaced concreteness to critically

compare his concepts with a present-day combination of popularly

suggested practices loosely corresponding to what I will call

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presence, recently brought to the fore by luminaries in leadership

and personal development literature as re-evaluations of past

work (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi, 2003; Gardner, 2007; Goleman,

forthcoming [2013]; Seligman, 2012; Senge, 2004; Torbert, 2004;

Depraz, Varela & Vermersch, 2001; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2001, 2007).

In chapter four, I will argue that any theoretical or

practical treatment of presence can itself avoid bifurcation of

the mental and physical, misplaced concreteness, substantive

thinking, and simple location by applying presence through the

methodologies of practice (in social science as discussed by

organizational theorist Robert Chia (2009) and performativity (in

science studies as discussed by physicist and critical theorist

Karen Barad (2007). Through these conceptualizations of engaged

influence, I will reevaluate applications of presence that seek

to shift researcher and practitioner alike out of fallacies of

misplaced concreteness (for example, individualism or

representationalism). Chia, for example, suggests engaging in indirect

action to create an influential effectiveness within the practice

of strategy, and Barad claims that intra-action informs a productive

understanding within the performativity of science.

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Finally, in chapter five I will propose two implications of

rejecting the fallacy of misplaced concreteness for a leadership

ontology-epistemology. In the first part of chapter five, I will

assert that through the rejection of the fallacy of misplaced

concreteness leadership can accept effectiveness itself as a

metaphysical nature of nature, but that this requires a profound

ontological and epistemological shift. An effectiveness

metaphysic would put efficacy at the very root of a process-

reality made of concrescent moments (concreteness) formed

inseparably of both felt value and mental decisiveness (not

bifurcated), individual expression-fulfillment and enfolding-

unfolding of the whole (substance quality), history of the given

and lure of the Good (non-simple location). For example, such a

leader's being-in-the-world would come from within an ongoing

practice of a presence-based leadership that at least attempts,

as a finite and imperfect being, a consistent, judicious,

performative acknowledgment that the fallacy of misplaced

concreteness narrows choice, influence and outcome and that in

the search for effectiveness one is, for example, always a

beginner, one always has access to possibility, one must always

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show up, one is always acting in community, and one must

consistently cultivate proper concreteness as an attitude of

felt-reasoned intuition regardless of momentary successes and

failures.

In the second part of chapter five, I will go further to

speculate whether process-relational presence-based leadership

necessarily acquires an ethic of dignity. In other words, I wonder

if leaders will know that they are not falling prey to the

fallacy of misplaced concreteness not only when they experience

greater width of choice, peace and patience, but also when they,

those around them, their interactions, their past and future, and

their entire environment takes on the flavor of dignity, or is at

least flavored by the pursuit of dignity in a bifurcated world

that often seems bent against it.

I will close with a final chapter recommending further

research.

Argument

Concrescence and Width of Choice: Two Poles

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*The concrescent moment is the fundamental building block

of Whitehead’s cosmos. Although this statement is an exercise in

misplaced concreteness. A concrescent event is not a “block,”

simply located in space or time and possessing a representable

givenness. A concrescence is not a substantive, separate thing

with its own fixed, observable qualities, measurable for some

future reliable determination. It is a “droplet,” to use

Whitehead’s terminology. More specifically, the droplet in its

movement is the metaphor, not an isolated, substantive entity

frozen on the tip of a leaf as in a photographic representation.

Rather the droplet actually appears out of a surround made of

surface, temperature, moisture, and an uncountable number of

other (unfrozen, moving, changing) conditions, exclusions,

formations, and attractions only to drop, ripple, and disappear-

but-not-into-nothingness on the surface of the pool-in-process

below. Instantly, another droplet forms to fall, among countless

other droplets simultaneously forming to fall, because conditions

(stretching without boundry to the ends of the universe) are ripe

for droplets to form on this planet, on this leaf, and these

droplets fall in just the way that they seem to be doing within

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our quiet, allegorical, early morning gaze. If we focus

understanding only on the droplet, or only on our perspective of

that droplet, we are misplacing concreteness. We, with our gaze,

are there, too, within its conditions for becoming—and it within

ours. Each agent-participant enfolds and unfolds out of, produces

and is produced by, all other agent-participants all the way

through reality.

*The droplet contains within itself all of the conditions of

the cosmos that have come together at that enfolded moment to

allow, invite, condition, and provide space for that droplet to

form and pass away in its own unique self-expression, never to be

repeated but forming once again out of its given reality toward

its potential. Of course this droplet’s “expression” is not

mentally, consciously performed, such as when a ballerina

performs that particular perfect leap at that particular moment,

but the droplet’s expression is a deciding of itself as symbolic

of itself and nothing else, as effortless as a ballerina drawing

on years of practice, the pattern(s) of her own physical body,

and an uncountable number of other (unfrozen, moving, changing)

conditions to launch this one perfect leap without a single

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thought throughout its duration, and then the next. Presence,

appearance, expression, manifestation, and influence are enacted

repeatedly, from within a simultaneous conditioning and freedom,

mindfulness and physicality. Whether narrow or broad in an

occasion’s capacity to decide—that enactment in its particularity

is the concrete reality that moves and allows us movement, that

creates and allows us creativity, that leads and allows us to

lead. That is the concreteness that allows the droplet to

repeatedly enact from within its narrowness or breadth what it is

conditioned and free to express, influence and shape. Nature-in-

its-decisive-expression is the measure of all things, not a

perspectival (hu)man, not any pre-existing-fixed Ideal, and not a

positive-static reality.

My few allotted pages here cannot contain a true description

of Whitehead’s conception of concreteness-as-repeated-

concrescence, an idea that took him at least the entire volume of

Process and Reality to explicate in language that most readers

declare opaque at best. I will (and invite my readers also to)

begin immediately, therefore, with a practice of writerly

presence in which I hold open the possibility of a width not

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available to me, certainly not within the parameters of an

abstractive and all-too-brief doctoral dissertation and also, I

will assure you, a width not within my own tentative grasp as a

limited human consciousness. I will practice openness to a width

from within whose potentials I nevertheless attempt a dignified

argument: that a practice of leadership that eschews the fallacy

of misplaced concreteness can achieve an inherent effectiveness

and that a concerted performative practice of presence is one

best path toward a concrete effectiveness. All in due time.

In the first section of chapter one I will make the briefest

sketch of Whitehead’s concrescence merely in order to introduce the

idea that the processual nature of concreteness combines two

poles of experience. Out of a feeling pole and a mental pole

emerge one reality repeatedly sensed and decided from among a

multitude of conditions, choices and aims. The entirety of a

concrescence happens in a single moment and happens across as

many intertwined instances as are required to make the universe

in that moment, then in the next. The whole and its parts repeat:

feeling-thinking, intensity-decision, ingression-givenness, again

and again. All things change, given these repetitions, because

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they are not “things” but events of feeling-thinking that will

recur from within all the vast interconnected changes made in the

previous, vast interconnected web of instance, but each instance

of decision will never reoccur. All is change, and all is

possibility. Would that we had the width of felt-reasoned

awareness to sense enough possibilities to always choose the best

one out of the plenitude. This dissertation will discuss the

first step toward such processual thinking-being, the rejection

of the fallacies surrounding misplaced concreteness.

*In the second section of chapter one, I will show that this

ontology of concrescence cannot be understood nor can it become

the source of effective action unless one becomes aware of a

propensity to narrow into decision the fallacy of misplaced

concreteness and its attendant fallacies, bifurcation, substance-

quality, and simple location, which in turn cannot be understood

without this ontology of concrescence. This ontology renounces

any bifurcation within nature, any splitting of movement from

stasis, of decision from condition, of location from extension,

of mind from matter. This ontology holds that reality is repeated

events unified as phenomenon never collated things externally

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causing this or that effect in other things, that each event is a

feeling-decision integration not an observation (or cause,

agency, or measure) split from and external to what is observed

(or effect, influence, or measure). This ontology holds that

valuation-intensity is the driving force of becoming, not being to

which insensate laws apply external forces or of which a

personified, transcendent mind shapes its designs. In other

words, everything/everyone is “located” in a radically

interconnected in-the-midst-of from which “qualities” (not

classical attributes but continually emergent characterologies) can

never be abstracted by substance-quality thinking, simple location,

or misplaced concreteness. We are present in constant becoming,

not in any consistent being.

Width of Choice: The Fallacies and Peace & Patience

From a dualistic, mechanistic, materialist point of view,

wholes, processes, emergence and co-construction may be easier to

imagine as attributes, places and products and more difficult to

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imagine as holistic, enfolding, unfolding process phenomena.

Actual attempts to practice a process-relational engagement that

avoids misplaced concreteness (e.g., 1929/1978, pp. 92-96) can

simply fall apart or worse, convince failure (McGuire & Rhodes,

2009; Petrie 2011; Silsbee, 2008; Topp, 2006). Alfred North

Whitehead’s texts (1920; 1925; 1926; 1929a; 1929b; 1933; 1938;

1929/1978; 1927/1985), particularly his principle metaphysical

work Process and Reality (1929/1978), provide me with an explication

of the concrescent occasion of a fundamentally creative reality

(e.g., 1929/1978, pp. 22-28). I will show how Whitehead’s model

of reality emphasizes physical and mental poles, around which a

self-formation process unifies felt objectifications around a

subjective form (e.g., pp. 18-36). Reality is shaped in each

occasion by the mental and physical unifying into a formative,

though reoccurring, whole.

“Higher grades of experient occasions,” or moments of

experience approaching a full consciousness of all actuality and

possibility in the universe from which to seek the “better”

decision (1929/1978, pp. 11-13, 112, 190, 193, 266-80), take

advantage of “width” or formative access to potentiality and

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decision between the two poles of concrescence (pp. 111-115, 162-

167). With this width each occasion becomes less hampered by

narrowing habits from the past, more appropriate to the moment,

and more conducive of “creative advance” into the future (pp.

223-225, 343-346). In other words, each occasion becomes less

swayed by misplaced concreteness (for example, emphasizing the

mental pole alone in so-called “rational” decision and action;

pp. 36, 189-193). In short, the more aware (intuitively and

conceptually) the occasion is (in other words, the wider its

felt-sense vector through actuality and potentiality) the more

efficacious will be its choices for self-(re)creation (in other

words, the more appropriate its momentary-and-to-be-repeated

decision for final form within the fundamentally creative lure of

all reality). Habit narrows choice (inattentive physicality and

cognition narrows mindful materialization of being): the more

awareness, the more choice—the more choice the more potentially

harmonious the act within its radically-intertwined-inner-whole

experienced as participation-in-the-whole. I must remember

throughout this discussion that the droplet is not itself wholly

and separately but a self-expressing, living extrusion of cosmic

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conditions at that moment, if my use of the word “extrusion” is

not understood through the mechanical bifurcations of simple

location and substance-quality. The Modernist’s habit of

dualistic, mechanistic, materialist thought has been trained to

the point of common sense and is very difficult to avoid.

*Whitehead prefers the width provided by intensity, feeling,

enjoyment, value, interest and radical (pragmatic) empiricism

that generalizes as it integrates. He laments a romance that is

unfulfilled because it is unfocused, and he deprecates the

narrowness of precision, truth-value and a “rigid” (pre-

conceptualized) empiricism (e.g., 1929/1978, p. 163) that is

rarely open to new categories, new practices, or new

manifestations. The former form of expressionism and the latter

form of empiricism are not unimportant to Whitehead. However,

romance or precision, taken ontologically and epistemologically

as all there is or even the greater part of choice and

performance, devolve into misplaced concreteness and

ineffectiveness within the whole. The more awareness (intuitive

and conceptual), the more choice an occasion has; the more

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choice, the higher the potential for action harmonious with lived

actuality.

*Therefore, if the avoidance of misplaced concreteness

creates a width of choice (Whitehead, 1929/1978, p. 111-115;

1938, p. 8), then its practice places an occasion at a higher

mode of thinking, one that resembles Whitehead’s “peace” and

“patience” (p. 285). According to Whitehead’s metaphysic (pp. 26-

28) this higher mode of thinking is woven into the very fabric of

a hierarchical, progressive universe, whether or not the higher

mode is adopted by any given concrescent occasion. The hierarchy

and progression toward “good” (1933, p. 267-268; 1929/1978, p.

338-339), “better” (1983, p. 14, 65) or “creative advance”

(1929/1978, p. 289) are never wholly imposed by any socially

extant judgment external to the occasion (a fallacy of substance-

quality) nor is it entirely linear progressivism toward some

altogether different location on the flat plane of a mapped

trajectory (a fallacy of simple location).

*The “better” is invited from within each occasion’s felt

sense of enduring and self-fulfillment and it emerges from within

a radically local enjoyment taking place within a radically

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interconnected enjoying whole. This enjoyment, furthermore, is

not “happiness” per se, nor might it be judged good by another

occasion, nor even fixed concretely in a externally predetermined

structural or transcendent meaning. Enjoyment is simply that

occasion’s localized-from-within-radical-connection movement

toward a felt-sense of good and away from the not-good, for better

or for worse in the larger surround.

A higher form of enjoyment in Whitehead’s sense may be

better described as equanimity when coupled with width of

awareness, both physical and mental. Yet this is my word; in his

words the “peace” of finding the one choice that comes with a

better sense of rightness paired with “patience” for continually

seeking the right choice within a practice of continuously

striving for width appropriate to this decision to become and

where to be in any pre-existing sense is impossible in the

repeatedly reworked becoming-dynamics of a processual reality.

Many philosophers have contributed to process philosophy

throughout the history of Western thought (a few more recent

examples include, Bergson, 1946; Deleuze & Guattari, 1988; James,

1909/1996; Nishida, 1990; Prigogine, 1981). However I will limit

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myself to Whitehead’s work as the context for understanding my

primary concern: to achieve his proposed form of processual

thinking, Whitehead writes (e.g., 1925, p. 51-55, 64, 72;

1929/1978, pp. 7-8), one must first reject the fallacy of

misplaced concreteness with its accompanying bifurcation of

nature which gives rise to the fallacies of simple location and

substance thinking. One must reject these fallacies at both poles

of experience, mental and physical, in other words, not just

conceptually but at the intuitive, pre-intellectual level from

which one’s felt-sense of the world emerges (e.g., one’s

intuitive “lived presence” in the world, according to Bergson

(1934/1946), one of Whitehead’s repeated contemporary references

(e.g., 1929/1978, p. 33). However, outright negation leads back

to the fallacy. One must also learn when to judiciously entertain

the fallacies while maintaining a proper awareness that they are

fallacies. Utter width of awareness and participation in the

whole flux of the universe is impossible for finite human

consciousness and productive human action. Judicious application

of abstractive and bifurcated thinking helps hold the infinite

fluidity still and clear long enough to create effective

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understandings and take effective action. Unfortunately,

according to Whitehead, this effectiveness of misplaced

concreteness has been misinterpreted in Western philosophies,

leading them to take it at face value as the only guide to

appropriate thinking or being. I will use “processual” and

“process-relational” interchangeably to signify rejection of

misplaced concreteness and acceptance of a process onto-

epistemology.

To help me with the sheer breadth and complexity of Western

ontologies and epistemologies that Whitehead’s arguments overturn

and that I must address as I present the principles of rejecting

the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, I will defer to at least

two authors’ work: one of the original interpreters of Process

Philosophy for the twentieth century, David Ray Griffin explores

the onto-epistemological factors of social science rationality in

relation to the mind-body problem in performing an Unsnarling the

World-Knot (2008), and philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers

adopts a practice of Thinking With Whitehead (2002/2011) to explore

the effective production of concepts and knowledge in the natural

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sciences (and by extension the empiricism of the social

sciences).

Whitehead does not use the term presence in the sense of the

late-twentieth century phrase presence-based leadership, nor even

leadership as a form of non-coercive influence within organizations

(e.g., Drucker, 1954; Follett, 1918/1998; Freire, 1970; Piderit,

Fry, & Cooperrider, 2007; Stacey, 2003; or Watkins & Mohr, 2001).

I am merely drawing an analogy between his peace and patience and

my understanding that these intuitive, conceptual and judicious

modes of thinking, which, when synthesized, are native to the

effectiveness of a presence-based mode of leading that grasps

reality without falsely assuming exact representation. Whitehead

even names an occasion’s engaging the world from both mental and

physical poles the act of “prehension” as if to highlight an

interactivity, a grasping of unity (as in prehensile, to grasp with

a pincer-like grip that affords agility by surrounding the object

in its wholeness; 1925, p. 69-73; 1929/1978, pp. 219-236), but

not com-prehension that sees attributes as if from with-out

(fallacy of substance-quality) or that observes from a separated

distance (fallacy of simple location). The more conscious, aware,

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deliberate, and wide this prehension grows the more closely an

occasion approaches the higher modes of peace and patience.

Presence-based Leadership: Patience & Peace

*For the leader who rejects the fallacy of misplaced

concreteness, Whitehead’s two poles of becoming, physical and

mental, bridge of the width between given circumstances and

potential choices to form a decision for the best, whatever that

best seems to be. “Bridging,” however, will turn out to be a

metaphor too substantive and simply located, and it will morph

into practice and performativity later in the discussion. In other

words, through width a leader’s effectiveness would come about

not merely by intellectual feats of instrumental-transformative

influence (convincing someone to), or conversely by material

feats of strategic-charismatic influence (making someone do), but

effectiveness would derive primarily from within the whole

person’s or whole group’s felt-sense of an occasion’s wholeness-

within-a-holistic-surround directly engaged at both poles

simultaneously. I will struggle throughout this dissertation with

the limits of Germanic-Romance language structures that separates

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individual from corporate and action from being. “Leadership” if

taken exclusively as individualized, demarcated role will itself

turn out to be a metaphor too substantive and simply located, and

one of my tasks is to keep myself from falling into that fallacy.

An interesting wordplay exercise is to turn any important noun

encountered into a verb: to “leader,” for example, may mean to

think-act from within a radical participatory stance that

recognizes difference in responsibilities but not exlusionary

difference and is not the same as to “lead,” which could be read

as the right to adopt a role out front as if heroically separate.

Be that as it may, after I apply a conceptualization of

these higher modes of thinking to the practice of leadership in

chapter two, I will in chapter three specifically suggest a

reconceptualization of presence as a methodological approach to

these higher modes from within the popular literature of several

known theorists. In chapter four I will liken this felt-sense

approach to leadership to Chia’s practice of “indirect action” that

lets go of pre-conceived design to open way for inherent

possibility, or Barad’s performative “intra-active” production of

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reality from within specific, iterative demarcations of what

matters within reality-as-phenomena.

*Within all these chapters I seek to connect the onto-

epistemology of Whitehead’s process thought to an appropriately

concrete hypothesis of leadership practice: that a generative

capacity for leadership efficacy in volatile, uncertain, complex

and ambiguous world must create width of choice and, therefore,

must first encounter and judiciously avoid the fallacy of

misplaced concreteness. When one acknowledges and judiciously

rejects the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, one understands at

multiple levels ranging from physical to conceptual (mechanical

operation, cognitive function, reactive affect, existential

unease, or social construction, to name a few) that definitive

certainty in a fixed, replicable world is an unattainable

abstraction and that lived uncertainty in dynamic, turbulent

creativity is the fundamental, concrete reality. Indeed Whitehead

placed the higher mode of thinking that avoided these fallacies,

patience and peace, in a position to lure other occasions toward

enjoyment of the Good: fulfillment, duration, and not merely

surviving but thriving.

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*In the first part of chapter two, I will review why we

should accept that leaders currently take action in an inherently

volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (“VUCA;” USAWC, 2004)

world where the knowledge for adequate responsiveness is itself

fundamentally incomplete and unencompassable, thus unknowable and

ultimately uncontrollable. I will also review why effective

leadership action must look for coherent and adequate grounds for

decision and agency in the concrete events as experienced within

process and cannot merely rely on distinct (and therefore

abstracted) observation-from-a-distance or measured geometric

analytics.

In the second part of chapter two I will review key writings

in the relatively new field of process organizational studies

that seek to demonstrate how and why, in a volatile, uncertain,

complex and ambiguous world, leaders must shift their world view

to one of process-relationality. I will briefly review how the

recent field of process organization studies has begun to address

process as an interesting source of insight for leadership (e.g.,

Bakken & Hernes; 2006; Chia, 1999; Chia & McKay, 2007; Cobb,

2007; Cooper, 2007; Hernes, 2008; Jarzabkowski, 2005; Langley,

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1999; Tsoukas, 2005; Tsoukas & Chia, 2002; Weik, 2010; or the

Oxford University Press series Perspectives in Process Organization Studies

(Carlile et al, 2013; Cooren et al, forthcoming [2014]; Hernes &

Maitlis, 2010; Schultz et al, 2012). Theorists in the new field

of process organization studies propose Alfred North Whitehead’s

Process philosophy, among other process metaphysics, as an

important correction for leadership theorizing, research and

practice. For example, in the work of Robert Chia and colleagues

(e.g., Chia, 1999; Chia, 2003; Chia & Holt, 2009; Tsoukas & Chia,

2002), we learn that we must understand in an integral, even

rhizomic. way the roles of feeling and reason, agency and

structure, and relational and material factors in organizational

practices and in leadership in particular. I will review this

literature to create a process-relational conceptualizations of

leadership, effectiveness, choice, presence, and dignity.

*In the first part of chapter three I will explore several

examples of popularized social and organizational theory that

have exhibited an interesting convergence in the last decade or

so (as of 2012). Many bestselling self-help books have attempted

to address the increasingly insistent requirements of a volatile,

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uncertain, complex, and ambiguous work and life reality from

within a set of remarkably similar concepts that I will argue

bears an uncanny resemblance to Whitehead’s descriptions of width

of choice, peace and patience. My chosen authors’ expositions seemed

to strive for an integral understanding of effectiveness, an

understanding that emerges from within a sense unity (a grasp of

the whole, or a wholeness of self brought to a holistic sense of

living or leadership) through a set of practices I will group in

this dissertation under the category presence. I will submit the

examples I pursue here to a form of appreciative critique for the

fallacy of misplaced concreteness that itself strives to not fall

victim to misplaced completeness. In other words, while I examine

each author’s work for instances of misplaced concreteness, I

will also seek resonances with practices of width of choice,

peace, and patience, as well as explore whether there may be

judicious commissions of misplaced concreteness that seem

necessary within the particular practice under question.

In this section I will present eight theorists who have long

been influential in the field of personal development or

leadership studies and who have in the past decade published at

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least minor reconsiderations of their theories toward a set of

mind-set that closely resemble what I argue can be grouped into a

category I will call “presence.” These theorists and colleagues

have named their concepts variously (reflecting differing

intentions and theoretical viewpoints): “flow,” “authenticity,”

“alignment,” “mastery,” “synthesis,” “creativity,”

“appreciation,” “purposefulness,” “resonance,” “mindfulness,”

“hope,” “compassion,” “attentiveness,” “connection,”

“persistence,” “systems awareness,” “focus,” “attunement,”

“persistence as a practice,” “engagement,” “fully conscious deep

listening,” “letting go to let become,” “presencing,” “seeing

potential within the emergent,” “holding a tension of opposites,”

“appreciation of the creative deviance of [or within] the whole,”

“becoming aware,” “specious present,” “meditative access to

transcendent awareness,” “sensemaking as collective mindfulness,”

“mindful access to radical uncertainty,” etc. In chapter three, I

will discuss these conceptions through a judicious criticism of

misplaced concreteness and width. Briefly, the authors I have

selected (in alphabetical order) offer the following:

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*First, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who built his career around

the concept of flow (1990; 1996), has published in 2001, with

Howard Gardner and William Damon, Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics

Meet, then alone in 2003, Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of

Meaning. In these works the “good” is an authentic alignment with

that which is appropriate or meaningful overall, including hope,

compassion for others and growth in mastery within self (2003,

pp. 10-20). Through this concept, Csikszentmihalyi expands his

original definition of flow to explain its dynamic impetus.

Second, in 1983 and again in 1993 Howard Gardner identified

Multiple Intelligences for individual learners and for Leading Minds

(with Laskin, 1995), but in 2007 he expanded his model to include

multiple minds, or mindsets (mastery, synthesis, creativity,

appreciation, and larger purpose) that are less about cognition

and more about intuitive engagement.

*Third, Daniel Goleman pointed early in his career to

Emotional Intelligence as essential for individual (1995) and

workplace (1998) effectiveness, a model he expanded to Social

Intelligence in 2006. Meanwhile with his colleagues Richard Boyatzis

and Annie McKee he developed Primal Leadership (2002), which

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Boyatzis & McKee working alone expanded as Resonant Leadership in

2005, complexifying “EI” to include future-oriented practices of

mindfulness, hope and compassion. On his own Goleman now suggests

a mindful Focus (forthcoming, 2013) for effectiveness, in which

excellence depends not just on the qualities of, but the mindful

practices used to acquire attentiveness, self-awareness,

attunement toward others and awareness within systems. Fourth,

Martin Seligman relinquishes his long support of mere modes of

Learned Optimism (1990), or Learned Happiness (2002), and adds to his

theory aspects of well-being he considers equally if not more

important for humans to Flourish (2011). To positive emotion,

engaged flow state, and meaningfulness, he adds accomplishment

(mastery) and positive relationship (living in connection with

others), but insists these traits are not effective without grit

(a practice of extreme persistence).

*Fifth, more than a decade after Peter Senge expanded

Argyris (1992) and colleague Schön’s (1974, 1978, 1996) work on

learning organizations into a Fifth Discipline (1990) of systems awareness,

he worked with colleagues to suggest the need in effective

leadership for Presence (2004) as “fully conscious, …deep

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listening, … letting go, …to let [be]come, … out of quiet mind, …

[and] … open heart,” (pp. 11-12) experienced both by individuals

and by groups. Now one of Senge’s team, C. Otto Scharmer, has

turned this call into a theory of leadership practice called

“presencing,” or Theory U. (2009) Presencing requires “seeing from

our deepest source…[into] one’s highest future potential…[from

within] what is emerging all around us as new realities” (p. 29).

Sixth, William Torbert keeps his concept of an iterative,

participative research into effectiveness that relies on a Power

of Balance (1991), composed of ever wider levels of attention (from

results, to behaviors, to strategies, and finally to intentions).

More recently he places this Action Inquiry (2004) within intuitive,

ever-higher modes of complex consciousness, ultimately achieved

as an alchemical leadership style. This highest action-logic performs

a blended inquiry by working from an appreciative tension of

opposites to entirely reframe the mythos within the patterns of

emergence to find the “creative deviance of the whole event” (pp.

182-183).

*Seventh, before his early passing in 2001, Francisco Varela

had shifted his object and ground from an Autopeoisis and Cognition in

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complex, dissipative systems (with Maturana, 1980; discussed

again in Maturana & Varela, 1998) to a “naturalization,” or

analysis of the neurobiological dynamics within a phenomenology

of becoming aware in a (William) Jamesian version of the present-

moment known as the ‘Specious Present’ (Varela, 1999; also

discussed in Depraz, Varela & Vermersch, 2001). From his

colleague Humberto Maturana (2012), we know that Varela was

interested in mindfulness meditation as a way to access through

phenomenological reduction a pre-constructed realm fundamental to

reality as we know it that stands in contrast to (but not

transcendentally separate from, as some phenomenologists believe)

an entirely constructed, lived reality. Finally, Karl Weick

continues to theorize a backward-looking Sensemaking in Organizations

(1995), but with Sutcliffe he now highlights contemporary

conditions of radical uncertainty and the need for a higher form

of forward-looking sensemaking he calls collective mindfulness (2001;

2007; 2011).

*I attempt in this dissertation to apply Whitehead’s

critique of modern reasoning frameworks to these theorists and

practitioners of ‘presence-based’ leadership (explored in part

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three) who assume that organizations and organizational life

consist of discreet, identifiable and nameable entities (people,

employees, roles, teams, departments, etc.) at specifiable

locations (on a hierarchical organizational chart, in a role-

based workflow model, on a continuum of kind from authoritarian

to transformational, etc.), are governed by law-like rules or

processes (interactions, feedback, directives, requests and

responses, etc.), and are best understood and engaged with

conceptual abstractions that are taken as concrete realities

(sales figures, mission statements, employee evaluations, etc.).

In so doing, they remain to varying degrees confined by the

limits of the modern rationalist worldview and ontology. When

more specific presence- or mindfulness-based development efforts

are grounded in but simultaneously contest the

representationalist and individualist conceptualization of

reality, the deleterious effect is multiplied. In the next

chapters, I will explore how unraveling the fallacy of misplaced

concreteness in presence-based leadership can take place when

presence is treated as a “practice” and a “performativity.”

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*Please note that I am not reading this literature in an

attempt to exhaustively list, classify, or otherwise demarcate a

fixed set or separating boundary for (or in other words, misplace

the concreteness of) presence (or Whitehead’s peace and patience)

as a concept nor as a category. I am instead exploring, within an

inconclusive but very specific (and popularized) set of

practices, a mode of performativity productive of conditions for

and outcomes resembling leadership effectiveness in a

fundamentally volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world. I

will be engaging this literature from within the frame of

Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness. My primary

question for each theorist’s lens on presence will be, how can

these conclusions in support of presence be better read and

understood by readers of popular works? How can practitioners,

readers of these authors’ popular literature, learn about these

various forms of presence, and more generally about effective

leadership practices, from within an awareness of misplaced

concreteness and an awareness of the achievement of mental-

emotional-somatic width necessary for process-relational knowing

and doing, decision making and influencing?

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*My working definition (and it will remain tentative

throughout, in conformance with the processual view that a only a

definition held in-the-passing-moment-to-be-continually-

revisited-in-practice determines the concept’s only true defining

expression) will define presence to be the capacity for and

ability to bring to bear on any emerging moment a practice that

brings a width of awareness to a performative concreteness that

provides choice adequate for decisions and productive

participation toward a (communal) “better.” This width includes

but is not limited to peace beyond understanding, mindful patience

for the unnamed, a poetic authenticity, and creative leaps without

design. This width of feeling-thinking awareness has nothing to

do with fixed, absolute beliefs, except perhaps the empirically

experienced process understanding (onto-epistemic metaphysic)

that there are no valid fixed beliefs only thinking-feeling

creativity out of circumstance and potential toward a local-

holistic good of surviving, growing, and even (at peak instances)

flourishing as part of, emergent from within, and influential of

an organizational whole.

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*In chapters two and three, therefore, I discuss the

proposition that a leader can become more effective in an

inherently volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world by

adopting a process perspective. Many process organizational

theorists stop their discussions here: with the who, the what and

the why of the importance of process thought for leadership

effectiveness, and do not explore (or do so only in a cursory

fashion) the how, the where or the when of engaging in this

feeling-thinking awareness in an effective way. This lacunae

reflects an unrecognized misplaced concreteness of concept over

phenomenon. Leaders can explain process thinking, but acting from

within a process understanding-being is another things entirely.

I am arguing that if according to Whitehead the process

perspective requires rejecting the fallacy of misplaced

concreteness and that if as Whitehead asserts that in its higher

(most effective) modes is expressed as patience and peace, then

one of the ways how a process-oriented leadership can judiciously

reject the fallacy of misplaced concreteness closely resembles

the current-day suggested practices that fall under the category,

presence. I will include a brief review of the literature of

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presence, especially presence in leadership, but the field is

burgeoning, ranging from charisma to Buddhist mindfulness. I will

not attempt to be exhaustive merely illustrative (e.g., Carroll,

2007; Chia, 2003; Conger, J. A. (no relation) & Kanungo, 1998;

Dhiman, 2009; Gambrell et al, 2011; Halpern & Lubar, 2003;

Hawkins, 2010; Hedges, 2012; Howe-Murphy, 2007; Kabat-Zinn, 1994;

Langer, 1989; Monarth, 2010; Quinn, 1996; Schuyler, 2007 & 2012;

Smyth, 2012; Strozzi-Heckler, 2007; Tan, 2012; Topp, 2006;

Wheatley, 2005).

In this dissertation I choose the study of leadership

presence as a practice and performativity to be merely an

exemplar of how a shift in worldview away from the fallacy of

misplaced concreteness, a shift that is so fundamental it

represents a tectonic movement at the very foundation of all

conceptions and performances of effective leadership. Other ways

of rejecting the fallacy of misplaced concreteness in effective

leadership could include adopting a sense of appreciation,

intentional nourishment of potential, and co-creation out of

radical relation (with the material and social world) or adopting

a sense of playfulness, humor, flexibility, and boundedness that

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allows fairness without a loss of flow (“fun”). Again, these are

not discrete substantive categories or experiences entirely

removed from each other in kind. All is process: all is emergent

from dynamic phenomenon, radically interdependent, coherent only

in their shared qualities, and substantive only as particular

lived experience in immediate context that immediately passes

away.

*That said, to stay true to the process-relational

understanding of nature, it’s not enough to describe, define, or

delineate Whitehead’s concept of width or the more contemporary

category of presence, even if by tentative example. A discussion

of presence as practiced within process-oriented leadership

cannot fall victim to the fallacies inhering within the fallacies

that surround misplaced concreteness. Presence cannot be

selectively “leveraged” as if applying an pre-defined tool,

abstracted as “effective against” a static, pre-existing

(abstracted as “resistant”) problem, although effective influence

is a key outcome. Presence cannot be merely an attribute

(substantive quality) “acquired” through genetics (as a trait) or

training (as a skill) or role (as a prerogative), though these

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factors are important historical givens at the moment of

application. Presence cannot simply be “applied” at key times

(simply located in sequential time) or at key interactive

junctures (simply located in geometric space), though these

measures can prove decisive for effective understanding and action.

Ultimately presence cannot be treated solely as a bodily effort

nor as an intellectual clarity (the physical and the intellectual

bifurcated and reduced to mechanistic or transcendent forces),

though both of these aspects, somatic and mental, are crucial for

its success. I must now avoid a misplaced concreteness in

explicating the “what” and the “how” of rejecting the fallacy of

misplaced concreteness with a further exploration of the “when”

and the “where” within concrete processual reality. To help me, I

will engage with the work two further theorists of process

thought to unravel this knot with a wayfinding practice turn (Chia,

2009) and a critical performativity (Barad, 2007).

Presence: Practice of and Performativity within

*In chapter four I will continue my exploration of the “how”

of presence as a contemporary example of Whitehead’s patience and

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peace, and I will do so in the context of “where and when”

process thought (the judicious rejection of the fallacy of

misplaced concreteness) can take up presence as an important key

to deciding and acting from within an unbifurcated simultaneity

of sensitive embodiment and mental acuity, of pre-lingual

intuition and acknowledgement of both the material and the

constructed nature of human reality. I will explore whether one

best way to the judicious rejection of misplaced concreteness in

presence based leadership might be through Robert Chia and Robin

Holt’s (2009) conception of non-individualist, continuously

engaged, purposive practice in the ever-recurring present moment

(however multitudinous the particular possible expressions of

presence may be), augmented by Karen Barad’s (2007) conception of

entanglement-aware agential-realist performativity from within

fundamentally innumerable, unknowable and uncontrollable sets of

factors (however unified the particular potential for

effectiveness may or may not be). To avoid an error of

abstraction, in other words, I seek to expand the

conceptualization of presence presented by most of the authors

reviewed in chapter three as a trait, knowledge, skill or ability

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by discussing in chapter four how presence is also, and more

fundamentally, an inwardly and outwardly ongoing, engaged,

interactive, holistic process of practice and performativity.

*Now that we are forty and sixty years after Whitehead wrote

(and was largely forgotten) the process metaphysic, theorists are

beginning to work out in actual practice the details of a

dynamic, radically interconnected, concretely vital reality

within the everyday world. More specifically to my treatment of

the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, Chia and Holt, and Barad,

discuss how the practice turn and performativity respectively can

fall victim to such fallacies as the representationalist,

individualist and entitive nature of social action in modernist

social theory or the mentality-physicality bifurcation of

observationist, reductionist tendencies within humanism and

constructivism, (post)structuralism and phenomenology. Please

note, these and other useful theoretical frames are not to be

discarded as fallacies of misplaced concreteness: that would

itself be a misplaced concreteness treating each frame as

discrete, explanatory, and self-contained in order to engage in

wholesale refutation. Logic that bifurcates becomes illogical.

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*In particular, I propose the practice turn as an

epistemologiecal-ontological-ethical framework that provides and

understanding of the role of feeling and reason, agency and

structure, and relational and material factors in leadership and

other social-material organizational practices, thereby moving

such considerations beyond the well-worn debates that pit

constructivism against realism, agency against structure, and

idealism against materialism. Indeed, the fallacies that

Whitehead assures us need to be rejected entails a rethinking of

fundamental concepts that support such binary thinking. Beyond a

few illustrative excursions, I do not therefore attempt in this

dissertation a full critical engagement with these late-century

philosophical advances: the practice turn of the social sciences,

the poststructuralist performativity of critical theory, nor even

such concerns of process organizational studies as sensemaking,

identity construction or sociomaterial mediation.

*Indeed, my brief is much more modest. I wish to explore how

how any shift in leadership epistemology toward a process

sensibility (which from a processual point of view ultimately

engages ontology, ethics, and metaphysics as an integrated whole)

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must first engage an understanding of the family of fallacies

inhering within misplaced concreteness. How a particular

practitioner, workgroup or organization defines a working

processual onto-epistemological ethic, a practice and

performativity, of decision and action will likely be particular

to the history and aim of that moment in a processual place and

time (not simply located on a flat plane or linear timeline). Yet

to enter this working processual onto-epistemology each

practitioner must first address the fallacies of bifurcation,

misplaced concreteness, simple location and substance-quality

thinking. To this end, the concept of presence provides an

important theoretical example of the need to move conversations

in process organization studies beyond the mere acknowledgement

that feeling and reason, agency and structure, and relational and

material factors play a role in leadership to an examination of

how these factors work together. The framework of the practice turn

(as discussed by organizational theorist Robert Chia and Robin

Holt; 2009), and the framework of performativity (as discussed by

science studies and philosophy of physics theorist Karen Barad;

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2007) will demonstrate how presence-based leadership can actually

engage in processual thinking-doing in each unique moment.

*Chia and Holt discuss process thought in the effective

practice of business strategy, including a rejection of the

fallacy of misplaced concreteness, and Barad concerns herself

mainly with effective scientific endeavor, taking an excursion

into employee productivity to illustrate her re-reading of the

notion of performativity. I will extend their methodologies to the

presence-based leadership explored in chapter three in an attempt

to understand the “how” of a presence practice in both senses of

the word, causally and agentially. How does presence provide the

width that creates conditions for effectiveness? And how does one create the

width of presence within one’s leadership practice? For process

thought, and for the methodologies of the practice turn and

performativity, treating these questions as aspects of the same

concern is not a category mistake confusing two different

movements (causality and agency) as unified in their grounding

intentions or explanations. For process thought causality and

agency are united inside the phenomenal (importance-decision)

nature of nature, of matter mattering. The practice turn of Chia and

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Holt and the performativity of Barad are arguments unique and

coherent within themselves, but taking both together resolves any

temptation for the practitioner to, for example, bifurcate

conceptualization from embodiment or action from effect when

attempting to “be” present and “act” with presence.

*The practice turn of social sciences (e.g., Bordieu, 1990;

Schatzcki et al, 2001), according to Robert Chia and Robin Holt

in Strategy Without Design: The Silent Efficacy of Indirect Action (2009), calls on

the works of Heidggar among others to describe social action as

an “intuitive grasp of” (p. 119) practice-from-within-the-

surround not the passive observation of, or active exertion of,

external influences or internal decisions. These organization

development theorists critique, however, the individualist

conception of agency still assumed in much of this theory, a

conception that they assert obscures the constitutive nature of

the practice: the agent constitutes from within, and is

constituted by, the practice. (p. 125) Chia’s interpretation of

the practice turn produces the “silent efficacy of indirect action”

and “feeding life without demanding that it conform” (p. 203)

from within phronetic wisdom, intimacy, equanimity, and the

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alacrity and flexibility of mētis (cunning). In other words,

practice is not a possessed trait or skill (a substantive

quality) but an embodied (not simply located) habitus cultivated

for a “sympathetic grasping of the nuances” (p. 131) that shape

the actor as the actor uses practice to influence the environment

through a “wider sensitivity” (p. 131). This width is often not

of the intellect but is instead “absorptive, elusive, and

prosaic;” it is felt in an “unfurling, significant present”

rather than planned or measured or confined to pre-determined

goals, or as Chia and Holt reinterpret it: a “silent,”

“spontaneous,” “indirect,” and “bland” dynamic efficacy (e.g.,

pp. 186-208). Thus practice is a cultivated, deliberate acquisition

through intensive, engaged attention to adequacy,

appropriateness, and insight within alternative ways of seeing

(and being) a reality that is essentially incomplete and open-

ended, and the attention occurs from within a self that is

knowingly and continually re-shaped by the engagement. (pp. 129-

132)

*Alongside Chia’s intensive engagement with practice as a

deliberate cultivation that creates reality from intuition’s

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efficacy-within-phenomenon, I will also rely on the physicist and

science studies theorist Karen Barad’s work Meeting the Universe

Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007)

for her unique conclusion of performativity from within a process

understanding of practice. Her understanding makes of practice a

choice of constraint and exclusion that produces reality through

the performative apparatus-within-phenonmenon (e.g., 62-66).

Barad expands her reading of Niels Bohr for part of her argument.

She resolves the bifurcation of physical and conceptual still

found within Bohr’s theory of complementarity (in the quantum

physics this is the reciprocal state of indeterminance created by

two mutually exclusive states requiring each other; p. 20) by

explaining that material-discursive intra-action happens within

ongoing phenomena of meaning and matter . Meaning (practice,

whether empirically measured or discursively produced) and matter

(apparatus, whether human body or tools for measurement) “intra-

act” to co-produce reality (e.g., Barad, 2007, pp. 194-198).

Practice is the choice, and apparatus is the “cut” that that

choice makes to constrain and exclude almost arbitrary parts of

reality that are fundamentally a complementarity, an

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indistinguishable entanglement of physical and conceptual within

the real.

*Barad then goes on to use the performativity of Judith Butler

(1993) for matter mattering in intra-action with meaning. For

Judith Butler, matter (in her case, the gender of human bodies)

is not a fixed site or bounded surface for discursive

constructivism to reflect off of but a gendering “process of

materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect

of boundary, fixity, and surface” (Butler, 1993, p. 9, cited in

Barad, 2007, p. 191). Barad expands Butler’s reading of Foucault

to hold that the humanist independent realist agent is not merely

forced into action but shaped by interaction and to hold also

that the inscribed constructivist subject is not merely created

out of subjective discourse but also out of matter mattering from

within its ongoing phenomenon of continuing to (re-)create its

existence moment to moment. Barad’s performativity and “intra-

action” seek the “attending to [relational] difference that makes

a difference” (p. 72) within diffraction, entanglement, and

notions of change, agency, and power in which material being

(processual emergence) and constructive action (processual

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decision) make two poles of the same phenomenon of performative

cut by physical apparatus intra-active with mattering (e.g., pp.

141-146).

*If we accept the process view that expressive decision

exists all the way through every phase of reality, from atoms to

star clusters to human workgroups to the entirety of our

planetary ecology, then the material as well as the mental holds

what Barad calls agency (interactive enactment from within

articulating-materializing phenomena, e.g., pp. 175-178) and what

Chia and Holt call efficacy (potent blandness, the art of

nourishing success using an unspoken attunement to potential

within the unfolding, e.g, pp. 198-203). The apparatus through

which one engages effective presence (in humans this begins with

our bodies, in self and in relation) is just as much a part of

the construction as is the discourse by which meaning (e.g.,

Berger & Luckman, 1996) emerges. The physical and the mental are

non-substantive, non-local extrusions (my word) of entangled,

concrete processes creating this instant, then the next. I argue

that with presence comes rejection of misplaced concreteness and

preference for width of choice and ever greater capacities to

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properly inhabit concreteness. When one understands (and acts

within) reality that is processual (event-based and continually

emergent), the more ‘present’ and the less reliant on misplaced

concreteness (abstracting mental processes from the felt whole)

the more coherent are leaders’ potentiating decisions and the

more harmonious are their active influence – one becoming ‘now-

moment’ after another.

*Mattering, having import, being effective, all are a matter

of performativity and thus a matter of permanent possibility not

of permanence. Presence in the body (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi’s

flow or Seligman’s grit) and presence in the quality of attention

(e.g., Weick’s mindfulness or Goleman’s focus) are both necessary

to avoid the fallacy of misplaced concreteness in presence based

leadership. Consequently, possibility is the prize for leaders who

use Chia and Holt’s cultivated habitus of awareness and Barad’s

reconceptualization of interaction as intra-action of apparatus

(presence) and performativity (choice). When leaders use both

poles of effectiveness to understand theirs as a processual

reality that rejects the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, they

can come to see productivity as the constant renewal of

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potential: attunement to the wider the awareness of potential

(e.g., Chia and Holt, 2009, pp. 164-168) the greater the

productive potential of power, agency, identity, work processes,

devices, etc. (e.g., Barad, 2007, pp. 236-243)

*The ballerina’s leap relies on the practice of a lifetime of

intense, disciplined cultivation to release one performative,

seemingly effortless movement, always readied for the next. A

lifetime of effort and a profundity of momentary attention launch

the ballerina into her singular act of supreme effortless effort,

then again. The ballerina’s body-in-launch-and-completion-of-leap

bring together her real materiality, her muscle formation, her

pointe shoes, the audience in their seats, the stage and the air

above it, and thousands of other processual conceptual-

materializations with her insightful, cultivated mental

discipline to become a momentary expression of an apparatus

(performative, poised and inextricably mental-material decision-

out-of-conceptual-being) and a radically embodied practice that

begins absolutely anew within the poise of each moment. The

leader stands in the middle of just such a leap with each

organizational interaction toward the better.

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Implications of Rejection of the Fallacy of Misplaced

Concreteness

Effectiveness

*In chapter five I will explore some of the implications for

the rejection of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness in

leadership, particularly within our working example of presence

taken as a practice and performativity. By understanding

Whitehead’s metaphysic as an ontology of event the leader can and

must shift to an epistemology of process that avoids the

fallacies associated with misplaced concreteness. Yet this shift,

if truly processual cannot ignore the ethics of value and action.

The ontology of process described in chapter one turns on the

concrescent moment, which itself turns on the pivot of valuation

between what the concrescent occasion feels and and what it

decides its reality will be. Value is fundamental to the nature

of nature.

*In chapter two I discuss how the universal baseline for

“appropriate” leadership is effectiveness, influencing movement

toward the better, and in chapter three I explore an example of

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an emerging conceptualization of how to achieve that movement

through presence-based leadership, however well these

conceptualizations succeed in rejecting the fallacies surrounding

misplaced concreteness. In the first section of chapter five, I

will use our entire discussion above to revisit and draw some

conclusions about the connection between rejecting the fallacy of

misplaced concreteness and effectiveness. Ultimately however,

“effectiveness” can take on so many different meanings in

practice and performatively shape so many different material

structures as to become a relativistic triviality. Is a managed

care company refusing care to increase profit margin “effective”

if it creates expensive recurring claims throughout the health

care system? Is cutting staff to maintain profit margin

“effective” if those who remain are exhausted by overwork and

demoralized by the grief and fear? Are performance reviews that

enforce achievement of the profit margin “effective” if their

punitive tone dampens all but the most conformist employee

behavior? Effectiveness is indeed a good measure of leadership

skill and performance, but what will keep this goal from sliding

so easily into misplaced concreteness?

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Dignity

*In the second section of chapter five I will venture

“dignity” as one measure of leadership effectiveness that may be

less prone to the fallacies we have been discussing all along.

My venture this far out from the typical definition of

effectiveness will, however, be on dangerous ground. If we accept

a processual understanding of the interrelation, interdependence,

and interconnection of all events-as-substance-identity-practice-

performance then leaders, employees, organizations cannot be

treated as discrete parts but as instances in an indivisible

whole. This processual stance toward value likely means that a

test of dignity can be subversive to many mechanistic,

individualist frameworks of effectiveness currently accepted as

preservative of the status quo, even as the current twenty-first

century status-quo becomes fundamentally volatile, uncertain,

complex, and ambiguous, and some would say stress-endemic and

trauma-informed (e.g., Bloom, 2013/1997).

*My intuition whispers that dignity can be the feeling-tone-

and-guiding-concept of a life of processual thinking-being. A

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processual life is devoted to striving to live beyond the

fallacies Whitehead points to in the Western thought and devoted

to the achievement of a practice and performative presence from

within a width-of-choice achieved by the intensive higher modes

of thinking-feeling that Whitehead calls Peace and Patience and

attributes to a foundational mode of consciousness beyond the

human that he calls “God’s nature” in Process and Reality (e.g.,

1929/1978, p. 350-351). For many reasons that would take another

dissertation to explicate, I will choose good to speak of this

higher, wider mode of awareness-and-becoming, which is

Whitehead’s “value” as the foundation of all things (e.g., 1925,

p. 178) .

*My intuition whispers the following from within my finite

grasp of Whitehead’s oeuvre (including my reading of 1920; 1925;

1926; 1929a; 1929b; 1933; 1938; 1929/1978; 1927/1985). I will

have to re-engage his work at a textual level to test whether my

hypothesis that is a correct interpretation. Whitehead agreed

with Kant that dignity is choice (from Kant’s Fundamental Principles

of the Metaphysic of Morals, Section 2, “Transition from Popular Moral

Philosophy to the Metaphysic of Morals”), and as such must have a

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moral dimension. Thus human free will, or human agency, is the

only thing that is an end in itself, beyond human judgment of

value, and “alone has dignity.” Whitehead therefore agreed that

width of choice is the fundamental ontological principle but

disagreed with the assertion that only consciousness introduces

choice. All occasions in the universe, according to Whitehead,

“decide” a final satisfaction out of physical causal efficacy and

mental presentational immediacy within rapidly recurring

occasions of experience. Some occasions simply have more of the

mental pole in play during a concrescent moment until at brief,

rare times the concrescent decisions become conscious free will.

However, consciousness occurs only very rarely, even for

supposedly conscious beings, who are in their moment-to-moment

becomings mostly habitual, un-, or semi-conscious. So Whitehead

reinterprets choice (dignity) not as the outcome of consciousness

but as the test for the breadth of awareness that is peace,

patience, etc. and that indicates an ever-closer approach to a

mode of Go(o)d, the primordial aim toward enduring, at times

thriving, even to the point of true harmony throughout the unity

of all parts into a greater unity.

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*Intensities that can go into the formation of a decision-

for-enjoyment within an occasion can just as easily be surprise,

terror, rage, and grief (“get away!”, “fight!”, “hunker down!”,

“puddle in grief!”, “explain away!”) as much as these decisions

can spring from joy, anticipation, flow and wholeness (“move

toward this!”, “sit back and enjoy!”, “wag your tail!”, “bark in

laughter!”). An occasion (life-event, person, organization)

seeking “good” intensities rarely views its own decision as

“evil” in the sense of being entirely unwholesome for that

occasion and its relation with its surround (e.g., “revolts of

destructive evil, purely self-regarding…individual facts [of]…

individual joy…”; Whitehead, 1929/1978, p. 346). Indeed, the more

narrow an occasion’s thinking-feeling processes the more

justified its decision within its own measures of “good,”

regardless of its capacity for producing deleterious effects in

its surround. Examples permeate all of nature: the black hole,

the tornado, the cancer cell, the predator’s kill, the unintended

offensive comment, or the conscious decision to fire someone

based on their race alone.

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*All decisions are narrowly justifiable (some more narrowly

self-serving and disconnected-from-the-whole than others and thus

more egregious to the rest of us). Even so, the more narrowed

occasion has more difficulty justifying a sense of dignity for

all involved in its All: it can only justify its reasons for

damaging a particular form dignity in its vicinity. (Use of the

word “justify” is not an inappropriate personification of natural

elements. Instead, it is a recognition of the concrete

intensities through which these occasions engage their surround:

intensity of gravity, intensity of atmospheric conditions,

intensity of replication, intensity of hunger-induced instinct,

intensity of speaking-before-thinking-of-consequence, or

intensity of hatred of the other.) I will wonder in this fifth

chapter whether one knows one has encountered the quality of good

(inter-connective thriving) rather than evil (destructive self-

interest) when a sense of dignity ever-more-widely pervades the

whole of the present occasion.

*Concrescent decisions are made all the way down the

hierarchy of being, while consciousness arises only in rarest of

instances. With consciousness, when unconscious habits fall away

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and narrow assumptions are consciously dissolved into a width of

grasp (prehension) of the larger whole (that is only possible

when the fallacies of misplaced concreteness are avoided). This

width brings with it a broader litmus of “good” for an occasion’s

final decision, because with width of grasp comes a broader

capacity to entertain a good for a broader array of

connectivities outside-inside the occasion’s decision to become

just this being in just this moment. I will suggest for theories

of leadership effectiveness that dignity not only as the feeling-

tone for this higher width but also as the gauge for how well

concreteness has been correctly judged and realized. To the

degree that the fallacies of misplaced concreteness have been set

aside and width of choice has been achieved, to that degree will

all in the All truly matter. To the degree that all in the All

truly matters, to that degree will the leader only then be truly

effective.

Further Research

*Even as I explore how rejection of the fallacy of misplaced

concreteness in leadership sets up an aptitude for what Whitehead

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calls peace and patience, and as I argue parallels to a category

of leadership practice that I group into the category presence, I

will push many larger questions beyond the scope of this

dissertation, however much it will serve as a lure (Whitehead,

1978, p. 184-189) of relevance (p. 166-168) for the current

exercise. In chapter six, I will suggest that other implications

of the rejection of the fallacies that accompany misplaced

concreteness remain for presence, efficacy, even leadership itself.

Such questions may concern appropriate developmental stages and

complexities of cognition and ego, training or coaching

procedures and evaluation of progress, personality/trait/identity

markers, whether psychological or therapeutic growth and

resolution of trauma is necessary, how

group/organization/societal cohesion may be impacted, and

questions raised by critical social theory, social justice,

comparative spiritual traditions, etc. These and other questions

will undoubtedly accompany such a fundamental shift to a

processual world view.

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Appendix A: Glossary Terms

[This will become a lexicon of terminology with quoted treatments

from various theorists specific to this study, much like the OED.

Note to self: Bold each word. Give section titles referring to

treatments as major idea of para or section. ]

agency (Chia) (Barad)

appreciative critique

awareness — propensity to change (Intro)

bifurcation

collective mindfulness — [Weick]

complementarity (Bohr) (Barad)

concrescence

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dignity

epistem-ontology — [a way of being that takes its form (becomes

matter) from a processual way of knowing (what matters)] (see

also onto-epistemology)

equanimity “the “peace” of finding the one choice that comes with

a better sense of rightness paired with “patience” for

continually seeking the right choice.” (Intro)

fallacy of misplaced concreteness

fallacy of simple location

fallacy of substance thinking

fallacy of substance quality

habitus (Chia)

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indirect action

individualism (Chia) (Barad)

influence (see also productivity)

intra-action (Barad)

leadership

mental (see also somatic)

onto-epistemology

outcome (see also productivity)

patience (see also: width of choice)

peace

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performativity

possibility (potentiality)

practice

practice turn

prehension

presence (see also: [each form of presence offered by

contemporary authors])

presence-based leadership

productivity (in the Foucaultian sense, see Barad)

reduction (phenomenology) — [Varela]

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representationalism

self — as a practice (Intro)

somatic

width of choice

world — produced in performativity (Intro)

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Conger Proposal v 1.1 2013-Dec

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