Chapter 3: The Emergence, Systemicity, and the Post-Newtonian Worldview

Systemicity

A systemicity is defined by Boje (2008, 2014) as the partial, fragmented and irregula that so-called sightings of 'whole system' are missing, glossing, reducing. Organizations are lots of overlays of partially implmented, rarely totally removed systemicities. Those systemicities are in-time, and in-space of organization everydayness. Systemicities are spatial-fractals, and temporal-fractals, and their entanglement combinations across the invovlement-contexts of an organization.

When a manager changes observation devices, then the scale of fractal-resolution, that is an observational apparatus move, changes what is seen in the organization-and-environment-systemicity of space-time.

Organizations are often called living systems:

"In living systems, the scales of DNA bases, chromosomes, nuclei, cells, tissues, organs, organisms, then social scales, do coexist, are related one with another, but are certainly not reducible to one particular scale, even the smaller one" (IBID.: pp. 65-6).

The systemicies of an organizaiton are fractal-scales that do co-exist, wthout one being reducible to the others. Actual systemicities can co-exist at the different scalabilities. The fractal patterns coexist in a single space-time, and are entangled, interconnected, and embedded. The fractal patterns and their reoslutions coexist in what Nottale (2011) calls a common 'scale space.' This scale space is alos the transitions the particular fractal-scales are making in space-time.

Lefebvre's Rhythm Analysis

Henri Lefebvre's Rhythm Analysis has a neat insight into embodied fractals. He talks about the rhythms of the body in terms of their relationships to the other rhythms in the body- their effect in co-creation with others. Instead of saying a fractal is good or bad for business, maybe we non-judgmentally assess its viability from a contextual, relational perspective?

"Furthermore, the dynamics within our bodies and those of our environment often display statistical self-similarity, i.e., the rate of change or variability of a time series is scale-invariant. There is substantial evidence that a high fractal dimension, which measures the degree of, for instance an individual’s heart rate variability, correlates with a healthy state (whereas rigidity, i.e., poor variability, correlates with a lower fractal dimension and disease)" (Vrobel, 2011: 27).

Vrobel (2011) also looks at how time slows down, such as in a high stress situation. Boje - I once had a motorist pull a gun on me as I left a church parking lot with my family. Time slows and you can see things in slow motion. Another time, while riding my Harley on the 405 Freeway in Las Angeles, doing about 80 MPH, a yellow bucket began bounding in a pickup truck in front. I was blocked on either side by a truck and a station wagon. In the pickup truck a girl, about age 10, pointed to the bucket, as it began to bounce higher and higher. Then it happened. The yellow bucket bouned high, and onto the pavement. Things went slow motion. I could see each bounce of the bucket. I throttled the bike to full speed, and swerved to let the bucket move slightly to me left. WIth my right hand full throttle, my left hand left the steering and and I picked up the bucket by its handle and raised it into the air. The girl was applauding, and the motorists around me, were shouting, what must have been, 'Wow.' How is that even possible, at 90 MPH plus, to spear a bucket in motion, and see it as if it was still?

Vrobel says Buddihist monks call this stretching-out-time, to see it slow motion. Police officers report a sort of tunnel vision, where they focus in on a particular motion, such as a suspect reaching for something, and then its all slow motion. Both are cases of single mindedness. Athletes call it being in 'the zone.' It is the ability to be fully involved in the experience of time, to be in-time, merging awareness with action.

When we are immersed in a Situation, how is it that time slows, and our awareness tunes into levels of detail of motion, that we would not otherwise notice? "For the meditating monks, cutting out sound, smell, vision, taste and touch left them with nothing but their thoughts, in pursuit of dhyana: the 'single flow of ideas'. For the police officers, much of their perceptive apparatus closed down in a state of stress, leaving them to focus on just one aspect" (Vrobel (2011: 5). One answer: "adrenaline activity is responsible – as seems to be the case with the playstation player who spills a quantity of the hero’s virtual adrenaline" (IBID.) However, monks are not using adrenaline. Rather, they are tuning out the senses and focusing on the Now, in mindfulness meditation.

What is the fractal explaination? In storytelling, we estimate not only the sequence of events, but their duration, and even the intervals between events. Storytellers estimate the successive events, and in simultaneous events, experience the nested structure of the Now itself. In music, I hear the notes and put the tune together. A storyteller does this by recall of past times that note pattern happened, then anticipates the note pattern that is coming up. "We may say that the past Nows are nested in our present Now" (Vrobel (2011: 14). In our living story webs, we experience simultaneous before-and-after, retrospective and prospective sensemaking flows of experience, in nested structures in multiple contexts, that we are able to sort out.

The storytelling comprehension of contextualizaion of multi-context events in the flow of space-time-mattering is a fractal Situation of simultanous nested-and-contextualized-overlapping-events.

"This theory is based on the simultaneity of nested Nows and makes use of the idea of the fractal. As a provisional definition, we can say that a fractal is a structure which shows more and more detail the higher the resolution ... Theory of Fractal Time takes account of all our primary experiences of time (duration, succession, simultaneity and the Now) and allows time series to be quantified and compared" (Vrobel, 2011: 16).

Not just time, but space is fractal, in its resolution.

"In 1967, Benoît Mandelbrot introduced to the world his notion of the fractal by pondering the question 'How long is the coast of Britain?' It turned out that the answer depends on the yardstick you use. If that yardstick is 200 kilometres long, the approximate length of the British coastline will measure 2400 kilometres... By halving the measuring rod, that length increases to 2800 kilometres ... If the yardstick is reduced in size still more, say to 50 kilometres, the coastline measures 3400 kilometres ... The measured length increases because smaller yardsticks take account of more detail on Britain’s wrinkled shoreline when they follow the banks of the river deltas and protruding rocks" (IBID.: p. 17).

"To generate a self-similar fractal, we can use a recursive algorithm" (IBID.: p. 20)

Consider the Fractal Clock in comparison to the mechanical clock that ticks away 60 seconds.

Figure 3.1 - Fractal Clocks at different algorithms of resolution

Nested Fractal Rhythms Analysis is something we can begin to theorize in organization studies. Nested rhythms can be defined as fractal patterns in a systemicity of rhythmic relationships that are nested within one another. Our bodies are attunement instruments (Heidegger, 1962). And our body becomes attuned to the rhythms around us in fractal entrainment processes of attunement. Some external Situations trigger anxiety moods. Our internal rhythms can be out of alignment with external rhythms. Work and sleep cycles can get out of sync, especially in shift work, where the schedule keeps changing. We experience jet lag when we have flown past time zones. "Exposure to coloured light, for instance, influences heart rate variability within minutes" (IBID.: p. 30). There are unwelcome situations of entrainment.

Standing in line at the Moter Vehicle or Post Office, brings on monotony entrainment. "Monotony results in a string of successive moments (∆tlength) with little or no simultaneity (∆tdepth) being created" (IBID.: p. 31). The complexity of the Situation is boring. The interplay of interanl and external nested fractal structures of space-time-motion is just boring.