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Creating ‘Rhizomatic Systems’ for Understanding Complexity in Organizations

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Abstract

The article describes and demonstrates the use of a new research proposal for understanding the complexity in organizations in terms of a Deleuzian sense of an event. It creates the rhizome metaphor that allows the emergence of different ways of systems thinking, a legitimate challenge to the Modernist’s orthodoxy. For Deleuze and Guattari, micropolitics are the essence of what we call ‘rhizomatic systems.’ It is this concept of the organization, as a rhizome or rhizomatic systems that we want to focus from ‘problem solving’ in a real-world situation to the process of problematization, that is, the making or appreciating a series of events in the problematizing fields. The paper draws on the research experience in which participatory action research was carried out in a Korean distribution company. The participatory learning process happened to create a series of events in which ‘time-related research’ was conducted in order to facilitate the process of problematization within the organization.

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Notes

  1. That sometimes means ‘true statements’ (Flynn 1985, p. 534). However, it is not accurate English translation for French word l’énoncé for which there is no English equivalent.

  2. The notion of the problematizing fields implies the particular and contingent process of problematization which happens between the local discursive fields and nondiscursive fields. The problematizing fields are conceived as having the following twin dimensions: The first dimension refers to the nature of the actual problematizing fields (i.e. the problem situation which happens within the nondiscursive fields). The other dimension refers to the virtual problematizing fields (i.e. the process of problematization proceeds in terms of making a series of events).

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Yu, J.E. Creating ‘Rhizomatic Systems’ for Understanding Complexity in Organizations. Syst Pract Act Res 19, 337–349 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11213-006-9022-8

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