Organisational Participation and Being a Participant: Ships,
Pirates and Crocodiles
Marion Helme
Systems Discipline
Centre for Complexity and Change
The Open University
Walton Hall
Milton Keynes MK7 6AA
UK
Telephone (01908) 655121
Fax (01908) 652175
E-mail: M.F.Helme@open.ac.uk
ABSTRACT: This paper draws on the author’s current systemic action research in
collaboration with a voluntary agency working with participation and children’s
justice issues. Participation in organisations can be considered ‘an especially
paradoxical form of change’ because it runs counter to practices such as hierarchical
decision-making, and selective information exchange. This has implications for those
striving for the participation in organisational planning, decision-making and action
of the ‘service users’, children and young people etc., whose interests the ‘practice’ is
primarily designed to promote. Making sense of this involvement in the governance of
the organisation of those described as ‘at the centre’, and acted upon at the margins,
requires the emergence of different ways of understanding and talking about the
relationships between the organisation and those who are the objects of its concern.
The author contends that stories and metaphors as second order methods of inquiry
can provide new ways of understanding and acting in the organisation, and can
illuminate the part that might be played by the ‘participatory’ researcher.
Introduction
This paper is a reflection on the experience of exploring metaphors and stories in my
current research with a children’s justice organisation (referred to here as the
Organisation) and some of the puzzles in distinguishing the role of the researcher.
Before telling the stories of the orange, rain forest, and the ship, and especially the
pirates and the crocodile, I will discuss the context of the research and the
methodology. There is no conclusion, except the need to listen, question and reflect.
The Organisation is a long established voluntary agency working with children and
young people and their families in their communities in the UK. Like many similar
organisations it has had to adapt to the considerable changes in demography, social
norms and social policy in the last twenty years, and undergone change in its
‘business’, from the provision of residential care and adoption work to working with
children and families in their communities, and internal structural changes, from ‘the
federation’ or ‘time of the barons’ in the 1980s, to centre and satellites in the 1990s
(and a new ‘engine room and bridge’ (my metaphor) structure for 2000). There are
currently about one hundred community projects funded in the UK, each having a
specific objective (for example child protection or social inclusion or ‘a good start’).
Within the Organisation there is a specific focus on children and young people’s
participation, not only in individual decision-making procedures concerning them
(e.g. in legal proceedings and in education), but in their neighbourhoods and
communities, and creation of their environment. The strategies employed in projects
to empower young people and enable them to participate include advocacy and
representation, involving young people as researchers, large scale environmental
community research activities such as Priority Search, and ‘direct work’ with children
and young people using techniques such as High/Scope (see (Udas 1998),(Hohmann
and Weickart 1995)). About four years ago practitioners specifically interested in
children’s participation in their neighbourhood, and concerned about the impact on
children of growing up in neglected and unsafe environments, formed the Child in the
Neighbourhood Group to share understandings and practice. This group developed
the proposal for the collaborative research I am now undertaking. In the two year gap
between the formulation of the proposal and the start of the research, shifts in
Organisational policy and structure, and the interests, knowledge, understandings and
biases I brought with me, have also ‘shifted’ the research. The focus now includes a
wider understanding of participation, including the eventual participation of children
and young people in the governance of the Organisation, and an attention to the
management of practice as well as innovations in practice itself.
Participation
The objective of the research as conceived in dialogue between practitioners and
researcher is to generate new ways of talking about children and young people’s
participation, and increase the choices in their practice for practitioners and managers
in the organisation, and for those children and young people with whom, and for
whom they work. The research methodology draws on systemic and constructivist
epistemologies and the particular qualities of metaphors and stories that enable
making sense of experiences and developing shared meanings. This is also action
research, involving a collaborative process between researchers and people in the
situation, critical inquiry, a focus on social practice, and a deliberate process of
reflective learning (Checkland and Holwell 1998, Argyris, Putnam et al. 1982)).
The participation (or at least, consultation) of service users in decisions about
services which directly concern them, either as recipients or members of the
“community of interest’ is one of the issues that has characterised developments in
welfare services and personal social services in the 1990s in the UK and elsewhere
(e.g. (Lorenz 1994)) and is established in many social care and voluntary agencies,
and in some cases is a legal right. There is a fast growing body of literature on
children and young people’s participation in the development process and
environmental planning in both the North and South, of which Adams 1995, Hart
1997 and Johnson, Ivan-Smith et al. 1998 are perhaps the most comprehensive and
relevant. The role of both agencies and practitioners to challenge societal power
structures that disadvantage people is often explicit in policy documents and
requirements for professional qualification. None of these ‘emancipatory practices‘
are unproblematic or uncontested in implementation; the issues are complex, difficult
and highly politicised. However there are ways of talking about this, publications
about how to do it and practice examples that can be shared.
Participation in organisations is equally problematic, and draws on a different body of
research, literature, history and terminology (for example “the democratisation of
organisational life” (Heller, Pusic et al. 1998), ‘stakeholder theory’ - although these
are used in a general discourse of participation) and with a focus on the participation
of employees, productivity and efficiency. Even this can be described as representing
“especially paradoxical ... working against standard organisational practice such as the
withholding of information and imposition of decision-making boundaries”
(O'Connor 1995 p. 769) and undermined by more valued structures and attitudes
“embedded in social, economic, and political principles’ (McCaffrey, Faerman et al.
1995). The participation of service users, and perhaps particularly that of young
people and children, in the governance, the decision-making, the learning and change,
in organisations is arguably something about which we have no way of talking.
I propose three illuminatory constructivist understandings, one structural observation,
and a metaphor, as examples of the issues to be addressed. Firstly dominant
understandings of organisations and employment are that they are ‘adult worlds’ (and
this can be evidenced, for example, in recent UK minimum wage legislation which
specifies a lower rate for young people, organisational policies excluding employees’
children in the work site, and the wringing of Western hands concerning child
employment in the East in the production of sports goods for the Western market); we
distinguish between work and home in our adult lives and children clearly belong to
the latter. Secondly is the dominant understanding of children and young people as a
‘special’ type of human being, for example. ‘a mixture of expensive nuisance, fragile
treasure, slave and super-pet’ (Holt 1975 p. 22) or ‘alien’ (Cunningham 1995), and in
current society “shielded in a special youth land” (de Winter 1997), as ‘potential’
people of lesser competence, and inscribed in a dialogue of ‘in their best interests’
(Oakley 1994), and for whom ‘adult responsibilities’ deny their ‘right’ to childhood.
An example of this is an interpretation of the Organisation’s duty to protect children
and young people that excludes their participation in staff selection and interviewing.
Thirdly is the understanding of organisations as emotion-free environments (Fineman
1993, 1997) in which children and young people as ‘beasts in the nursery’ (Phillips
1999), and bundles of emotional turmoil in the various stages of their emotional and
physical development, hardly fit.
A structural observation is that the voices of service users in organisations are usually
mediated - by practitioners, by elected representatives, by ‘interested parties’ and
advocates. In discussion about the involvement of children and young people in the
Organisation, a frequently raised question is “how can practitioners work to empower
and involve clients in decision-making processes if the decision-making in the
organisation excludes them”. (This question is explored in (Helme July 1999
(pending)) This resonates with Dispenza’s exploration of ‘the unease I feel in
seemingly promoting empowerment in what I personally experience as a
disempowering world” (in management learning) (Dispensa 1996 p. 240), and his
conclusion that ‘we cannot talk empowerment into existence without addressing what
it actually means in practice ‘ (ibid. p.249).
A metaphor and image that I have used to generate discussion about some of these
issues is that of a ring doughnut (although pace Handy 1995 a British jam doughnut
may be substituted). Service users, children and young people are, on one hand,
spoken and written about as central (the organisation’s ‘core business’) and on the
other hand marginalised as having individual, special and local interests. Without
pushing this metaphor too far, it does fit with Ortony’s three theses of how metaphors
may generate learning (Ortony 1975); compactness (distinguishing between the
rhetoric and practice of participation), inexpressibility (enabling children and young
people to be seen in two positions vis-a-vis the Organisation simultaneously) and
vividness (in a familiar shape of substance and gaps which also has positive
interpretations (Armson and Ison 1995)).
Research methodology
The understandings informing the methodology are that:
e The world we experience is the world we construct; our understandings of ‘reality’
both construct and are constitutive of ‘reality’.
e Language is central in constructing what we understand as our ‘reality’
e We create and make sense of our reality through metaphors and stories and
imagery
e Metaphors, as expressed and as embedded in stories are not reducible to ‘truth’, but
they are ‘the enemy of the abstract’;
Metaphors invite others to participate in the creation of language
Metaphors provide ways of talking about ‘second order’ constructions, e.g. how do
we learn about learning? (How can ways of changing change?)
In outline, the planned research activities include three interlinked and overlapping
stages, of which the last two form an iterative action learning cycle.
* engaging practitioners, managers, children and young people and others concerned
with children’s participation in conversations in which the researcher is learner
and facilitator, and also ‘collector’ of stories and metaphors of participation
e inviting practitioners and managers to join an action learning group (in which the
researcher will act as facilitator), to consider their own and others’ metaphors and
stories of participation, learning from the juxtaposition of metaphors and surfacing
the meanings for practice and application
* communicating the work of the action research group within the Organisation for
feedback and further stories and metaphors
The principles informing this research are firstly recognition of the legitimacy of
different perceptions and ‘voices’ (Fisher 1991); secondly the generation of choices -
Bardmann quotes Von Foerster’s ‘motto’, “Create possibilities’ in his creation of a
positive outlook on social work ‘informed by possibilities, chances and freedom’
(Bardmann 1996), and thirdly that ‘there are no observations independent of the
observer’ (Segal 1986, Krippendorff 1996), that research cannot be independent of the
researcher/s.
In constructivist ways of thinking, metaphors play an important role, as both
constructing and constituting understandings. For this research I am using Lakoff and
Johnson’s definition of the essence of a metaphor as ‘talking of one thing in terms of
another’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), and three different but related aspects:
e Metaphors as linguistic devices (embedded in everyday language - ‘unintended
metaphors’ and as rhetoric -‘intended metaphors’); analysable (as consisting of
topic (first subject), vehicle (second subject), ‘ground’ (similarities between the
subjects) and ‘tension’ (difference between the subjects) e.g.(Candy 1994; Goatly
1997), and also be ‘a way of seeing the world’ (root metaphors).
e Metaphors as exploratory instruments: used in understanding organisations
(Morgan 1985, Broussine and Vince 1995, Oswick and Grant 1996, Morgan
1997); in different academic and research contexts (e.g. education (Candy 1994),
geography (Cresswell 1997), politics (Mio 1996); and in therapeutic contexts
(Riikonen and Madan Smith 1997), (Barker 1985), (Jooste and Cleaver 1992)
e Metaphors as ‘second order’ methods of inquiry: (Fiumara 1995, also Aristotle,
whose ideas of the political power of metaphorical discourse are echoed in Mio
1996), in constructivist theories (Spivey 1997, Gergen 1990), and in second order
cybernetics (Krippendorff 1993,1995, Glanville 1998); metaphors as generative
and creative, offering new ways of seeing (Schén 1979), as the expression of
emotion (Vince and Broussine 1996, Averill 1990), implying a narrative story and
prescriptions for action (Stone 1988) and arguably as a linguistic form of Barthes’
‘punctum’ (Barthes 1993), the ‘sting, the speck, the cut (that) makes a photograph
significant’ (Hagedorn 1994), that sparks enthusiasm and ‘fires you off into orbit’
(Cook 1998).
The consideration of current or dominant metaphors and stories and the emergence of
new ones leads to new ways of thinking and acting and relating with others
(Krippendorff 1995). The active emerging, recognising (or ‘enunciation’ (Palmer and
Dunford 1996)) and juxtaposing of different metaphors and stories — ‘consulting from
a multiple narrative perspective’ (Boje 1994) is a learning activity. Although a
plurality of metaphors produces liberation and emancipation because it avoids
privileging one dominant perspective (Palmer and Dunford 1996),(Morgan 1985),
(Lakoff and Johnson 1980), Alvesson and Wilmott indicate the superficiality of a
‘supermarket’ approach to organisational metaphors (Alvesson and Wilmott 1996)
and the importance of attending to the way in which they are “selectively adopted and
mobilised in the politics of management theory and practice” and inquiring into the
political and historical significance of the use and popularity of particular metaphors.
(ibid. p. 93). They also note the particular effect of 'taken for granted' metaphors, and
that “when a metaphor is deemed to mirror reality, the credibility of alternatives is
effectively displaced and diminished” (Alvesson and Wilmott 1996 p. 92, also Schén
1979).
Stories and narrative play some similar roles to metaphors as embedding cause and
effect relations, as ways of organising and attributing meaning to experiences
(Polkinghorne 1988). Stories organise through plotting, and have an explicit temporal
dimension; metaphors are embedded in stories. “Metaphors condense stories and
stories examine metaphors” (Czarniawski 1998). “Narratives exhibit an explanation
instead of demonstrating it’(Polkinghorne 1988). Stories make sense of lived
experience (White 1998), and position and contain understanding of both author and
audience. I have recounted the ‘story’ of the research many different ways, as it has
unfolded to me and become familiar, and according to my understanding of how to
engage the listener and invite their involvement. On reflection on the telling of the
story in this paper I have omitted the part played by the Open University, supervisors
and precursors in the development of the research, which perhaps reflects the shift
from planning to action. Storytelling is perhaps particularly appropriate in research
with social work and community workers. . Story-telling enables other voices to be
heard (Boje 1994). In teaching social work I have always found that the processes of
narration, collaboration and social construction described by Brown and Duguid
(Brown and Duguid 1994) resonate with practitioners for whom storying their practice
with others is how they learn.
The initial research proposals were drawn up with practitioners, who have also been
consulted in drawing up the methodology, will act as co-researchers during the later
stages of the research, and it is their understandings and those of children and young
people, rather than those of the researcher, which will inform future practice. The
research design perhaps does not meet all McTaggart’s principles for ‘authentic’
participatory action research — this is research towards a PhD thesis so must be ‘my
own work’, and the further cycles of plan-act-observe-reflect (Carr, Kemmis et al.
1986) for second-order reflection suggested by Perry and Zuber-Skerritt (Perry and
Zuber-Skerritt 1992) may not be feasible within the time scales.
Checkland and Holwell propose the criterion of ‘recoverability’ as an alternative to
replicability as a criterion in action research (Checkland and Holwell 1998).
Metaphors and stories encountered on the way can act as landmarks in mapping the
territory of research, and recovering the content and methodology, and judgements
made along the way. Indeed, sharing metaphors can trigger that process for others.
For example, my metaphors for how it has felt doing the research — being in a fog (the
literature survey), jumping off a precipice (starting the fieldwork), hacking through
the jungle (making sense of the data) not only can be located in a reassuring root
metaphor of a journey (with a destination (Lakoff 1993)), but banal as they are, also
trigger off a return to their own experiences of researching, often very different.
Making sense in and within metaphors and stories
In illustration, conclusion, and partial ‘recovery’, I recount how two metaphors
triggered my enthusiasm and understanding at the beginning of finding out about the
Organisation, how a narrative and its metaphors provided space for practitioners to
learn about their own learning in workshops, and reflect on a metaphor for a
researcher, collaboratively researching participation.
“The Organisation is an orange”
In the early days, before I started fieldwork and was reading about metaphors and
talking to people I already knew about the research, I had a conversation with
someone familiar with the Organisation, but not employed by it. He recounted his
admiration for many aspects of the Organisation, including its support of innovative
practice and research, but also his encounter with a ‘brick wall’ in attempting to
discuss differen related to issues in the Christian Church with which the
Organisation is associated. At the end of the discussion, I invited him to propose a
metaphor for the Organisation. He said it was an orange, because it had a thick skin,
was segmented and “spits out the pips”. This metaphor was extraordinarily vivid,
almost tangible, a living example of Ortony’s thesis that metaphors can incorporate
complex or confused information into an organised whole (Ortony 1979), a summary
of our conversation. It is a metaphor I have continued to turn to, to make sense of my
experiences and getting to know the Organisation, and in conversation with others. It
was corroboration of my own perception of the Organisation as segmented, chunked
by geographical distance, affiliation to different objectives, and local connections, to
the extent that I have been an occasional conduit of information. I have understood the
‘thick skin’ as a shared value system (although patchy in parts), as containing and
retaining staff, as insulation, and as the way in which the Organisation might wish to
see itself presenting coherence and clarity to funders and service users. ‘Spitting out
the pips’ remains a reflection-provoking puzzle.
“The Organisation is a rain forest”
The first meeting I had with practitioners from the Organisation focussed on strategic
and structural changes in the Organisation, including the appointment of a marketing
director, an orientation towards corporate funding, a new logo, changes in practice
focus. For the second meeting I visited projects in another part of the country to find
out from practitioners what they did and how it was organised. The image that came
to mind in my reflection on these conversations was the Organisation as rain forest.
This included again an understanding of the Organisation as ‘ecological’, layered, but
also an appreciation of local interdependency, and top-bottom distance, reflecting the
shared understanding of practitioners from different projects in the same region,
which IJ had experienced, and also concern expressed about the lack of consultation
and uncertainty about the impact of the changes. The other similarity was the
vulnerability to colonisation or invasion. Critical reflection on this connection
surfaced the ‘frames’ through which I was making sense of the research. What I had
brought to it was over twenty years work as a social work practitioner and manager,
and five years teaching social work in a new university, under increasing pressure to
do more with less, and observing and absorbing practitioners’ stories of working
under pressure and unappreciated. However this is only one perspective, and from
recognising this emerged the possibility of taking other positions and trying out other
metaphors that, for example, might positively represent the changes.
Ships, pirates and participation
Towards the end of the first year of research, I was invited to an annual conference for
practitioners in the Organisation, who were working in projects with a focus on
children and young people’s participation. During the conference (and in parallel with
other sessions sharing different aspects of practice), I invited practitioners to
workshops to explore ‘how metaphors can be used as a way of creating understanding
from different perspectives, including neighbourhood’ through working together,
sharing ideas and having some fun. The conference occurred at a time of great
uncertainty and the announcement of changes in key organisational roles. In the
workshops I wanted to create a safe and comfortable space, ‘outside’ the immediate
organisational context. To do this I adapted a familiar story (J. M. Barry’s ‘Peter Pan’)
(making sense of metaphors also depending on familiarity with the ‘domain of
knowledge’ (Winner and Gardner 1993)), which also draws on the dominant
metaphor in Western culture (Dunn 1990) of ‘change as journey’ (Lakoff 1993). (Kay
also noted the prevalence of the metaphor of ‘organisation as journey’ in voluntary
organisations (Kay 1991, see also Inns 1996), and indeed the metaphor of ‘practice as
journeys’ was used in another presentation during the conference). People were
invited to consider the ‘story’:
“Things are changing. The whole pirate ship is talking about becoming a
participating (and learning) organisation. “We must give the crocodile a voice; he is
a stakeholder in this ship as much as Wendy, Peter and the Lost Boys”, argues Smee,
“and is walking the plan consistent with our mission statement?”
and share understandings about “the sort of things that the ‘pirate ship’ could do to be
fully participative”, and “the sorts of things that people (and animals?) could do to
fully participate in the ‘pirate ship’”.
It was perhaps inevitable that the Chief Executive would be identified with Captain
Hook, and that how the detail of the story was used depended on people’s recall.
(What did Tinkerbell do? Where did the Indians fit in?). The second question proved
much more difficult, but revealed my own assumptions about how people ‘look’ when
they are ‘participating’ (animated, with eye contact). The richness of roles and events
generated a very wide range of discussion, for example for some, the ship never left
the dock and participation was about working out relationships, trust, sharing previous
experience, an ‘inner journey’, ‘training’ for participation. For others the context was
important, the possibilities of agendas from ‘outside’, why were people there, how
autonomous was this ship. Time (travelling) raised question about at whose pace
participatory action should be, that participation was about freedom — where to go and
whether to go at all, and that it can be too slow.
People were able to share experiences through the story, and generate new metaphors.
In the workshops we (researcher and practitioners) developed a shared language and
way of talking about participation that we have used and developed in subsequent
conversations.
“The Researcher as crocodile”
At the end of each workshop I asked participants for ‘rapid feedback’, using a
technique developed by myself and a colleague in our teaching. Participants or
students are asked for anonymous written answers to three questions which vary
according to the context. In this case I asked “what did you learn in this workshop?”
and, “what should I do next to find out about participation” and for any other
‘comments or burning issues’. The response to the second question included
invitations to projects (with telephone numbers), several recommendations to talk to
children and young people, and two particular replies which ‘struck home’ and which
I discuss here. The first was “think about ways that you participate — or not”, and the
second “be a crocodile”.
In the workshops I was experimenting taking photographs with a Polaroid camera,
with the consent of those involved. This was in order to have an additional record, to
produce ‘images of participation’ as data, but mainly as an aide memoire for myself. I
chose to use a Polaroid camera because people could immediately see the pictures in
the context in which they were taken, and have shared control over what happened to
them (they could be taken away or torn up etc.). What I had not realised was the
obtrusiveness of the process of taking pictures. I had to position myself and the large
camera near to the ‘subject’, there was a loud noise (snap!), and a flash. What I also
had not appreciated was the ambiguity of the photographer in relation to the
photograph — who is not ‘in the picture’, but whose gaze the picture represents. The
photographer is always ‘behind’ the picture. There was also a question of ownership —
to whom did the picture ‘belong’? Can there be a plurality of ways of belonging ? At
what point should this be negotiated ?
Considering the crocodile also surfaced questions about the researcher’s position in
relation to the research and co-researchers in the field. In my recollection, J. M.
Barry’s ‘Peter Pan’, the crocodile is the only creature of which wicked Captain Hook
is afraid, after an encounter in which the crocodile ate his hand and also swallowed a
clock. The crocodile appears at times in the story, either in fact or as a ticking noise,
to turn the battle between Hook and Peter Pan and his friends in the latter’s favour,
and eventually eats Captain Hook. The crocodile may seen as a reminder that things
may be different, as ‘outside the main story’ but catalytic in the outcome, and as
having a very different view on events. In the workshop discussion, the crocodile was
seen by some as needing special consideration (“going at the crocodile’s pace”), by
others as “needing feeding”, and also as “management”, which poses a “dilemma” for
participating, resolved by “inviting the crocodile on board”.
“Researcher as crocodile” surfaces additional choices of action for the researcher, in
addition to hunting, gathering, inviting, questioning, joining, listening, facilitating,
communicating, recording, presenting, particularly ‘perturbing’ - asking difficult
questions, ‘bringing non-official stories and story-tellers to the round table of
dialogue” (which Boje considers is “a political and rebellious invasion, and will be
viewed in some enterprises as an act of terrorism”(Boje 1994 p. 457); and is important
because “listening to someone’s story is not just to capture knowledge, it confirms
that their experience has value to the people involved in the situation” (Brown and
Packham 1999 p. 27).
The idea of being a crocodile was also illuminatory in considering some of drawbacks
in using metaphors and stories in research. A ‘crocodile gaze’ is required firstly
because metaphors are ubiquitous — everyday, unintended metaphors attribute values
to characteristics in ways that can marginalise, for example ‘up’ and ‘big’ are
positive, ‘down’ and ‘small’ are negative (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). The
unexamined metaphor may have entailments which are potentially dangerous (Lakoff
and Johnson 1980; Packwood 1994), particularly here in the way that others are
positioned (e.g. as marginal). Secondly, metaphors and stories are culturally specific,
and depend on the story-teller or metaphor-maker ‘taking-as-shared’ a vocabulary, a
set of beliefs and values ‘which must be presupposed if the use of metaphor is to be
attempted’(Fiumara 1995 p. 105). One of the implications of this is that metaphors
may be very differently interpreted, and may be exclusive. Finally the otherness of the
crocodile gaze recognises that no single metaphor can capture the whole, but the
purposiveness of the gaze can see that too many metaphors confuse (Packwood 1994),
(Palmer and Dunford 1996).
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