Someone on Twitter – forgive me, I can’t remember who! – recently mentioned the book The Sense of Dissonance by David Stark at Columbia University. I hadn’t heard of the book and requested it from the library. Just in the first chapter (available on Stark’s book website here), I’m already finding some compelling stuff.
The concept of “heterarchy” is fascinating to me, in multiple contexts – including media and journalism, naturally. Stark discusses an example from the tech industry in detail in a later chapter. (It’s also used in other fields, as this Wikipedia entry demonstrates.)
Applying this idea to higher education is fascinating. Check out these paragraphs:
…in an increasing number of areas, many firms literally do not know what products they will be producing in the not so distant future. To cope with these uncertainties, instead of concentrating their resources for strategic planning among a narrow set of senior executives or delegating that function to a specialized department, heterarchical firms embark on a radical decentralization in which virtually every unit becomes engaged in innovation. That is, in place of specialized search routines in which some departments are dedicated to exploration while others are confined to exploiting existing knowledge, the functions of exploration are generalized throughout the organization.
These developments increase interdependencies between divisions, departments, and work teams within the firm. But because of the greater complexity of these feedback loops, coordination cannot be engineered, controlled, or managed hierarchically. The results of interdependence are to increase the autonomy of work units from central management. Yet, at the same time, more complex interdependence heightens the need for fine-grained coordination across the increasingly autonomous units. (p. 21)
…authority is no longer delegated vertically but instead emerges laterally. … A young interactive designer…expressed this succinctly: When asked to whom he was accountable, he replied, “I report to [the project manager] but I’m accountable to everybody who counts on me.” (pp. 22-23)
Stark also describes the role in heterarchical organizations of “diverse evaluative principles” (I skipped ahead to the book’s conclusion for this succinct statement):
The assets of the firm are adaptively increased when there are multiple measures of what constitutes an asset. The same is true at the societal level. Value is amplified when there is organized dissonance about what constitutes the valuable….We do better when more of us with varied voices ask this question from different standpoints of what is worthy. (p. 212)¹
His explanation raises all kinds of questions for me, including these:
- What would it mean if higher ed institutions turned over responsibility for innovation to academic departments, asking them to envision completely new ways or radical innovations with which they could best accomplish their educational goals?
- Would losing the organization offered by the larger university hierarchy lead to chaos — or, freed from the strictures of imagining only what would work within the context of the entire institution, could entirely new means of educating at the university level be envisioned?
- Are faculty too socialized into and comfortable within existing hierarchies to embrace the interdependence and new accountabilities inherent to a heterarchical approach?
- Would a heterarchical structure be compatible with current funding structures in place for higher ed? If not, what would be alternatives?
- Are we maintaining “diverse evaluative principles” with regard to higher ed, or is the increasing focus on workforce preparation diminishing the value of higher education as a societal asset?
I don’t find much discussion of the links between “heterarchy” and higher ed. Here’s one connecting to the concept of “ecovillages”; here’s one in the British context; here’s one about K-12 education. Am I missing others?
The “heterarchy” concept is new to me, and it’s entirely possible I’ve misunderstood Stark’s thinking — and, I admit, I’m only about 25 pages into the book. I have no doubt that it’s about to get much more complicated in fun ways. But I love it when a new idea with so many potential applications gets my brain off and running.
What do others think, about the idea in general or about this application of it? Please share your thoughts.
¹ Stark, D. (2009). The sense of dissonance: Accounts of worth in economic life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Image by Flickr user Dan Zen.
