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Scaffolded Joint Action as a Micro–Foundation of Organizational Learning Brian R. Gordon and Georg Theiner Brian R. Gordon Georg Theiner BRGordon Partners Department of Philosophy, Villanova University brianrgordon@gmail.com georg.theiner@villanova.edu https://sfu.academia.edu/BrianGordon http://villanova.academia.edu/GeorgTheiner Abstract Organizational learning, at the broadest levels, as it has come to be understood within the organization theory and management literatures, concerns the experientially driven changes in knowledge processes, structures, and resources that enable organizations to perform skillfully in their task environments (Argote and Miron–Spektor 2011). In this chapter, we examine routines and capabilities as an important micro–foundation for organizational learning. Adopting a micro–foundational approach in line with Barney and Felin (2013), we propose a new model for explaining how routines and capabilities play a causal role in transforming experience into repertoires of (actual or potential) organization–level behavior. More specifically, we argue that routines and capabilities are built out of capacities for shared – both joint and collective – intentionality (Tomasello 1999, 2014; Bratman 1999a, 2014) that enable individuals to engage in complex forms of collaboration in conjunction with multiple layers of scaffolds that encompass material and symbolic resources, social processes, and cultural norms and practices (Weick 1995; Hutchins 1995; Clark 1997, 2008; Orlikowski 2007). In short, we outline what we call the ‘scaffolded joint action’ model and suggest its potential as a micro–foundation of organizational learning. Forthcoming in: Stone, C.B. & Bietti, L.M. (Eds.), Contextualizing human memory: An interdisciplinary approach to understanding how individuals and groups remember the past. London: Psychology Press. *** Penultimate Draft *** *** Comments welcome *** 1 2 Scaffolded Joint Action as a Micro–Foundation of Organizational Learning Brian R. Gordon and Georg Theiner 1. Organizational Learning: An Introduction Organizational learning, at the broadest levels, as it has come to be understood within the organization theory and management literatures, concerns the experientially driven changes in knowledge processes, structures, and resources that enable organizations to perform skillfully in their task environments (Argote & Miron–Spektor 2011). Understood this way, organizational learning encompasses organizational knowledge and organizational knowledge creation processes (Kogut & Zander 1992; Nonaka 1994; Spender 1996; Grant 1996; Cook & Brown 1999; Nonaka, von Krogh & Voelpel 2006; Nonaka & von Krogh 2009); absorptive capacity (Cohen & Levinthal 1990; Zahra & George 2002; Volberda, Foss & Lyles 2010), organizational memory and cognition (Walsh & Ungson 1991; Walsh 1995; Kaplan 2011; Ren & Argote 2011), sensemaking (Weick 1995; Weick, Sutcliffe & Obstfeld 2005), and related areas. Making sense of what this actually means, and explicating how it works, has been an important mandate in the field for several decades now; a quest chronicled, in part, by several influential reviews, including Fiol and Lyles (1985), Levitt and March (1988), Huber (1991), Crossan, Lane and White (1999); Argote and Miron–Spektor (2011), and March (2011). A theory of learning implicitly entails the existence of some sort of memory. Arguably, this much follows from a common conception of learning, according to which learning is broadly understood as the processes by which prior experience comes to influence an actor’s subsequent action or understanding by modifying some underlying substrate on which those rely (Reisberg, 1999). This holds even though the relation between what could objectively be said to happen in the world and what the actor subjectively experiences and learns from such experience is often tenuous (Daft & Weick 1984; Weick 1995; March 2011). And it also makes sense to identify a certain range or type of phenomena as instances of ‘organizational learning’ before we embark on the task of discovering the underlying processes and mechanisms which are causally responsible for bringing them about (Machamer, Darden & Craver 2000; Craver & Bechtel 2006). 3 From this perspective, to propose a theory of organizational learning is to try and say something about the way that experience comes to affect how an organization situates itself in its environment and deal with flow of events it encounters – to say something, that is, about the memory processes operating at an organizational level of analysis. When we do so, we engage in what Whetten, Felin, and King (2009) termed a ‘vertical borrowing’ of theory from one level of analysis to another (e.g., Sandelands & Stablein 1987; Larson & Christensen 1993; Hutchins 1995; Runciman 2005). In the case of organizational learning and memory, it is a borrowing we argue is justified not by the postulation of a single mechanism underlying both individual and group manifestations of these phenomena, but from its fruitfulness as a heuristic for comparing functionally similar sets of relationships between entities and events located at different levels of analysis. One caveat may be warranted. Because organizations are made up—at least in part—by people (Orlikowski 2007; Pentland 2011), things become a bit more complicated once we acknowledge that some aspects of organizational learning and memory are indeed explained—at least in part—by what happens in the heads of individual members of the organization (cf. Levitt & March 1988; Simon 1991; March 1991; Spender 1996; Cook & Brown 1999). Implicating a role for individual learning and memory in larger organizational processes, however, is far from asserting, like Simon, that organizational learning and memory is ‘nothing but…’ what occurs at the individual level. Even when organizational and individual manifestations of learning and memory incorporate a common substrate—like the brains of specific individuals—they may do so in very different ways and to different effects. Learning and memory processes at the one level, then, may be implicated by learning and memory processes at the other – potentially in complex, interleaved, and nested ways. Working out the details of these relationships is part of the larger, ongoing project in which we are engaged. The construct of organizational learning is often defined functionally. That is, it is described and operationalized in terms of changes in an organization’s actual or potential performance that result from experience (Argote & Miron–Spektor 2011). The apparent simplicity of this approach belies an enormous amount of controversy as one might naturally expect in a field of 4 inquiry that is this robust. For starters, whose experience is a complex question, in part because learning and knowledge processes span multiple levels of analysis, from the individual to the organizational (Crossan, Lane & White 1999; Argote & Miron–Spektor 2011), and in part because the experience can be vicarious (Cohen & Levinthal 1999; Huber 1991; Zahra & George 2002; Volberda, Foss & Lyles 2010). Moreover, the construct of experience as it has come to be understood in the literature itself is complicated, as it has expanded over time from more traditional notions tied to the actual histories of organizations (and the people who comprise them) to include deliberate search and imaginative processes that are in some cases only loosely tied, if at all, to actual events (Daft & Weick 1984; March, Sproull & Tamuz 1991; Gavetti & Levinthal 2000; Felin & Foss 2009; Felin & Zenger 2009; Salvato 2009; March 2011). Among the many foundational issues in the field, our concern here is with what is sometimes called the micro–foundations of organizational learning (cf. Felin & Foss 2005, 2006; Barney & Felin 2013). A micro–foundations approach asks a deceptively simple question. It asks, of a particular capacity or property that is attributed to an organization, what are the resources, processes and mechanisms that underwrite this capacity or property? Adopting a micro–foundations approach is thus an inquiry into how things work (Dennett 1978; Bechtel & Richardson 1993; Cummins 2000; Machamer, Darden & Craver 2000) that seeks to open up the ‘black box’ of organizational learning in order to see how the organizational–level properties and capacities are enabled by the interactions of more basic elements and processes. When we turn to the micro–foundations of organizational learning, many different answers to this question have been proposed. Some scholars, often taking a methodological individualist approach (Felin & Foss 2009), have sought to locate the micro–foundations of organizational learning in the heads of the individuals who constitute the organization (Walsh 1995; Kaplan 2011). In a very influential paper, Herbert Simon, for example, asserted “all learning takes place inside individual human heads; an organization learns in only two ways: (a) by the learning of its members, or (b) by ingesting new members who have knowledge the organization didn’t previously have” (1991, p.125). Other scholars, often adopting a methodological collectivist approach (Felin & Foss 2009), have contested the idea that organizational knowledge is 5 (completely) reducible to the individual–level and have sought, instead, to ground important aspects of organizational learning in transactive memory systems (Wegner 1986; Ren & Argote 2011; Theiner 2013) or in constructs like organizational routines and capabilities (Nelson & Winter 1982; Levitt & March 1988; Argote & Miron–Spektor 2011). In their seminal treatment, Nelson and Winter (1982), for example, explicitly introduced the notion of an organizational routine as a macro– or organizational level analog of skill at the individual level. In general terms, routines and capabilities are typically understood as patterns of interdependent action among individuals that are learned over time and oriented toward accomplishing some ‘larger’ unit of work that requires the coordination of multiple individuals (Winter 2003; Becker 2004; Felin & Foss 2009). Moreover, they often bring together people with very different knowledge, skills, and experiences (Felin et al. 2012), involve flows of activity that can occur over varying stretches of time, and, potentially, can involve action that takes place at many different locations. Finally, they often entail action that relies upon various socio–material ensembles (Orlikowski 2000, 2007). 1 Seeking the micro–foundations of organizational learning in higher–level constructs like organizational routines and capabilities is not without its own challenges, however. Nelson and Winter’s approach, along with subsequent work in the literature rooted in methodological collectivism, has been criticized as of late for two reasons: (i) for not explaining the origins and historical emergence of routines and capabilities, and (ii) for not explaining how macro–level phenomena such as routines and capabilities are assembled from a heterogeneous network of entities, processes, and interactions operating at lower–levels (Felin & Foss 2005, 2006, 2009; Barney & Felin 2013). We are sympathetic to this critique. At a minimum, one does not have to be a reductionist to see the legitimacy of inquiry into the micro–foundations of macro–organizational phenomena. But perhaps more importantly, if the goal is to understand what factors drive organizational level dependent variables, we think it is reasonable to look for explanations wherever they may be found, without necessarily biasing our explanations towards certain privileged levels. At the same time, we remain cognizant of critiques of reductionistic approaches, which have long noted 6 the challenges, practically and conceptually, of skipping directly from action, choice, and knowledge at the individual level to organizational–level descriptions and outcomes (Pentland 2011; Hodgson 2012; Winter 2012). What is needed is a proper micro–foundational approach that is not reductionistic in nature (Ross & Spurrett 2004). What we suggest is that routines and capabilities can be understood as larger–scale units of analysis that emerge from – though are not necessarily reducible to – the people, artifacts, processes, and their interactions that comprise the organization’s basic elements (Felin & Foss 2005; Felin, Foss, Heimeriks & Madsen 2012; Barney & Felin 2013). We thus favor a multi–level approach to social ontology (Sawyer 2003, 2004, 2005; Salvato & Rerup 2011; Barney & Felin 2013). In this chapter, we examine routines and capabilities as an important micro–foundation for organizational learning. Adopting a micro–foundational approach in line with Barney and Felin (2013), we propose a new model for explaining how routines and capabilities play a causal role in transforming experience into repertoires of (actual or potential) organization–level behavior.2 More specifically, we argue that routines and capabilities are built out of capacities for shared – both joint and collective – intentionality (Tomasello 1999, 2008, 2014; Bratman 1999a, 2007, 2014) that enable individuals to engage in complex forms of collaboration in conjunction with multiple layers of scaffolds that encompass material and symbolic resources, social processes, and cultural norms and practices (Suchman 1987; Norman 1991; Simon 1994; Weick 1995; Hutchins 1995; Wertsch 1998; Clark 1997, 2008; Wilson 2004; Sutton 2010; Menary 2007; Theiner 2011; Kirsh 2013). In short, we outline what we call the ‘scaffolded joint action’ model and suggest its potential as a micro–foundation of organizational learning. 2. The ‘Scaffolded Joint Action’ Model Preliminaries We start by outlining the basic elements needed for purposive intentional action at the individual level and build up from there, introducing additional elements needed to explain more complex forms of joint action in a series of stages. We do this because we think it is critical to understand how the various elements of the psychological infrastructure we specify enable progressively more complex forms of joint action. Our model is broadly inspired by Tomasello’s ‘shared intentionality hypothesis’ (2014), which views the evolution from individual to joint and 7 eventually collective intentionality as a series of adaptations for dealing with increasingly complex problems of social coordination. To be clear, though, our model is primarily intended as a conceptual model. It is not meant to describe the ontogenetic or phylogenetic development of human cognition, although it is quite reasonable to suppose that the conceptual layers of our model roughly correspond to the ontogenetic and phylogenetic ordering in which our collaborative skills for joint action are acquired. Nor do we seek to provide a conceptual analysis of what constitutes a ‘joint action’ in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions – an enterprise that has generated a flurry of activity within the philosophical community (cf. Schweikard and Schmid 2013). Instead, the purpose of our model is to describe a cluster of interconnected cognitive capacities whose manifestation underlies paradigmatic displays of joint and collective intentionality. To succeed in this endeavor, we don’t have to argue that any subset of these capacities is strictly necessary for the performance of joint actions. But we do think that their coordinated operation is causally linked to a wide range of human collaborative activities at which our model is aimed. Individual Intentionality Humans, in general, have sophisticated faculties supporting purposive intentional action at the individual level (Bratman 1987, 1999a, 2014; Tomasello et al. 2005; Grammont, Legrand & Livet 2010). Our model of scaffolded joint action takes this cognitive machinery underwriting individual intentionality – or, what Bratman (2007, 2014) has termed our planning agency – as its basic building block. We will not elaborate much on this aspect of our model here, as its central features are well recognized. Purposive intentional action at the individual level requires three basic elements (Tomasello et al. 2005; Bratman 1987, 1999a; 2014): (i) an ability to represent goal–states; (ii) an ability to develop situationally appropriate plans of action, of varying degrees of novelty, for achieving goals by intervening in the environment; and (iii) an ability to represent and track changes in the goal– and action–relevant states of the world over the course of time during which the action is carried out. 8 Goal–state representations specify a desired end, a particular state of affairs that the agent desires in and of itself or for its instrumental utility in some larger scheme. The ability to represent goal– states entails an ability to represent things in the world not just as they currently are, but in ways that they could be, should be, or might have been. It entails the ability to represent counterfactuals, basic normative constraints, and alternatives (Hofstadter 1979; Fauconnier & Turner 2002). Action plan representations capture ways of intervening in the causal commerce of the world to bring about various desired changes. These action plans are rooted in an agent’s sensory–motor capacities for engaging skillfully with the world (Clark 1997; Grammont, Legrand & Livet 2010; Noë 2012). Action plans are typically partial, incomplete, and responsive control structures for bringing about desired changes (Grush 2004; Clark 1997). They are partial in the sense of representing, at best, schematic aspects of an agent’s complex interactions with the world over time in the pursuit of some objective; touching on critical points in the cascade of events, they leave open many details and ramifications that get filled over time, often on the fly in the reciprocal interactions between agent and world (Clark 1997; Grush 2004; Noë 2012; Bratman 2014). Environmental representations enable the agent to track select aspects of the external environment that are relevant to the agent’s niche and action plans (Gibson 1979; Noë 2012). Many of these environmental representations are fundamentally ‘action–oriented’ (Millikan 1995), in that they do not depict the world ‘as it is,’ in agent–neutral terms, as much as they capture the world from the perspective of an embodied agent with particular skills and capabilities rooted in a history of interactions in a specific niche (Clark & Toribio 1994; Barsalou 1999; Glenberg & Kaschak 2002; Gallese & Lakoff 2005, Noë 2012). From Individual to Joint Intentionality As human beings, we do not just act as individuals, but are able to merge our goals, plans, and actions with one another in distinctively cooperative ways such that we act jointly. Singing a duet together, lifting a large piece of furniture together, or robbing a bank together, are all examples of joint action. Joint actions must be distinguished from situations in which two people happen to 9 do the same thing, in pursuit of the same goal, but independent of one another (Searle 1991). This is true even in cases where they both know about each other’s goals. For example, if I am singing an aria on my balcony, and my next–door neighbor is singing an aria on her balcony, then, even if we both share the same goal of attracting as many spectators as possible, in conditions of common knowledge, we are just wannabe artists singing in parallel, not jointly. Joint actions are also different from strategically coordinated individual actions. Consider two people driving towards each other on a narrow dirt road who avoid a heads–on collision by executing the same swerving maneuver – either both swerving to the right, or both swerving to the left. In this situation, the goals of those two agents are perfectly aligned; they take into account each other’s behavior and adjust their actions accordingly. What is missing in both cases, however, is a characteristic form of ‘we’ intentionality that is peculiar to joint actions, and distinguishes them from other types of goal–directed social interactions. Beginning in the late 1980s, there has been an increased interest in understanding the conceptual, normative, and psychological underpinnings of joint action. Philosophers have argued that the ability to engage in joint actions requires a special kind of collective or ‘we’ intentionality that cannot be identified with the kind of intentionality that is required to perform individual actions (Bratman 1992, 1993, 1999b; Gilbert 1989, 1990; Searle 1991, 1995; Tuomela 2007). Developmental and comparative psychologists have found that pre–linguistic (or barely speaking) infants are capable of engaging in basic forms of joint actions in ways in which the great apes, our nearest primate relatives, are not (Tomasello et al. 2005; Tomasello 2014). Cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists have begun to unearth distinctive cognitive and neural processes which support real–time joint action, challenging the assumption – still fairly popular within mainstream psychology– that the cognitive foundations of human behavior can be understood by studying individual minds in isolation (Clark 1996; Sebanz, Bekkering & Knoblich 2006; Knoblich, Butterfill & Sebanz 2011). Over the past decade and a half, the study of collective intentionality has turned into a rapidly growing, and increasingly interdisciplinary area of research reaching into, and generating interest from cognitive science, sociology, anthropology, legal theory, economics, and political science (cf. Meggle 2002; Koepsell & Moss 2003; Tummolini & Castelfranchi 2006; Schmid, Schulte–Ostermann, & Psarros 2008; Butterfill & Sebanz 2011; Schmitz, Kobow, & Schmid 2013; Chant, Hindriks & Preyer 2014). 10 The species–unique human capability to engage in joint action is a fundamental building block of the social, cultural, and institutional realities in which we live. Following Tomasello (2010, 2014), we distinguish two main types of shared collaborative activities, each of which is grounded in a distinctive psychological infrastructure or ‘we’ intentionality. Those two forms are (i) joint collaborative activity, which is based on the capacity for joint intentionality, and (ii) group collaborative activity, which is based on the capacity for collective intentionality. We now briefly outline the difference between these two types of collaboration, the specific problems they impose on the coordination of action, and the cognitive skills and motivational propensities on which they rest. Joint Intentionality We understand joint collaborative activity as a second–personal mode of engagement between self and other that, at the very minimum, satisfies at least two conditions (Tomasello 2014). First, each agent actively participates in the joint activity, with a fundamentally cooperative attitude, rather than passively observing it from the outside. Second, the engagement always involves a specific person – a ‘significant’ other (Mead 1934) – with whom the individual stands in a direct relationship. By saying that the basic form of a joint collaborative activity involves a dyadic relationship, we do not want to exclude the possibility of triadic or more ramified forms of joint collaborations that share many of the same underlying features (discussed below). For definitional purposes, what matters is that the structure of those collaborative interactions does not add up to a group, understood as a cohesive collaborative unit that persists over time, and is characterized by a more permanent division of labor (cf. Arrow, McGrath & Berdahl 2000). The joint intentionality of acting together has a dual–level structure which combines social sharedness with individual differentiation. This enables the collaborative pursuit of joint endeavors in which each partner plays distinct yet complementary roles. In the extant literature on joint action, there are numerous proposals for making the intuitive concept of shared (both ‘joint’ and ‘collective’) intentionality more precise. Philosophers have given detailed accounts of the distinctive content and mode of shared intentions, as well as related collective intentional attitudes, as key ingredients of joint actions (Schweikard & Schmid 2013). Cognitive 11 psychologists have studied systems of mental representations that are dedicated to the planning and execution of joint actions (Knoblich, Butterfill & Sebanz 2011). More recently, ecological psychologists have found that a surprising variety of social coordination can be achieved through the dynamics of perception-action couplings which do not require that the participating agents any represent any joint action plans or shared knowledge structures (Dale et al. 2013). In order to characterize the interplay between these two seemingly distinct but causally entangled psychological mechanisms that underlie joint action processes, Knoblich, Butterfill & Sebanz (2011) helpfully distinguish between planned and emergent types of interpersonal coordination. Even though our own approach is primarily informed by representational and planning-theoretic accounts of joint intentionality, we recognize the importance of more basic forms of coordinated action that interact in potentially complex ways with the former. More specifically, our modelcombines a number of features that have previously been discussed in the work of Bratman (1999a, 2007, 2014), Tomasello et al. (2005), and Tomasello (2008, 2010, 2014). We suggest that planned forms of joint collaborative activities typically require that each of the participants be capable of (a) representing a joint goal, (b) representing a joint action plan which supports the integration of interconnected sub–plans for self and other, (c) jointly attending to selected aspects of the environment which are relevant to the task at hand, and (d) regulating one’s actions in conformity with the social–evaluative judgments of others. As we remarked earlier, we do not claim that each of these conditions is individually necessary to engage in joint actions, nor do we go so far as to assert that they are jointly sufficient in each and every case. But our contention is that a significant portion of joint collaborative activities involves an exercise of the suggested psychological capacities. Let us, then, expand on our description of conditions (a)-(d) in some detail. (a) To begin with, for two persons to form a joint goal, such as hunting a stag together, their goal structures must be appropriately interlocked to ensure the coordination of their joint actions. I must have the goal to hunt a stag together with you, and you must have the goal to hunt a stag together with me. It would not constitute a joint action if each of us were to pursue the same goal – say, to capture a particular stag – separately, without the goal of doing so in a collaborative fashion. We would then, again, be hunting in parallel rather than jointly. Second, we must be 12 mutually aware of each other’s goal to hunt a stag together.3 In classical game–theoretic treatments of common knowledge, it is frequently assumed that such mutual awareness must be iterated ad infinitum (Lewis 1969). More realistically, it is sufficient that potential collaborators recognize that there is enough ‘common ground’ (Clark & Brennan 1991; Clark & Schaefer 1989; Clark 1996) between them that they decide to launch a joint action. If this presumption is somehow challenged, e.g., because of unexpected disturbances of their activity, people are certainly capable of engaging in several iterations of recursive mind reading (‘she thinks that I think that she thinks…’); but it does not follow that they always go to the limit in advance of a decision to cooperate (cf. Tomasello 2008). (b) Central to the notion of a joint collaborative activity is not only that two people have a joint goal, but that they form a shared intention of achieving that goal together. Generally speaking, the difference between having a goal and forming an intention is that the latter resolves a deliberative question, thereby settling the agent on a specific course of action.4 Figuring out what exactly it means for two people to share an intention is a contested issue (e.g. Searle 1991, 1995; Gilbert 1989, 2003; Bratman 1993, 1999b; Velleman 1997; Tuomela 2007). Given our explanatory interests, we are partial to Bratman’s (1999a; 2007; 2014) planning–theoretic account which identifies shared intentions with socially interconnected – or, as we shall say – joint action plans. On this account, the capacity of human beings to develop shared action plans is grounded in, and thus broadly continuous with, the core capacity for temporally extended individual planning agency. Just as human agents conceive of their current activities as being embedded in their past and future arcs of action, or projects, they can see their activities as being embedded in what they are doing with others, and this understanding guides and frames their individual activities. As a species of action plans, the role of joint action plans is to coordinate individual actions and plans, to serve as a framework for joint deliberations about how (and whether) to proceed, and to structure relevant bargaining about who does what and when (Bratman 1999a, 2014). Joint action plans usually have a hierarchical means–ends structure, are typically partial, and conditional with respect to the appropriate attitudes of one’s collaborator. Joint action plans, thusly understood, satisfy three major requirements for a joint collaborative activity (cf. Bratman 1992): the inter–connected agents (i) must coordinate or ‘mesh’ their respective sub–plans and actions in ways that track the joint goal, (ii) have an appropriate 13 commitment (though perhaps for different reasons) to the joint activity, and ensure the mutual responsiveness outlined in (i), and (iii) have a commitment to support one another playing their respective parts if the need arises. Let us briefly highlight two important aspects of Bratman’s planning–theoretic account – one cognitive, the other normative. First, in many cases of interest, a successful joint action plan calls for a division of labor in which individuals play complementary roles. This requires that each collaborator must be able to conceptualize the distinct sub–plans of self and other in a common representational format, as being carried out simultaneously as part of the same joint action, and while recognizing that those roles are – at least in principle – interchangeable among the two co–actors. This is what we have earlier called the ‘dual–level’ structure of collective intentionality (cf. Weick & Roberts 1993). Tomasello (2014) suggests that the need to construct dual–level cognitive models in the pursuit of joint collaborative activities is likely to have enhanced, possibly even enabled, our ability to conceptualize ‘role–based’ categories (Markman & Stillwell 2001) such as ‘’pedestrian,’ ‘customer,’ or ‘referee.’ Such categories are defined functionally, in terms of relations between an entity and a wider network of events or processes in which it participates. In addition, a dual–level understanding of joint action sets the stage for a more abstract, agent– neutral conception of ‘slots’ or purely generic social roles that anybody could play, which is characteristic of collective intentionality (cf. below). More generally, this ability may have been an evolutionary precursor of domain–general forms of higher–order relational thinking that have been considered a hallmark feature of human cognition (Penn, Holyoak & Povinelli 2008). Second, the formation of a joint action plan supplies the planning agency of collaborating agents with basic norms of social rationality. If two people act jointly, for example, there will be a rational pressure to adjust their joint plan states in ways that are consistent with each other’s beliefs, intentions, and attitudes. There will also be rational pressure to fill in the details of their prior partial plans with the necessary means, to engage in coherent means–ends–reasoning, and to initiate preliminary steps of their joint activity. And there will also be pressure towards social stability over time: a defeasible presumption, shared by both parties, in favor of following through with their prior plan, other things being equal. For Bratman, the emergence of these social norms is directly grounded in the practical rationality of planning agency as such. 14 Importantly, this shows that intentionally shared agency goes beyond less demanding forms of social coordination where each agent intends to do her part but merely expects the other to do likewise. Joint intentionality implies that I have a practical – not purely instrumental – reason to coordinate my actions with yours, to support your role, and to refrain from ways of acting that would jeopardize the continuation of our joint action; and so do you. Gilbert (1989, 2003) has argued for the even stronger thesis that entering a joint commitment generates a sui generis type of group norm that involves an obligation not to act contrary to the collective goal, a right to demand an appropriate performance of others, and an entitlement to rebuke others for failing to do so. (c) An important part of intentional agency is monitoring one’s progress towards the desired goal state. To do this, an agent must be capable of constructing a model of her environment that represents whether an action was executed appropriately, and whether it had the desired effect. To emphasize the selective, top–down mediated aspect of intentional perception, we use the term attention here. When two people act together, they must be able to attend jointly to the effects of their actions in the pursuit of a joint goal. Joint attention subsumes an entire host of psychological processes that allow cooperating agents to coordinate their attentions in ways that establish a perceptual ‘common ground’ (Tomasello 1995; Moore & Dunham 1995; Clark 1996; Carpenter, Nagel & Tomasello 1998). Being able to do this requires several things. First, individuals must be able to attend to the effects of their own actions in addition to the actions of the other person in a way that allows them to, integrate the effects of other person’s actions with their own in order to assess whether or not the integrated effects of their actions are consistent with their joint action plans. Second, both people must be aware that each person is jointly attending to the situation and the unfolding events. This, in turn, means that, at least potentially, each individual can attend to the attention that the other is paying to one’s attention, and so forth. Third, each participant must understand that both individuals can have different, first person, subjective perspectives on a single object, action, or event which is the target of their joint attention (Moll & Tomasello 2007). Note that this does not refer to more prosaic benefits of collaboration involving facts like one actor might see or know things that the other does not. Nor does it refer to the pedestrian fact that collaborating partners often attend to 15 different aspects of their environment at different stages of their joint activity. Instead, it refers to an understanding that two people can attend to one and the same aspect of the world, but each of them interprets it, simultaneously, in a different light – i.e., through a lens that is structured by the complementary roles each actor plays in their joint action. In sum, joint attention exhibits the same dual–level structure that is characteristic of joint intentionality in general. (d) Finally, the opportunity to engage in joint collaborative activities requires that one is able to find a suitable partner, or be chosen as such by others. What makes somebody attractive as a potential collaborator in the eyes of others is not only the possession of a specific skillset that is relevant to the task at hand, but the confidence that she is likely to honor the commitments implied by a joint action: to do one’s fair share of the work, to provide help if needed, and to share the spoils at the end. From an evolutionary perspective, human beings thus had to develop a special concern for social self–monitoring (Moll & Tomasello 2007; Tomasello 2014) together with their basic joint collaborative skills. A good collaborator needs to have a keen sense for how her performances are being gauged by others, and a concomitant ability to regulate her actions so as affect the outcome of that evaluation in a positive way. This ‘cooperative’ mode of self– monitoring pertains to the prospect of collaborating directly with specific others. As such, it predates more abstract forms of normative self–governance that are concerned with ‘fitting’ into certain group–level patterns that are governed by cultural conventions. Tomasello (2014) argues that obligate collaborative foraging was instrumental in creating the conditions that brought on the evolution of the cognitive architecture that is necessary for task– specific joint action in bounded environments. While this new set of cognitive capacities endowed our hominin ancestors with impressive capacities for joint intentionality that enabled qualitatively new kinds of shared cooperative activities (Bratman 1992; Tomasello et al. 2012), in and of themselves, those alone are not adequate to explain the full range of collaborative action that ‘modern’ human beings are capable of; something more is needed to engage in the kinds of collaborative activities that involve what Tomasello terms collective intentionality. Collective Intentionality 16 We understand group collaborative activity as an agent–neutral, transpersonal engagement with others as members of complex social groups, such as social organizations, institutions, or entire cultures (Tomasello 2014). Living in large groups with a complex social organization means that one has to be prepared to coordinate one’s actions with those of people with whom one does not have any ‘common ground’ (Clark 1996) based on direct, second–personal engagements. This includes both the synchronic coordination with in–group strangers through large–scale cooperative arrangements as well as the diachronic coordination with one’s ancestors and descendants through the transmission of knowledge and skills. Becoming a competent member of such groups requires that one be able to take on board the viewpoint of the ‘generalized’ other (Mead 1934). From an evolutionary perspective, this increase in social complexity triggered the development of a ‘group–minded’ type of collective intentionality that underlies conventionalized culture, norms, and institutions, including full–blown symbolic language (Tomasello 2008, 2014). According to Tomasello, the transformation from joint to collective intentionality was effected by a process of conventionalization, which has both coordinative and a transmissive effects (Tomasello 2014, p.81). On the one hand, conventionalization ensures an implicit ‘agreement’ to do things a certain way as long as others are willing to do the same (e.g., to drive on the right side of the road). On the other hand, doing things in some agreed–upon way automatically sets a precedent that can be copied by others who want to coordinate their actions as well. In effect, culturally shared norms and practices are ‘scaffolds’ for coordinating one’s behavior with that of anyone else in the group. Shared cultural practices serve as a marker of group identity. Members of the same group can be expected to have a common stock of culturally specific background knowledge, skills, and values (Shore 1996; Chase 2006), which makes them attractive as potential collaboration partners. However, recognizing others who belong to the same cultural group, and being recognized by others as such, is far from trivial in large populations. Consequently, conspicuous displays of one’s group identity serve to advertise one’s aptitude as a knowledgeable and trustworthy collaborator. As part of our collective ‘we’ intentionality, human beings have a pronounced in–group/out–group psychology that serves to cement a strong sense of belonging to 17 a larger whole (Tajfel 1978, 1981; Turner et al. 1987). Human displays of group identity take on a large variety of species–unique forms that range from distinctively group–level emotions including collective pride, guilt, and shame (Seger, Smith & Mackie 2007; Haidt, Seger & Kesebir 2008) to the self–identification of cultures in terms of their collective ‘histories’ (Halbwachs 1992; Assmann 1995). Conventional cultural practices serve to indicate a cultural ‘common ground’ (Clark 1996): things ‘we’ all know we do, and can expect others to do (or know) even if we have not personally experienced them doing it. Cultural ‘common ground’ is established conventionally through traditions, rituals, and narratives (Chase 2006). For example, Chwe (2003) argues that the main function of many public ceremonies and rituals – ranging from coronation ceremonies to Super Bowl beer commercials – is to bring certain ‘facts’ out in the open, by letting everyone know what everybody else knows, and thus to shape a group’s cultural ‘common ground.’ Some cultural conventions are the product of explicit agreements, but not all conventions require anything like an agreement (Lewis 1969). A powerful source of the conventionalization is the simple habituation to group–level ‘precedents’ (Lewis 1969; see also Berger & Luckmann 1966). In a recurrent situation which presents a coordination problem, we tend to do as we did before – provided that the collectively adopted solution worked for us in the past, it is in everyone’s best interest that the solution persists, and that everyone expects everybody else to conform to it (Lewis 1969). Newcomers to the situation will then only need to imitate the existing regularity. But perhaps more importantly, human beings go to great lengths to teach social conventions to others (Tomasello 2010), and employ a diverse and flexible set of ‘mindshaping’ practices – such as distinctively human imitation, pedagogy, narrative self–construction, and norm enforcement – designed to make each other more alike, and thus easier to understand (Zawidzki 2013). Human social learning is not only fundamentally collaborative but deeply enculturated (Lave & Wenger 1991; Bruner 1996; Tomasello 1999). Because the maintenance of our group-mediated collaborative lifestyle5 crucially depends on the vertical transmission of expertise that is hard to acquire individually but critical for survival, humans have invested a lot of cultural effort into the construction of 18 complex learning environments that ‘scaffold’ information–sharing practices across generations (Sterelny 2012). The conventionalization of group cooperative activities also transformed the procedures by which individuals are evaluated for their collaborative performances. It fostered the emergence of social norms that are not shaped by, and geared towards the regulation of second–personal encounters, but intended to apply in an agent–neutral, transpersonal, fully generic mode (Tomasello 2014). Social norms in this sense are conventional in that they are shared mutual expectations about how to behave in various social settings that is considered part of the cultural ‘common ground’ (Clark 1996) of a group. They are generic in at least three senses (Tomasello 2014, pp.88–89). First, they imply an ‘objective’ standard against which an individual’s job performance is being judged. This is possible because the criteria for what counts as ‘doing a good job’ are no longer based one’s personal experience with specific others who screwed up, cheated, or copped out on us, but depend instead on a conventionalized understanding of social roles and cultural practices. Second, they are generic in their source, because they are not issued by individuals on the basis of personal preferences and observations. Instead, they arise from a collective–intentional commitment to certain agreed–upon norms. This not only involves one’s own commitment to follow those norms, but also carries the implication that others ought to do likewise, or are bound to face sanctions over non–compliance. Linguistically, these norms are typically expressed in generically as ‘timeless,’ ‘objective’ states of affairs when they are enforced (‘One cannot do it like that’) or taught (‘It works like this’). Lastly, they are generic in their target, because they are in principle directed at anyone who identifies herself as a member of the group, and thus – perhaps tacitly – accepts the social norms as part of the cultural ‘common ground.’ As ‘group– minded’ creatures, people tend to internalize the social force of the norm, and apply it to themselves if they violate it even in the absence of any concrete second–personal engagements. For example, people feel guilty that they stole something regardless of whether they actually caused any harm to the rightful owner of the stolen property. 19 In sum, the cooperative turn from joint to collective intentionality fostered the development of new forms of normative self–monitoring (Tomasello 2014), in which individuals monitor and regulate their actions in accordance with generic group norms. It thus became an important social goal to protect one’s public reputation within the group so as to maintain one’s viability as a potential collaborator. The strong force of the expectation to conform to generic group norms has several motivational sources (ibid, p.88). ‘Group–minded’ people have an instrumental reason to conform so as to coordinate successfully, a prudential reason to avoid public reproach and disgrace; and a strategic reason to refrain from non–conformity so as to signal their affiliation with the group’s identity. This new kind of collaboration is characterized by the emergence of stabilizable groups operating in socially enacted environments – both of which are capable of enduring beyond specific encounters (Tsoukas & Chia 2002). These groups can be assembled from a large, heterogeneous pool of individuals who, while sharing a cultural ‘common ground,’ have little to no overlap in domain–specific knowledge, skill, expertise, or perspective (Nickerson & Zenger 2004; Hsieh, Nickerson & Zenger 2007). This affords two kinds of organizational advantage (Nahapiet & Ghoshal 1998; Smaldino 2014). First, it provides an incentive for group members to accumulate in–depth individual expertise which they can inject into shared collaborative ventures. Second, it allows for the construction of an ‘assembly bonus’ (Collins & Guetzkow 1964; Conner & Prahalad 1996) in complementary tasks, stemming from co–specialization, integration, or the combination of both (Lawrence & Lorsch 1967; Larson 2009). At the same time, these groups support the development of stable role structures, where the roles are assigned responsibilities for specific tasks, the role–holders are granted special status and rights as they pertain to the execution of the tasks related to these roles, and where the performance of individuals holding a specific role in a particular circumstance is governed by conventionalized norms established by the group (Tomasello 2012; cf. March 1994; Searle 1995). And finally, these are groups that are capable of ‘hijacking’ the agentive powers of the individuals who comprise them under appropriate conditions such that these individuals come to understand at least some of their own actions in terms predicated on the role they play in the organization’s actions, objectives, and strategies (King, Felin & Whetten 2010). In this context, 20 King, Felin and Whetten argue that these organizations are capable of assuming something of an independent reality, becoming, as it were, a macro–actor in the minds of the outside individuals in the relevant, larger communities in which they are situated – actors that are, at some level, understood to have an intentionality of their own, independent of the individuals who comprise the organization (cf. Theiner & O’Connor 2010; Theiner, Allen & Goldstone 2011; List & Pettit 2011; Huebner 2013). We can now see how collective intentionality underpins the collaborative mindset which allows an individual to be ‘plugged’ into an organizational matrix. First is an ability to represent and fluidly use more sophisticated and abstract notions of roles, rules, and status functions that exist independently of the actual person who carries out the role in any particular situation (Tomasello 2012; Searle 1995). These roles specify what should be done in particular circumstances by way of a ‘logic of appropriateness’ (March 1994) that articulates the (provisional, partial, and incomplete) duties and responsibilities the role–bearer has over an entire range of circumstances. Second is an ability to engage in more sophisticated types of monitoring. Joint action, in these new cases, entails capabilities of specifying, at an abstract level, what a role–bearer’s contribution should be in functional and/or procedural terms in addition to capacities enabling people to monitor outputs or process conformance of others – notions that are core to Ouchi’s notions of output, process, and ‘clan’ control systems (Ouchi 1979, 1980; Eisenhardt 1985; Simons 1994). Lastly is an ability to represent enduring joint efforts as institutionalized beings in their own right – as macro–actors with an enduring identity, goals, plans, preferences, etc. that is independent of those of the individuals who comprise the organization at any particular moment (King, Felin & Whetten 2010). There are two additional features which distinguish group collaborative activities, especially in organizational contexts, from basic forms of joint intentionality. First, in lieu of the stronger requirement that joint actions plans ought to ‘mesh,’ the more flexible arrangement is typically that they should cohere. That is, they must collectively contribute to the furtherance of a higher– order goal, but they need not interlock in the sense of directly meshing with the causal contributions of others in accomplishing more proximal objectives. 21 Second, these new kinds of collaborative work oftentimes present new challenges regarding the nature of joint action itself. Following Kirsh and Maglio (1994), we believe action can be understood in terms of a pragmatic component, entailing physical manipulation of aspects of the world in the pursuit of goals, and an epistemic component, involving ‘work’ whose primary objective is not necessarily advancing toward a goal state as such, but rather, is best understood as an effort to learn more about the nature of the situation in which an agent finds herself And following Weick and his colleagues (e.g., Daft & Weick 1984; Weick 1995; Weick, Sutcliffe & Obstfeld 1995) we believe it’s useful to distinguish between action undertaken in environments that are more concretely and objectively defined, i.e., where inter-subjective agreement is, perhaps, close to universal, and action that takes place in environments whose characteristics intrinsically depend on socially constructed institutional facts (cf. Searle 1995, 2010). While nominally these two dimensions (i.e., the epistemic vs. pragmatic and the concrete vs. socially constructed) are orthogonal, we suggest that whereas the archetypal forms of joint intentionality take place in bounded action situations (Ostrom 2005) involving concrete goals, physically mediated action plans, and a readily observable environment, the new kinds of joint action mediated by collective intentionality often occur in enacted environments (Daft & Weick 1984; Weick 1995; Weick, Sutcliffe & Obstfeld 2005) and involve epistemic and pragmatic actions (Kirsh & Maglio 1994) oriented toward abstract or symbolic (i.e., less concretely–defined) ends. It is these two features in particular which point to the importance of external support structures or ‘scaffolds.’ Technological and Social Scaffolds The human capacities of joint and collective intentionality are part of a species–wide, uniquely human psychological infrastructure that lies at the core of more complex forms of cooperative social interactions. However, while basic, these capacities need not be innate or simply maturational, in the sense of unfolding in their form under their own biological accord. Instead, we take a Vygotskyan perspective which accords a significant role for nurture in the development and elaboration of all human forms of intentionality (Vygotsky 1978; Olson 1994; Bruner 1997; Baltes, Reuter–Lorenz & Rösler 2006; Sterelny 2012; Ansari 2012; Lende & Downey 2012; Tomasello 1999, 2014). The skills of joint and collective intentionality come into existence only through an extended ontogeny which depends on the developing child’s 22 immersive participation in a collectively created and transmitted environment suffused with cultural practices, artifacts, and symbols that has been ‘ratcheted’ up (Tomasello 1999) by the cumulative effects of cultural evolution. We are thus suspicious of classic ‘homuncular’ decompositions of the human mind into discrete, nearly–decomposable, and innately specified mental modules (Anderson, Richardson & Chemero 2012). Rather, we are sympathetic to the view that many of the more complex forms of human cognition are socially or technologically ‘scaffolded’ in that they rely on, and actively incorporate, culturally constructed skills, practices, artifacts, and other environmental support structures to complement our biologically more basic cognitive representations and processes (Suchman 1987; Donald 1991; Norman 1991; Hutchins 1995; Clark 1997; 2008; Logan 1997; Wertsch 1998; Wilson 2004; Wilson & Clark 2008; Menary 2007; Harnad & Dror 2008; Sutton 2010; Theiner 2011; Anderson, Richardson & Chemero 2012; Kirsh 2013; Rowlands 2013). For example, the development of logic, mathematics, and the scientific method would be unthinkable without the creation, transmission, and skillful deployment of visually perspicuous symbolic representations such as written language, diagrams, and specialized graphical notations (Goody 1977; Latour & Woolgar 1979; Latour 1986; Logan 1986; Olson 1994; Crosby 1997). More generally, the material structure of linguistic vehicles (and their internalized encodings) has recently been analyzed as a powerful cognitive tool that scaffolds individual intentionality (Dennett 1993, 2000; Clark 1998, 2006; Roepstorff 2008). Here, we draw attention to various ways in which language, tools, and shared cultural practices scaffold joint and collective intentionality. To begin with, language and other modes of symbolic representation provide efficient tools for extending the ‘interaction space’ of joint actions (Clark 1996; Tomasello 1999, 2008, 2014; Tylén et al. 2010; Fusaroli & Tylén 2012). Many familiar stock examples of joint actions (e.g., walking or dancing together) are face–to–face encounters in which interactants can draw on embodied, multisensory mechanisms to help coordinate their movements, actions, and perspectives (Goodwin 2000; Dale et al. 2013). Spoken and written language, diagrams, and ‘boundary objects’ remove this dependency on the immediate ‘here–and–now’ and the (implicit) presumption of common knowledge, allowing people to coordinate joint actions that are 23 displaced in space and time and that involve interactions crossing ‘epistemic boundaries’ (Star & Griesemer 1989; Carlile 2002, 2004). Second, language contains an elaborated set of devices for sculpting and navigating joint attentional and referential spaces (Tomasello 1999, 2008; Talmy 2000). For example, linguistic categories such as deictic markers, prepositions, tense and aspect, and lexical choices that involve different levels of abstractness can be used to convey different conceptualizations of a situation in subtle ways that modulate joint attention and understanding. Diagrammatic modes of representation (Crosby 1997) like boundary objects play similar roles in enabling people with very different knowledge, perspectives, or skills to effectively orient problem solving efforts to common ends even when there is little overlap in their respective knowledge or skills. These linguistic and diagrammatic representations help to shape, constrain and drive along attention in both ‘real time’ interactions (Sawyer 2007; Bjørndahl et al. 2014) and in diachronic and asynchronous interactions (Star & Griesemer 1989; Carlile 2002, 2004), or in situations where the problem domain itself is ill–structured or understanding otherwise provisional (Simon 1977; Clark 1998). Third, language and other symbolic representations facilitate the mutual alignment of expectations through the sharing of higher–order situation models and joint action plans (Weick & Roberts 1993; Walsh 1995; Weick 1995; Pickering & Garrod 2004; Weick, Sutcliffe & Obstfeld 2005; Roepstorff & Frith 2009; Sebanz & Knoblich 2009; Kaplan 2011). The necessity of ‘being on the same page’ in terms of what tasks to perform, as well as how and with whom to coordinate one’s actions, is a key determinant of the success or failure of collaborative endeavors. Within the family of approaches collectively labeled as ‘team cognition’ (Cooke, Gorman & Winner 2007; Fiore & Salas, 2004), several theoretical frameworks have tried to render this intuitive concept more precise, and to measure its impact on team processes and performance. For example, the formation of ‘team mental models’ (Klimoski & Mohammed 1994; Mohammed, Ferzandi & Hamilton 2010), understood as a shared set of convergent mental representations about the nature of the task, team, equipment, and situation, has been invoked to explain how team members interpret information in a similar manner, share expectations concerning future events, and develop similar causal accounts for a situation. An alternative 24 approach to team cognition which breaks away from the dominant knowledge-based, information-processing paradigm views team cognition as an emergent feature that results from a history of interactions between team members (Cooke, Gorman & Rowe 2009). Anchored within the tradition of ecological psychology (Gibson 1966, 1979; Heft 2001) and dynamical systems thinking in cognitive science (Spivey 2008; Chemero 2011), the ecological approach aims to put the focus back on the impact of interactive team processes (vs. individual knowledge structures) and the self-organized (vs. routinized) nature of coordination dynamics, especially in heterogeneous work groups whose structure needs to be continually adapted in response to complex team-level events (Gorman, Amazeen & Cooke 2010; Gorman, Cooke & Amazeen 2010; Cooke et al. 2013). Finally, because the accretion of linguistic structure reflects multiple levels of coordination dynamics which range from individual brains, bodies, dyads, groups, to entire cultures (Coseriu 1974; Rączaszek–Leonardi & Kelso 2008; Rączaszek–Leonardi 2010), language is a socio– cultural tool for a kind of ‘sensemaking’ which straddles the divide between situation and traditions (Linell 2009). In each dialogical exchange, a person not only attends to a ‘significant’ other in a specific context, but is attuned to a ‘generalized’ other in the sedimented forms of socio–cultural practices, routines, and representations that transcend specific situations (Mead 1934; Bakhtin 1986; Marková 2003). This dual–level structure of interpersonal dynamics and social sharedness has been called the ‘double–dialogicality’ of language (Rommetveit 2003; Linell 2009). On the plane of situated encounters, self and other contribute to a joint communicative project, though typically with an asymmetrical distribution of communicative labor (e.g., by asking a question, and having it answered). On the socio–historical plane, we are both (socially distributed) ‘shareholders’ of a common language and culture from which we collectively inherit, and into which we also reinvest (Rommetveit 2003). Both types of dialogical encounters are dynamically intertwined, mutually sustaining coordinative processes that operate simultaneously, but evolve at different time–scales (Sawyer 2003, 2005). And importantly, there are potentially multiple levels of double–dialogicality involved in any instance of sensemaking as organizational and role–based (e.g., profession–based) ‘cultures’ and cultural capital – in part defined by contingent logics of appropriateness – often play critical roles in shaping instances of more localized coordination (Douglas 1986; March 1994; Weick 1995; Bourdieu 1984). 25 Language and other symbol systems, shared cultures, and tools are all important kinds of scaffolds, but they are by no means the only ones. As we shift attention to more complex forms of organization, scaffolding by means of complex social practices becomes increasingly important. Of particular salience are more stable, institutionalized instances of socio–material ensembles (McGrath et al. 2000; Orlikowski 2007; Pentland 2011), management, or organizational, control systems (Ouchi 1979; Eisenhardt 1985; Simons 1994), and sensemaking processes (Weick 1995; Weick, Sutcliffe & Obstfeld 2005). These practices and structures emerge out of the activities of individuals and groups, but are not reducible to them (Sawyer 2004, 2005); they often have a durability that enables them to persist in the face of substantial turnover of specific individuals and, perhaps more importantly, they enable groups to engage in kinds of action that would otherwise not be possible. Much of what is sui generis about organizational action in its most complex manifestations, we claim, stems directly from the scaffolding effects of these social–practices. Socio–material ensembles (Hutchins, 1995; Orlikowski 2007; Pentland & Feldman 2008; Pentland 2011; Leonardi 2011) can be understood, following McGrath et al. (2000), in terms of coordination networks of members, tools, and tasks. An analysis of ‘member–tool–task’ networks in groups includes six components (Arrow, McGrath & Berdahl 1999; McGrath & Argote 2001): (a) member–member relations such as trust, hostility, or power; (b) task–task relations such as sequential constraints on action or the development of routines; (c) tool–tool relations, which include both ‘hardware’ tools (e.g., hammers, trucks, front desks) and ‘software’ tools (e.g., norms, scripts, representational media); (d) task–tool relations, which specify which tools are required to complete certain tasks, (e) member–task relations, which indicate the division of labor among members; and (f) member–tool relations, which specify how members perform their tasks. Coordination at the organizational level – even at relatively modest levels of complexity – is often intimately bound up with the elaboration and stabilization of these kinds of ‘member–tool–task’ networks and the brokering of what Nelson and Winter (1982) termed ‘truces’ between individuals and factions within the organization characterized by divergent goals and interests (see too Becker 2004). This is particularly true in cases where individuals within the organization inhabit very different epistemic worlds, where coordination relies on 26 ‘boundary objects’ to span these epistemic boundaries (Star & Griesemer 1989; Carlile 2002, 2004). And, they are critical for maintaining coordination, coherence, and collaboration over time as the context or strategy evolves (Mintzberg, Ahlstrand & Lampel 1998). Managerial, or organizational, control systems (Ouchi 1979; Eisenhardt 1985; Simons 1994) are the formal and informal systems used by organizations to specify outputs, standard operating procedures, incentives, and the ‘ways things are done’. Simons (1994) thus describes them as ‘levers of control’, emphasizing the way that these meta–organizational processes can alter the way that organization’s more basic, ‘zero–order’ (Winter 2003) production processes operate. They can be explicit, as is the case with most performance management systems, or implicit, as is the case when prior socialization into group norms, identities, expectations, and values is used to channel individual actions toward ‘corporate’ (i.e., collective) ends (Ouchi 1979). Control systems provide more or less objective and well–articulated standards against which behavior and results at the individual or supra–individual can be measured, giving management the opportunity to see how interventions in the ongoing flux of organizational activity affect the operating characteristics of the organization (or parts thereof), and allowing individuals to self– organize their actions over time in light of how those actions will eventually be evaluated by the organization. Sensemaking processes (Weick, 1995; Weick, Sutcliffe & Obstfeld 2005) involve the socially– mediated construction and interpretation of task environments that provide the grounds of organizational action in situations where both goals and action plans are abstractly defined. Sensemaking processes involve individuals creating, telling, and interpreting stories about what is happening and what should be done, in order to create and advance understanding of what is happening and what is being done by the organization qua organization. And, more to the point, it is often through and in these ongoing conversationally–mediated processes (Ford & Ford 1995; Phillips, Lawrence & Hardy 2004; Hargadon & Bechky 2006; Lawrence & Suddaby 2006; Sawyer 2007) that organizational actions and decisions are constituted in many cases. Whereas more basic forms of organizational action might involve individuals coming together to produce some tangible ends (e.g., a barn raising), more complex forms of organizational action often involve abstractly defined, intangible modes of actions (e.g., developing a strategy, launching a 27 new product line, conducting R&D) . Likewise, the environments themselves in which those actions occur are similarly abstract in the sense that competitors, markets, and industries are best understood as the products of organizational cognition (Porac, Thomas & Baden–Fuller 1989; Reger & Huff 1993; Walsh 1995; Kaplan 2011). Figure 1: The ‘Scaffolded Joint Action’ Model 3. Scaffolded Joint Action as a Micro–Foundation for Organizational Learning At the outset, we noted that organizational learning has often been defined functionally in terms of the transformation of experience into new behavioral repertoires. We can distinguish two main variants of organizational learning – greenfield, were experience mediates the construction of new-to-the-world capabilities and associated behavioral repertories, and brownfield, where experience mediates the transformation of existing organizational capabilities and repertories6 – even if, in real world contexts, these are often entangled in complex ways. Greenfield learning 28 occurs when new organization–level behavioral repertoires are created, in either de novo or existing organizations; brownfield learning occurs when changes are made to existing repertoires. The creation and modification of organizational routines and capabilities, then, constitute important modes of organizational learning. The scaffolded joint action model, we argue, constitutes a micro–foundation of organizational learning because it illuminates the processes, mechanisms, and structures by which organizational routines and capabilities are created or modified. Scaffolded joint action enables individuals to engage in collaborative efforts characterized by increasing temporal, spatial, and social distribution of activities; efforts that oftentimes are simultaneously characterized by increasingly abstractly defined goals, plans, and environments. These more complex modes of organizational action, we suggest, are made possible, and mediated, through (i) socio–material ensembles, (ii) control systems, and (iii) sensemaking processes. Together, these scaffolds help orchestrate complex pragmatic and epistemic operations (Kirsh & Maglio 1994) – an orchestration that is driven by the intention of exploiting judgment, insight, and experience in the pursuit of opportunity (Klein 2008; Augier & Teece 2009; Felin & Zenger 2009; Teece 2012; Foss & Klein 2012). And they do this by enabling the kinds of patterned interactions between individuals (and other elements of the organization) and canalized behavioral repertoires that have long been taken as definitive of routines and capabilities (Becker 2004; Vromen 2011; Eggers & Kaplan 2013). Constructing socio–material ensembles and associated control systems is a powerful way of establishing group level production systems (March & Simon 1958), which are, in a sense, higher–order partial plans for generating ‘corporate’ outputs. In this way, production systems comprise a new mode of planning agency (Bratman 2014), scaled up from more basic forms of group collaboration to more complex organizational architectures. As partial plans, they are far from an algorithmic description of all the necessary and sufficient steps guaranteeing the desired output. They are incomplete recipes – to be filled in at the appropriate time, by individuals enacting specific roles in light of local circumstances and based on their understanding of the organization’s goals, preferences, strategies, and identity (cf. King, Felin & Whetten 2010). And thus, their continual evolution (Nelson & Winter 1982) is dependent on the ongoing processes of 29 sensemaking that constitute a fundamental element of organizational action. And it is precisely in these experientially–driven processes of capability construction and modification that we have organizational learning. 4. Conclusion In summary, the transition from individual action through shared collaborative activities to organizational action necessitates certain upgrades to the cognitive architecture that enables agents to engage in those more complex forms of collaborative interaction. The first upgrade, from individual to joint intentionality, is characterized, mainly, by the addition of architectural elements that enable the distribution of work across individuals and over time (cf. Tomasello et al. 2005; Tomasello 1999, 2014; Bratman 1999a, 2014); a transition that sees the emergence of small groups as functional units capable of jointly working toward some shared set of ends in bounded environments. What is critical about having joint intentionality is that it endows individuals with the ability to establish common ends, mesh their actions in goal– dependent ways, and operate effectively in shared environments. The second upgrade, from joint to collective intentionality, is characterized by the addition of elements that enable groups to operate in task environments that are fundamentally socially enacted and abstract in nature (Daft & Weick 1984; Weick 1995) and which involve the combined contributions of individuals who may share little, if any, domain–specific knowledge, skills, or expertise (Conner & Prahalad 1996; Hsieh, Nickerson & Zenger 2007). What is critical about having collective intentionality is that it enables integration and complementarity amongst individuals who may have little understanding of either the collective ends towards which their efforts are oriented, or the ways in which their individual efforts are yoked in pursuit of those ends. The third upgrade, which enables full–blown forms of organizational action, heavily relies on a variety of scaffolds – social, technological, and cultural – which help to structure, coordinate, and control shared collaborative activities. They do this by permitting the kinds of patterned interactions between individuals (and other elements of the organization) and canalized 30 behavioral repertoires that have long been taken as definitive of routines and capabilities (Becker 2004; Vromen 2011; Eggers & Kaplan 2013). Taken together, these upgrades take us from the stag hunt archetype of collaborative joint action (Tomasello 2012) to an archetype of 21st century knowledge work (Powell & Snellman 2004). Organizational learning, on this account, involves, firstly, orchestrating people, artifacts, and processes into complex socio–material ensembles (Hutchins 1995; Orlikowski 2007; Pentland 2011), with their associated control systems and sensemaking processes, towards achieving ends that require broad and sustained collaborative efforts if they are to be realized, and secondly, the evolution of such systems in light of subsequent experience in processes dependent on sensemaking and deliberative problem solving conditioned by shared intentionality. In sum, what we suggest is that organizational routines and capabilities, which constitute an important mode of organizational learning, can be profitably understood through the lens of our scaffolded joint action model. 1 It is sometimes argued that capabilities are composed of routines (e.g., Winter, 2003), with the implication that an organization’s capacity to engage in more complex lines of action is built up from inventories of more basic building blocks, assembled hierarchically. In practice, however, the line distinguishing a routine from a capability is often vague and hard to define with any rigor or consistency (Pentland and Feldman, 2005); just how these constructs are operationalized in empirical research often depends on the questions of interest of the researcher. 2 This is not to suggest that these are the only causally relevant factors. There are good reasons, as Huber (1991) and Simon (1991) well noted, for understanding some aspects fundamental organizational learning in terms of what is going on at the individual–level (see too related discussions in Felin and Hesterly, 2007; Felin, 2012; Barney and Felin, 2013). At the same time, there are clearly things like transactive memory systems (Wegner, 1986; Ren and Argote, 2011; Theiner, 2013) that exist at the supra–individual level, but that are not exactly a routine or capability, either. 3 For an argument against the necessity of the ‘common knowledge’ condition, see Blomberg (submitted). 4 Our ordinary locution of ‘intention’ is often ambiguous between goals and intentions in the narrower sense. But as Bratman (1984) pointed out, intentions are subject to more stringent rational constraints than goals. Whereas an agent can rationally have two goals that she knows cannot both be attained, she cannot rationally intend or plan to produce two outcomes that she knows to be mutually incompatible (cf. Velleman, 1997). 5 Drucker (1993) argued that our society is, in many ways, a society of organizations. In saying this, he was suggesting two things. First, that much of what gets done in our society is 31 accomplished in, and mediated by, organizations. Second, that individuals in our society often are enmeshed in many different organizations simultaneously – in their work, their social lives, and in their civic and community dealings. 6 The distinction between greenfield and brownfield original derives from discussions of the built environment, where greenfield projects are those built in previously undeveloped areas and brownfield projects entail redeveloping an existing development for new use. 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