Browsing by Author "Doyle, Jeremy"

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    Organising for social-ecological resilience : lessons from self-organised groups in Cape Town, South Africa
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03) Doyle, Jeremy; Feront, Cecile; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences. Centre for Sustainability Transition.
    ENGLISH SUMMARY: How can we organise ourselves to better address “wicked” systems problems? Despite increased awareness of the planetary crisis and recognition that organisations need to embrace approaches consistent with social-ecological systems (SES), it remains unclear what this means in practice. Communities who take matters into their own hands to tackle local issues show promise as a type of emergent, organisational assemblage that follows a different set of rules. The self-organising and emergent nature of these groups may hold practical lessons for those who are struggling to translate SES thinking into meaningful strategies and actions. However, what we know about organisational assemblage remains highly abstract, with little insights from empirical research. To gain insights into ways of organising to tackle systems problems, my study investigates the organising principles and practices displayed by local, self-organising groups working on systems problems, such as water security, urban decay, or social segregation in Cape Town. To conduct my investigation, I adopt a grounded theory approach. Using a combination of semi-structured interviews and participant observations, I gather data from fifteen participants and five different groups. I find that people working together on local systems problems have little concern for organisational forms. Groups exhibit circumstantial organising, with highly diverse organisational approaches and structures. Groups paradoxically display both collective motivations showing alignment on the problem to be solved, and personal motivations producing a diversity of ideas, plans and strategies. Groups display ambiguous boundaries, continually scaling, shrinking, or seeding new initiatives, and easily disbanding or re-forming. In addition to these group characteristics, two individual practices appear to hold groups together: valuing relationships, and associative action. Importantly, the “organisations” that emerge from these efforts appear as by-products of temporarily overlapping motivations rather than being shaped by structures. These organisational assemblages are made up of collections of many different intentions (ideas, plans, and strategies), relationships, and actions. Thus, my study suggests that people working on systems problems value intentions over entity, and that groups are held together by the individual practices of valuing relationships with others and associative action at points of alignment. My research contributes to our understanding of how we can organise to address systems problems. First, I contribute to organisational theory in the context of SES by showing that organisations working on systems problems are better conceptualised as sense-making mechanisms rather than intermediaries through which system goals can be reached. Second, I argue that organisations working on systems problems are constituted of assemblages of intentions, relationships, and actions, thereby providing a more granular interpretation of event clustering. Third, I argue that aspects of organisational assemblages can be valuable to explain the dynamics and fluctuating nature of the roles of people working on systems problems. I term role assemblage the temporary configuration of intentions, relationships, and actions that direct how individuals work on systems problems. My findings suggest that leaders, managers, and entrepreneurs who adopt an SES approach should encourage alignment on the understanding of systemic problems rather than on specific solutions, allowing organisational assemblages to emerge and coalesce around individual and collective interests. My research also suggests that those working on systems problems in informal organisational settings should exercise caution when establishing or enforcing formal processes, metrics, or indicators, as they may reproduce mechanistic outcomes and stifle emergent cooperation.