TOWARDS RHIZOMATIC PLURALISM: ENHANCING PLURALISM INTO POST-STRUCTUALISM

摘要

Recently, as a number of management practitioners have been noticed, management consultancy is undergoing a radical change to social learning process characterised by participants-driven integrative teamwork for dealing with various problems situations in practice. A midst of this undergoing process of learning, the social 'appreciation' requires that practitioners understand more about not only they will coorperate on construction knowledge derived from the events, but also how agents/learners find the ultimate source of meaning and knowledge, develop how they reconsider and become self-reflective in respect to "the art of judgement" that prevails in inherent systems thinking. Why will this kind of social 'appreciative' process be required for encountering an active learning model of reflective practices? Because the real-life management problems are never complete, absolute, concise and clear in terms of their 'vague' nature of ontology, epistemology and linguistic terms. The results of the appreciation of this 'vagueness' in the problem situations over last decade showed an emergence of 'pluralism' in management sciences. In particular, critical systems thinkers have made a great contribution to the development of 'critical pluralism' in the U. K.-based systems communities in the late 1990s. Since, there has been a variety of 'pluralism' or pluralist approach to 'problem solving' in the field of management. However, 'critical pluralism' has heavily been influenced by modernism and/or Critical Theory of Habermas' work. Although the critical pluralism has met with success in terms of an evaluation of such multimethodology, a corresponding shift in management practices to learners-centred 'appreciation' of social processes is less evident. The time now has come to grasp the post-structuralist perspectives on systems thinking and social appreciation with a continual renewal a mode of existence in social process of learning from theory to practice. Enhancing pluralism into post-structualism means that a "rhizome" kind of pluralism can be developed as "rhizome" becomes a new components of the old root where critical pluralism has been established, yet with some overlap and integrated as component of a new kind of root or 'tips' of the plants. Thus, a learning model of the social appreciation is presented that is based on Deleuze and Foucaut's work on a moving image of the world, 'problematization' and 'traversing' on different contexts in the problem situations.