Interiority in the Work of Edgar H. Schein: A Personal Reflection

Abstract

In this reflection I explore how Ed Schein's philosophy of being a scholar-practitioner is expressed through interiority. By interiority is meant a quality of attentiveness to one's cognitive processes (data of consciousness) while attending to data of sense (what one is seeing and hearing). Throughout his writings Schein explicitly accesses his experience, his questions, his understanding, and his coming to know and judging how to act. This reflection is offered both to celebrate Ed's scholarship of practice and to stimulate reflection on how scholar-practitioners may engage in their craft.

In the mid-1970s when I read Process Consultation (Schein, 1969) a new horizon opened up for me. In this little book I discovered the value of attending to process and of a collaborative way of inquiring into experience, understanding, decisions and actions. It also introduced me to Ed's writings, of which I became an avid reader. In this appreciative reflection I’m exploring what I have internalized over 40 years as Ed's philosophy of being a scholar-practitioner so as to celebrate Ed and to provoke reflection on how we do practical research.

During my year at MIT's Sloan School in the mid-1980s, I had a course with Ed and we had frequent meetings in his corner office overlooking the Charles river and he used to give me copies of his work in-progress—working papers and the manuscripts of his books in progress. Over time, as I developed in my OD/action research work, I had a first insight that what runs through Ed's work is a spirit of inquiry. As he reflected in 2019

I think that it has always been my strength: to turn whatever is around me and what is going on around me into something analytically and practically useful (In Hansen & Madsen, 2019, p. 45).

In 2017 I was reviewing the contents of the 24 volumes of the series, Research in Organizational Change and Development, and I was struggling to frame a coherent classification of the diverse range of chapters (Coghlan, 2017). I drew on a paper that Ed had given me which was his keynote address to the Academy of Management's Organizational Development and Change division in 1989 (Schein, 2010). In this address he questioned whether OD is a science, a technology, or a philosophy. I adopted his categories in my review, because they came out of a reflection on his extensive and deep experience, rather than from a systematic review of the literature. I have framed this reflexivity as interiority, which I describe as a quality of attentiveness to one's cognitive processes (data of consciousness) while attending to data of sense (what one is seeing and hearing). I came to appreciate that interiority is what is constant through his writings for over 60 years. My second insight was that what I was learning from Ed was how interiority was grounding his practice of the social science of a scholar-practitioner.

Ed does not refer explicitly to formal philosophical writings in his reflections on his work. Rather he discusses how his own life experience has shaped it (Schein, 1993). At the same time, in the third edition of Process Consultation, he defines his approach. “Process consultation is a philosophy about and attitude toward the process of helping individuals, groups, organization and communities” (Schein, 1999, p. 1). Ed is not using the term “philosophy” in the sense of philosophy as a technical, often abstruse, discourse among specialists. Rather he is philosophical in the sense of philosophy as “reflective inquiry into what it means to function consciously as an inquirer and as a responsible agent” (Webb, 1988, p. 3). He is philosophical in the sense of ancient philosophy understood as “a mode of existing-in-the-world, which had to be practiced at each instant and the goal of which was to transform the whole of the individual's life” (Hadot, 1995, p. 265). He is philosophical in terms of the Aristotelian notion of phronesis, the qualities of acting justly and wisely in everyday action. In this manner he accords with the notion of scholar-practitioner that Tenkasi and Hay (2008) present as an “epistemic practitioner.”

The Scholar-Practitioner

To celebrate the occasion of Ed's 80th birthday, Rami Shani and I guest-edited a special issue of this journal. Given the range of subjects on which Ed had written we asked him which he would like to be the focus of this special issue. His reply was unequivocal—the scholar practitioner. The special issue was titled, “The challenges of the scholar-practitioner” (Coghlan & Shani, 2009).

In that special issue, Wasserman and Kram (2009) reported on how they explored what being a scholar-practitioner might mean for those who designate themselves as such. They interviewed 25 people, asking them such questions as to how they identified with the term, how they defined the role and what they experienced as the challenges and dilemmas. Wasserman and Kram framed the dynamic role of the scholar-practitioner in terms of being at the midpoint on a continuum anchored at both ends by a segmentation of the roles of scholar and practitioner and being able to integrate both roles, a perspective reiterated by Ed in a conversation with Jean Bartunek (Bartunek & Schein, 2011).

Ed was one of the participants in Wasserman and Kram's study and they cited some of his reflections on being a scholar-practitioner, including this definition.

a professional who knows how to abstract new knowledge from experiences in organizations; someone who is dedicated to generating new knowledge that is useful to practitioners (in Wasserman & Kram, 2009, pp. 19−20).

In his response to Wasserman and Kram's published article, Ed commented on their findings and reflected how his early work in experimental and social psychology and his training in statistics and experimental methods was a base for developing clinical inquiry which he judged to be “a better science for the study of human systems than positivistic experimentation and option surveying because I learned the advantages and limitations of both” (Schein, 2009, p. 41).

From Ed’s definition we can understand how scholar-practitioners merge the worlds of science and practice. They exercise what Heron and Reason (1997) have called the “extended epistemology.” This extended epistemology describes four forms of knowing: experiential, presentational, propositional, and practical. Experiential is described as knowing that comes directly through direct experience. Presentational knowing captures knowing through art, literature, music, and aesthetics. Propositional knowing expresses what we understand as scientific or conceptual knowing, through systematic and ordered understanding. Practical knowing relates to the completion of everyday tasks and seeks to help us deal with situations as they arise and to discover solutions that will work. Each form is governed by rules and norms appropriate to its own form and has its own criteria for affirming what is so. The criteria for practical knowing are whether it works; the criteria for science are whether it is based on evidence rigorously gathered and analyzed. Heron and Reason make the case that practical knowing is primary as it “fulfils the three prior forms of knowing, brings them to fruition in purposive deeds and consummates them with its autonomous celebration of excellent accomplishment” (p. 281).

Ed identifies with that consummating form of practical knowing as a scholar-practitioner. He looked to Kurt Lewin whom he saw as combining theory and a concern for action around important social concerns where it was not enough to explain things, one also had to try to change them (Schein, 2010). He reflected

I have never been interested in theory for theory's sake. I find l always want to go down the abstraction ladder and use examples, metaphors, or other simplifications to make theoretical points. In other words parsimony is very important to me, but high levels of abstraction are not (in Wasserman & Kram, 2009, p. 12).

Interiority as the Integrating Feature of Schein's Philosophy of Social Science

In a metalogue with Ed on the occasion of his 90th birthday in 2018, I highlighted three themes of his work that had been formative in shaping my work (Coghlan, 2018). These three themes are: (i) how OD scholars may draw on the data of their own thinking, what I call interiority, (ii) how OD may ground itself in a philosophy of practical knowing, and (iii) how engaging in OD involves OD scholars being attentive in the present tense.

In the metalogue I pointed out to Ed how in his writings he is consistently explicit about his own intellectual development and how it has shaped his practice as a scholar-practitioner. He combines what he is seeing and hearing with what he is thinking and shows how he reflected on his thinking as he listens to clients and figured out how to respond, sometimes identifying errors in how he had misread situations and had intervened inappropriately. His response was that it was his experiences in T-groups and association with the NTL colleagues that generated his learning to attend to “here and now” processes. He framed his approach to research as clinical inquiry which is an orientation to inquiry that views the researcher as one who enters the organization at its invitation and helps clients understand their organizational challenges and works with them to help address those challenges and be helped by the clients to generate the relevant data and build relevant theory that is useful to both practice and to scholarship (Schein, 2008).

Becoming a psychologist implied to me that understanding had to lead to some kind of improvement, and that our job as psychologists was not just to report back to people what we saw but to ask ourselves how we can be helpful (in Coghlan, 2018, p. 392).

My third insight is that these three themes constitute an integrated approach to organizational and change research that I identify as a legacy from Ed. In my view these three themes: interiority, generating practical knowledge and inquiring in the present tense, with interiority as the integrating process of the spirit of inquiry are the hallmark of Ed's legacy to the theory and practice of the social science of being an OD scholar-practitioner. It is explicit when he writes about how he engaged with organizational culture, career anchors, coercive persuasion, change and the many other topics he has explored. It is explicit in the appreciative reflections written by his former colleagues and doctoral students at MIT Sloan (Fatzer et al., 2019). Illustrations of his practice of interiority are found in the many interviews conducted with him (e.g., Lambrechts et al., 2011; Quick & Gavin, 2000) and in his thematized account of his own work through the construct of a Greek drama (Schein, 2006).

In conclusion, while this reflection focuses interiority as my internalization of Ed's philosophy, I offer it in this special section of this issue both to celebrate Ed's scholarship of practice and to stimulate reflection on how we do research as scholar-practitioners. Ed's philosophical system is grounded in his interiority as he accesses his experience, his questions, his understanding and his coming to know and judging how to act (Coghlan 2009, 2021). Meynell (1999) has argued that interiority forms the “new enlightenment,” a synthesis of modern thesis and postmodern antithesis. If we understand Ed's contribution to applied behavioral science as expressing the new enlightenment then we can assure the future of his legacy.

To give the final word to Ed

After 60 years in this arena, I am convinced that we are still at a Darwinian stage of searching for constructs and variables worth studying and are still waiting for some Mendelian genius to organize the field for us. In other words, I still think that good observation, phenomenology, fieldwork, ethnography, and careful case analyses are more important than quantitative statistical hypothesis testing. Clinical analyses of cases come naturally from our work as consultants and interveners, which led me to propose clinical research as an important method in our field. I believe that good theory is still to be discovered by careful observation and analysis. (Schein, 2015, p. 3)