Temporal Factors in Leadership and Change

 William R. Morris

Social revolutions occur when the needs of society, agencies, agents and culture diverge. Time becomes a factor when responsiveness diminishes. Examples include white law enforcement in the south oppressing Afro-Americans in the early part of the 20th Century. Another example is Gandhi’s movement against the British colonial rule of India. Following suit with non-violent social revolution, Martin Luther King played the value of time against his detractors. When asked, "Why didn't you give the new city administration time to act?" King invoked the power of time stating, “We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jet-like speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.” He equates the word "Wait" with the word “Never." Stating that "justice too long delayed is justice denied." He is demanding transformation now. There is no time to wait is his overpowering argument against the placating statements from a group of Alabama clergymen (King, 1963).

Temporal Factors in Change

The role of agency occurs as resistance to cultural values and codes that are often transformed, challenged, rethought, rejected or subverted. One of the risks in dominant cultures is totalizing concepts to which the disenfranchised communities on the periphery of the culture react.

There are yin and yang correlations between operations and structure, action and agents, praxis and agency. They transform, engender, consume and oppose each other. Each set is one of totality in the case of operations and structure, the individuals for action and agents and reality in terms of praxis and agency. This occurs at each holarchical level.

Three features of Yijing and sociology involve each of the actuation potentials in the domains of time, being and location. The tempo whereby change occurs variegates, producing organizational rhythms.  Agents engage in the process of enculturation drawing on cultural beliefs, rules and values to form their intentions and enact projects. Through these processes culture itself is reconstituted. It is through interpretation of meaning and application to new settings that the role of the culture bearer is revealed (Fay, 1996 pp57).

Borderlands between praxis and agency, or where both praxis and agency modulate between the container and the contained are affected by temporal factors (please see table 2). So also, the semi-permeable membrane structures between transforming paradigmatic states. These are organized as follows: awareness, depth, shape, emphasis, conception mode and temporicity. Each of these features may dominate the perceptual horizon for the individual and the group. They are also implicit within the power structures that play out hierarchically and heterarchically.

It is Qi that transforms agency and agents, transforming structure and function. Yang becomes qi and yin becomes shape. Yang transforms into qi, while yin represents the agents and the agency. 

Table 1

This table links social theory with the Book of Changes and Chinese philosophical concepts

T

The following graphic depicts rising and sinking cycles that are progressive. These take place in ever expanding and contracting holonomic structures. The nuances of yang solid lines and yin broken lines are present in varying degrees throughout the cycles of change.  Cycles can form chaotic attractors within and between systems. Change can happen as quickly as the wind changes. It can happen as slowly as the mountain. It can be as peaceful as the lake or it can be as forceful as thunder. Heaven and earth collide, water and fire collide and change happens.

This image is the ‘Fu Hsi’ organization of the trigrams, it demonstrates cyclic wave forms involved in the transformations.

Varying cultures organize time differently as do individuals. Conflict and its resolution occur over time and can be directly linked to temporal sensibilities within organizational processes. If one individual considers being on time to be important and another does not, it is easy for them both to construct ‘stories’ and assign meanings to the behaviors that occur when an individual chronically arrives late for instance. It can become especially heated if there are products that are expected as part of a larger project.

Totality absolutely occurs, individuality relatively occurs and a moveable sense of being happens as an identity that experiences. Reality occurs as a limited field within the totality that individuals can identify. Operations may occur quickly or slowly and the totality of the systems that are under change respond. Action through being may also be quick or slow and similarly so for praxis. Structure tends to limit and filter the field of experience but can be changed quickly or slowly just as agents and agency.

Of all the conceptual states that impact organizational harmony, ‘temporal awareness level’ may be one of the most important. If an individual makes time important and another does not, this can be a source of conflict in organizational processes. Organizational harmony is highly contingent upon the importance that individuals, teams and institutions place upon temporal emphasis as detailed in structure one and structure two of the table.

Table 4

This table is a synthesis and distillation of Sztompka (1994)

The entire social network and operations where individuals act are classified as totality. Reality is that membrane where context and subject interact; it is composed of both praxis and agency. Praxis is the actuality and the manifestation of the social fabric. It occurs at a place between the individual and the context, it is the confluence of operating structures and action. “It is a dialectical synthesis of what is going on in society and what people are doing” (Sztompka, 1994 pp217) Agency is actualized in practice, it is the membrane between social structures and the agent. Transitions and transformations between paradigms such as gender, hierarchical, holarchical and heterarchical states may be analyzed structurally and functionally. The structural components occur as language, organization and physical spatial relations. Agents operate through agency on behalf of the interests of the social culture to generate a cultural transformation. These are some of the components that operate as catalysts in the movement from one meme state to another. Within praxis, the perinatal birth matrices of Stanislov Grof may be applied where there is a calm fallow period followed by individual and collective feelings of frustration. This is followed by upheavals and cataclysmic shifts and revolutions whichare then followed by a breakthrough into the new paradigm or meme. 

Talcott Parson’s evolutionary and cycle schema have been correlated here with yin-yang theory and a multiple time frame concept (please see table 1). ‘Differentiation’ is the separation of functional units within a social system. An example of this is registration and then certification for a new medical profession such as Chinese medicine. ‘Adaptive upgrading’ is the process where the new profession gains a wider range of resources such as coverage by insurance, research funding and licensing agencies. The process of ‘inclusion’ happens when the profession gains integration into social structure and may then be found in hospital settings. The stage of ‘value generalization’ is achieved when the large social system accepts the medical discipline, currently this would be symbolized by Medicare coverage.

Table 3

This table shows evolution and cycle phenomena in multiple time frames, yin and yang dialectical and the famous sociologist, Talcott Parson’s ‘extended theory of differentiation’ (Sztompka, 1994, pp 119-120).

The Book of Changes is a rich philosophical base from which I have explored the relations with social science theory. This is just a brief sketch of possible connections. There is more work to do in terms of flushing out the connections and identifying real world examples of these phenomena.

References

Fay, B. (1996). Contemporary philosophy of social science. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

King, M. L. (1963). Letter from birmingham jail.   Retrieved June 14, 2007, from http://www.nobelprizes.com/nobel/peace/MLK-jail.html

Sztompka, P. (1994). The sociology of social change. New York: Blackwell.