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Original post can be found here: https://benzweibelson.medium.com/living-with-multiple-paradigms-the-case-of-paradigm-interplay-in-organizational-culture-studies-75ecaf87c719

This recommended article is about social paradigms- not to be confused with scientific ones that Thomas Kuhn explained in his groundbreaking book. Kuhn stated that a scientific paradigm develops and is used until it no longer is valued, or it begins to break down. Consider how astronomers applied Newtonian laws of motion and physics in mathematical formulas to explain the movement of the planets, moons, and stars. The math was close, but not perfect, and in many applications over time, the math was problematic except in very specific instances (planetary movements, for example that could be projected years in advance with startling accuracy).

Then came the Theory of General Relativity (and to simplify things here), and suddenly a new scientific paradigm replaced (and destroyed) the old one. This of course is a gross oversimplification, but please hang on as this all moves toward why social paradigms are different. Scientific paradigms are proven in some verifiable, tested, repeatable manner to displace and remove whatever current paradigm is in place. This is not how social paradigms work at all.

Social paradigm theory developed about a decade or two after Kuhn’s explanation of scientific paradigms. The social sciences often follow the lead of “hard” sciences historically, and this is another example of that pattern. Sociologists would posit that groups of people generate their own social frames (worldviews, but so much more. these are social paradigms that have rich belief systems). The thing about social paradigms is that one might use many of the same words as another paradigm, but the dictionaries are entirely different. Take Marxism and Liberal Capitalism for example, or how the US faced off in a Cold War against the Soviet Union. Marxists also used terms such as “science”, and “freedom”, and “the people’s rights”- but these all were interpreted to mean very different things within the Soviet (a state Marxist) frame. Scientific papers in the Soviet Union would go through a scientific peer review just as the western world would, but that process would also include a political officer that screened for adherence to Marxist ideals. Hence, “science” would be changed to mean what Karl Marx originally argued in the mid-19th century that was not paradigmatically the same as the western, liberal frame.

Okay, with that out of the way- time to introduce this wonderful article. Schultz and Hatch talk about multiple SOCIAL paradigms and how they interact in complex reality experienced by humans. So, this is not about Kuhnian scientific paradigms at all. This is how people view and understand the world, and go about talking and acting and influencing it collectively, and why some groups (using different paradigms) are unable or unwilling to understand WHY another group sees the world so differently to their supposedly obvious, clear perspectives. The article is located here, and unfortunately it is behind an academic paywall. Readers might approach librarians (especially military and USG who can reach out to their libraries directly and request a copy), or engage with university faculty or students to attempt to get a PDF.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/258671

Schultz and Hatch frame the social paradigm interactions with “paradigm overlap”- when two paradigms agree on commonality- such as the Chinese, Iranians, and American space programs agree that the world is round and not flat so that space flight is conceptualized and conceivable. There is also “paradigm tension”- where two groups look at the very same thing in reality yet have entirely paradoxical conclusions. An example of this is found in how Native Americans lived in the “undiscovered” continents until the European explorers and colonists reached their shores and began to engage with them. The idea of “property” and “land ownership” was largely a Western, European (or pan-Asian if we want to really get technical) construct that the Native Americans did not understand because it was not how their social paradigm functioned. Land was for all, including rivals and adversaries. and semi-nomadic or nomadic peoples did not develop the “own the land to control and protect it” mindset as an agrarian society would. Land would be something in tension between these two social paradigms in tension.

The third part is really the most exciting element for me as a designer to explain to military audiences- paradigm interplay. Interplay is what two paradigms bring together that could not be accomplished or realized independently. I use a crude example with children. Two parents might have tensions and overlap, but only in their children do we find interplay (one parent cannot have a child alone; you must combine genetic material in some way).

The authors talk about two types of social paradigms here; the functionalist one and the interpretivist one. These come from Burrell and Morgan and their classic book on social paradigms in the late 1970s. Briefly, a functionalist social paradigm requires a stable reality, one that does not change. meaning that if we have gravity in one part of the world on Earth, it must also work everywhere else. Otherwise, science falls apart. Extend this to social things- such as “every person in the world should understand universal concepts of freedom, justice, and honor.” Such a notion in a functionalist paradigm supposes that there are core, universal, timeless constructs that all humans would embrace naturally (natural laws).

Militaries mostly use a functionalist ordering of war so that “principles of war”, or Clausewitz’s “war is a continuation of politics by other means”, and his maxim “in war, it is of the supreme importance to focus the decisive offensive strike against the enemy’s forces to annihilate them”- I am not challenging these western war theory maxims here, just using them toillustrate how we use a functionalist social paradigm to understand war.

The other social paradigm used here is “interpretivism” (of four social paradigms Burrell and Morgan offer in their book). This stipulates that reality is stable like Functionalism, but while Functionalism also stipulates that reality is objective and can be reduced into clear, quantified and measured things or sub-systems, Interpretivism views reality as fluid, context-specific, subjective. A quick example is how in ancient Greece, philosophers argued over whether reality was composed of clear forms (Plato and how he viewed reality as the Ideal and the Real. and how to correlate the two), and alternative Greek thinking such as Heraclitus- who said “no man ever steps in the same river twice.” This would fade out in ancient Greek logic, but independently develop in ancient Chinese philosophy and take hold. In the 1980s and onward, many in sociology, anthropology, and other disciplines that study social (people, humans, groups) would gain an interpretivist framework that sees everything as contextual. One case study could help identify patterns, but one cannot take lessons from studying one group of people, devise a formula, and repeat it everywhere else.

Now, in closing and for my defense audience in particular, I offer what I talk to military war colleges and PME (professional military education) programs about how this matters. If we consider social paradigms and the difference between functionalism and interpretivism, consider how we go about forming strategies and implementing them in different conflicts. In Iraq (the Iraqi War), the highest level strategic planning outlined an “Anaconda” concept of constricting like a snake killing prey; this was how General Petraeus formulated the Iraqi strategic shift in a boiling, deadly counterinsurgency.

He then was called to assume command in Afghanistan, and he reapplied the exact same “anaconda” war strategy while changing select terms and names (Sunni insurgent to Taliban, for instance). In another example, we continuously force our concepts (functionalist, so they are universal) so that all opponents (Taliban, drug cartels, Chinese PRC, Boko Haram) have the same features and qualities. Everyone must have an enemy strategic center of gravity we can find, analyze, target, and exploit to goal completion (defeat). I once had the ISAF J2 bluntly inform me, “whether the Taliban know it or not, they have an ESCOG and we are right about it, so you better be using it as our campaign plan dictates to subordinate units.” I find this to be an example of potential social paradigm tension. We as functionalists project our war frame upon all others, including those that may not be using it.

How might we use paradigm INTERPLAY in strategic planning, campaign design, operational planning so that we avoid such misadventures or lack of imaginations (recycling the same Anaconda concept in two entirely dissimilar conflicts such as above)? It would require us to frame how and why we use our own social paradigm to construct our war frame (our theories, models, methodologies, terminology, and metaphors supporting our paradigm belief system), and then consider adversaries that do not have the same. Then, interplay becomes a new option- it is how we might consider both social paradigms within a conflict, and how we could develop new strategic options, experiments, and innovations that could gain advantage or generate new consequences that our rivals (if stuck using just their primary social paradigm) might not realize.

This is deep stuff; and often the institutional referees throw a penalty flag right about now, usually arguing “you need to keep this all simple so everyone understands this at the 8th grade reading level” coupled with “this is how DC and the DoD work and whether you like it or not, you need to play the game in those rules to get any progress.” These arguments are on the surface anti-intellectual (tell us everything new and different but you MUST use our legacy language, models, and theories to do so or else we will never listen), but ultimately are about paradigm incommensurability- what Schultz and Hatch address in this article wonderfully. In a way, it is mis-diagnosed as “anti-intellectualism” which is really only half true. When we stick with our social paradigms and refuse to consider others (incommensurability), we are being anti-intellectual in that we are demanding all of complex reality funnel through our lens only, and use our words with our dictionary alone.

The entire world must be rendered in our paradigm, or we reject it. This does become anti-intellectual when we do this and miss out on the intellectual possibilities, the richness, the potential, the innovation and change that cannot be discovered or used without paradigm INTERPLAY. It is our own mental barriers that usually stop us. Indeed, every single act of innovation demonstrates this. One innovator breaks the paradigm barriers and creates the novel, and along the way, the institution fights them every single step. You can find this in the story of 3M and the Post-It! Note, the development of Aircraft Carriers in the interwar period, or how NASA failed twice to listen to the right engineers in their organization to prevent the loss of the space shuttle (see Karl Weick’s studies on NASA disasters). Our paradigmatic lack of awareness plagues us, particularly in war when we are in conflict with those that think differently about the world to our own frames.