Over the next month, due to increasing demand, Otto Laske will make available a large number of his unpublished social-science papers on this site.
The majority of papers is unpublished, but some important papers published more than 10 years ago will also be made available. Only very few papers are incomplete.
The Archive is divided into two parts: Decade 1 (1999-2009) and Decade 2 (2010 to 2019) of IDM. Each part of the Archive will be in the form of a single blog and will comprise both papers and sets of slides, the latter used for teaching CDF in both English and German. The articles will be posted in chronological order and will be annotated to various degrees in order to make them accessible.
Writings of the first decade of IDM begin with a critique of behavioral mindset generally, whether in management, coaching, or consulting. They extend the critical approach to organizations initiated by Chris Argyris and Elliott Jaques. These writings reconceptualize the tayloristic shibboleth of “Human Resources” on grounds of developmental thinking, a critique that finds its clearest expression in the forthcoming book by Jan De Visch and Otto Laske on collaborative intelligence (see ). To me, these writings show an optimism regarding the openness to learning of HR managers that I find thoroughly depleted at the time of this writing.
Writings of the second decade of IDM increasingly draw consequences from DTF, the Dialectical Thought Form Framework, and in their focus veer from cognitive coaching of individuals to critical facilitation of team work. Their central source is the work on dialectics by Roy Bhaskar (1993) who provides the ‘ontological’, truth-claim, aspect of dialectical thought forms that Basseches saw as skill-related. In my use of Bhaskar’s work, I establish an Applied Epistemology of and for work in organizations. On these grounds, I increasingly emphasize the dialogical character of dialectical thinking (and interviewing) and focus on issues of team development. As to my optimism found in these writings, I still hold on to some of it, knowing that at least under the strain of becoming an endangered species, organizations can at times begin to ‘think twice’ if skillfully provoked to do so. (My hero for doing so is Jan De Visch).
All of my writings are characterized by the introduction of new vocabulary for speaking about human work in organizations, taken from the adult-developmental sciences. There is no way of introducing new ideas without new nomenclature.
Thank you for your interest in my work.
