 The
Waves and William James
By Michael Hulme
Michael
Hulme is the Chairman of Teleconomy Group Plc.
He has written and lectured extensively on issues
relating to consumer behaviours and corporate
communication, and has had a successful commercial
career in senior management and as an entrepreneur. |
Over the years I have been asked on many occasions
what is the significance of our wave picture, and
overlaying quote from William James, that forms our
home page on the website and is included at the beginning
of many of our presentations. It could of course be
there as some perverse means of eliciting such questions,
without having any real meaning. Nothing could be
further from the truth.
The combination of the James quotation and the waves
picture is a powerful symbol of our philosophy and
values and is fundamental to our practical research
and businesses position. Understanding this is key
to understanding us and, I would like to think, helpful
to us all in thinking about both our business and
private lives.
William James (1842-1910) was an American thinker
and academic, a Harvard man, trained in medicine,
was a non-practicing MD, and psychologist. However
his first love was undoubtedly philosophy. His thinking
was essentially what today would be called ‘inter-disciplinary’
in as much as he was prepared to synthesise many subject
areas in attempts to find coherent explanations. In
this sense Teleconomy can be seen as continuing this
tradition, as we pull together insights from a range
of disciplines to ‘shed light’ on empirical
data.
James was active and influential in his thought at
a critical time for both America and the World. Many
of the institutions and fundamental concepts that
drive our modern world were created or conceived out
of the ferment of the end of the nineteenth and beginning
of the twentieth century. There is a strong parallel
between then and now, the opening years of the twenty
first century, as many of our institutions, values
and the position of the individual in society are
being questioned and reappraised.
Whilst James wrote and contributed to many debates,
he is perhaps best known for his thinking in relation
to pragmatism and process philosophy. These two conceptual
positions are fundamental to the way in which Teleconomy
approaches research and are the reasons why James
is quoted.
To attempt a discourse on pragmatism is beyond the
scope of this article; suffice to say that as a body
of thought it was very strong in America, with key
proponents including C.S. Pierce and John Dewey. Scruton
defines pragmatism as “the view that true means
useful. A useful belief is one that gives me the best
handle on the world: the belief which when acted upon,
holds out the greatest prospect for success”.
Stated another way, for an account to hold true it
must be derived from external experience and this
must be verifiable within a broader context. Applied
to Teleconomy, this becomes the role of gathering
detailed empirical/experiential evidence to provide
insights/findings/beliefs that are practically useful.
It is our goal to provide ‘actionable’
work of immediate relevance to our corporate clients
i.e. having some direct profit/cost benefit.
A second element of pragmatism deals with context.
James observes that to “an observer standing
outside of its generating causes, novelty can appear
only as so much ‘chance’, while to one
who stands inside it is the expression of ‘free
creative activity’”. For Teleconomy this
becomes our deep involvement in the area of consumer
and organisational behaviour in relation to media,
virtual/ physical communication and relationship channels.
Our specialised concentration and understanding is
sufficiently profound as to ensure we stand within
the events that are shaping our area of study, and
we are therefore able to locate important, yet at
times small, developments or changes that could have
profound future competitive or strategic implications.
The theme of context is reinforced in James’s
process thinking. James “saw the world as a
sea of flux (hence the waves image) …that are
not a clear-cut replacement of one hard-edged state
by another but a melting and fusing of boundaryless
processes that lead into one another”. Practically,
one might say that the relationship between the consumer
and, say, a mobile phone is deeply contextual and
interconnected. The phone will change the behaviour
of the consumer, the consumer may well use the phone
in a manner or manners not anticipated by the manufacturer,
and each change evolves the other.
In this manner, changes are not binary (on or off)
but complex, nuanced and if not understood as such
may, through analysis, be reduced to over simplification
or at worst the absurd. We have seen a prime example
of this in recent times in much of the early research
surrounding the dot.com retail bubble. At Teleconomy
we endeavour to handle complexity and the inter-relationship
of processes and behaviours without reducing arguments
to the absurd. This places a particular burden upon
us, as, whilst we are comfortable with such context
dependent data, we must always ensure we communicate
our thoughts and findings in an actionable and pragmatic
manner to our clients. Ours is not a simple path but
it is the most likely to lead to successful outcomes.
William James attempted through his thought to provide
frameworks by which one could derive meaning from,
and make practical sense of, the world in which he
lived. This is also, although in a much narrower sense,
the role of Teleconomy. James adopted a framework
of thought particularly adapted to the times of change
in which he lived; I believe that those ‘tools’
and modes of explanation remain powerful and useful
today.
Sources:
James.William, The Principles of Psychology (New
York: Henry Holt, 1890)
James.William, A Pluralistic Universe (New York: Longmans
Green, 1909)
Rescher. Nicholas, Process Metaphysics (New York:
State University of New York, 1996)
Scruton. Roger, Modern Philosophy (London: Mandarin,
1994)
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